The people have the power...

 April 26, 2023

This past Sunday, I caught an interview on television that Willie Geist conducted with the one and only Reba. One of the questions he asked her, early into the interview was, “how do you describe the sensation of walking out on stage?”

It wasn’t that her answer surprised me so much as that it stayed with me. She said, and here I’ll paraphrase, that you step out on stage with all the razzle dazzle, but you want people to like you, you want to be accepted, everybody does. And then she said, “And I’m no different—you see us on the outside but we’re very insecure people on the inside, and you do want to be accepted.”

Reba. McEntire.

One of the themes I’ve been fond of writing about over the years, both in my novels and my essays, is how we all have so much more in common than we have as differences. We come from different backgrounds, have different life experiences, but basically, underneath it all, we’re truly more alike than we are different.

With the news media full of stories about the big divide in society these days, it’s a good idea to focus on the ways we all are very much alike.

Now I know that I have something very basic in common with Reba. I, too, just want to be liked and accepted.

Our similarities as human beings aren’t so much superficial as they are intrinsic and instinctive.

We want to live in peace and freedom. We want to raise our children, healthy and happy, and teach them that the best life can be made with hard work and kindness. We want to be able to feed them, provide the things they need and even a few of the things that they simply want. Of course, we want all of those things for ourselves, too.

We want to cherish the memories as we make them and take pleasure in a job well done. We want to get through the hard times and celebrate the good times. We want to live and laugh and love.

And we want to fall asleep each night with a heart that is looking forward to the next sunrise.

When you consider the differences between us, they’re truly matters of preference. But they are inflamed by those who mistake their beliefs for universal truths. And those differences are exacerbated by hate.

Willie Geist’s Sunday Sit Down wasn’t the only interview I’ve watched recently. Just last night, we watched an interview by Joe Scarborough with the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement—that milestone ending to the rabid violence in Northern Ireland that had begun in the late 1960s, violence that became known as “The Troubles”.

Thousands of innocent civilians as well as many British service members were murdered during this conflict, one that no one ever believed could come to an end. When asked what he thought most contributed to the ability of the politicians to all come to an agreement, Mr. Blair said, it was the people. The people got ahead of the politicians because they were just sick and tired of the way things were. They simply didn’t want to live the way they were living anymore. They were fed up with being filled with fear for their children simply playing outside or walking to school.

And I thought, as I pondered the situation that had been and the peace that had been wrangled by all parties involved twenty-five years ago, that really, in this modern world, that was as it should be.

When the people realize that the power to change what is to what should be truly is theirs, then miracles can happen.

I hope the citizens of the countries occupying this continent will take note of this truth, and act accordingly.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

It's the fear....

 April 19, 2023

A young man is sent by his mother to pick up his two younger siblings, who are at a friend’s house. He thinks he knows where he’s going, but it turns out he’s mistaken. He walks up to the door of a house he’s never been to before, unknowing at that moment he was at the wrong house. He rings the doorbell, and he waits—but not for long.

And then with no warning, no words, a man inside the house shoots his gun through the glass window of the front door—twice. The first time, he shoots the teen standing on the front porch in the head, and that young man falls to the ground. And then the man with the gun aims and fires again, this time shooting his body. Fortunately, this young man survives, somehow. Oh, and he tried to get help from the neighbors, but the first two refused to help the bleeding teen. The third only helped the bleeding boy after he got on the ground and raised his hands—and then lost consciousness.

Meanwhile, a couple of days later and a few states away a young woman is riding in a car with some friends on her way with other friends to find a house wherein lives—you guessed it, yet another friend. They’re young, it’s Saturday night, and they only want to have a good evening with their friends.

But they’re in a rural area and they get lost. There’s no cell signal, and not much light. The driver turns down a driveway, and soon realizes that no, this isn’t the right place. That driver is in the process of turning around when a man comes out onto his porch and fires his gun—and the young woman passenger in the car is killed.

You may recognize these stories from the news over the last few days. And you may think that I’m going to rail against gun violence. But while the sheer number of guns available so freely in the United States is a problem, and gun violence surely is a serious problem, I don’t think that it’s the biggest problem my neighbors to the south are facing.

I think the biggest problem is fear.

Thanks to so many people stirring up so many fears for so very long, I believe that people are reaching an inevitable tipping point. Fear has become an epidemic in the United States, and I don’t see any signs of it tapering off anytime soon. It’s fear that drives irrational behavior and holy moly, is there ever a lot of irrational behavior being displayed these days.

Our news headlines are teeming with tales of doom and gloom and violence. All those negative things sell. One of the less redeeming qualities we have as human beings is that we tend to remember the horrible, scary things that happen as opposed to the good things. We tend to want to turn our heads and look at the car wreck. We even will sometimes giggle when we hear of someone going through tremendous difficulties.

So first, we have our own human nature appearing to be out to get us. I think we each have a responsibility to engage in some self-assessment. Sort of a kind of inner spring cleaning.

But on top of our own innate nature, others have stoked fears using what they know to be lies, and those are the cancerous cells walking and talking and breathing among us. It is the abundance of lies, and our growing tolerance for the presence of same that have worked to stoke the fears that never stay just as fears for long. It’s a universal truth that fear grows into a constant state of nervousness. Then that nervousness rolls into terror. And finally, terror crosses the border into paranoia.

And paranoia always has its finger on the trigger.

Yes, we have racism rampant around us, and racism comes, I believe, from a lethal mix of fear and hate. This mixture is toxic and is very much another source of the violence and near mob-mentality we are seeing displayed around us and in the news.

The wrong door shooting victim is black, and the man who shot him, white. But in the second instance, the case of the wrong driveway? Both shooter and victim were white. Which just proves my point.

Fear, like many human emotions, knows no color boundaries. It’s universal—and it needs to be eased.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

Keep asking questions...

 April 12, 2023

For those who celebrated over this past weekend, I wish you all a belated Happy Easter, Ramadan Kareem, and Happy Pesach. I hope the celebrations you enjoyed and the moments you shared with loved ones were meaningful and pleasant for you. Most of all, I hope that you’re at peace.

I have no problem giving good wishes to my fellow human beings, whatever their beliefs or however they worship. I believe that we are all deserving of best wishes and happy times. We truly are deserving, all of us, of the very best that life has to offer. And I have learned something very important over my nearly seven decades. Words of edification and kindness will never come back and bite me in the butt.

April is now fully in swing, and yes, the temperatures have risen nicely. For some folks I’ve noted that the temperatures have risen more than nicely; they’re more like swelter of summer than the freshness of spring.  For those of you who with one hand turned off the heat and the other turned on the A. C. you have my sympathy. We’ve had a few springs here that were not very spring-like at all, and it wasn’t anything to wish as the norm.

Sadly, I’m coming to the conclusion that most of the things I’ve come to think of as norms—and not just as that word relates to weather—are nothing more now than the way things used to be.

My writing continues to trundle along, and I know that I just need to do my best to jettison the flotsam and jetsam cluttering up my life—or at least pack it up and put it into a trunk in the back corner of the attic of my mind. This last week has been a challenge in the area of pain management. That for the most part is done, and I am determined to hold on to my positive attitude with both hands and a meat hook.

Writing for the most part is a solitary affair. I do have a sprinting group, writers who, twice a week, join with me on Zoom, that magical place where we can be together virtually. We state our goals for each session, and then report our results. The group of which I am a member celebrates the achievement of every word written. There is something motivating about having to answer to someone for what you’ve done with your time. That was a principle I learned early in my career. Sadly, I haven’t always been able to do so.

One of the reasons that I have written the essays I have over the last fifteen plus years was a pure desire to demonstrate to anyone who’d read them that we are, none of us, alone. There is a sense of relief to be found when one understands that one is not the only person to have experienced (fill in the blank).

I can’t say that I have accumulated a whole bunch of answers when it comes to facing the dilemmas of life. I have, however, gathered baskets full of questions. All sorts of questions that cover nearly every single subject you could name and likely on a lot more subjects than you’d ever image I’d want to know about.

And maybe, just maybe, I have stumbled upon something truly amazing. Something that could be compared to the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth.

Despite everything—or maybe because of it—I remain curious. I’m curious about almost everything. I can barely watch a YouTube video without wondering about something. And I often pause that video as I go in search of the answers I need.

No, I’m not ever likely to strap on a backpack and go exploring in the bigger, badder physical world. My traveling days are, for better or worse, pretty much over. But my mind yearns to go on journeys of discovery. The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. And that, more than anything, keeps me putting one foot in front of the other, day after day.

That is, in essence, the reason that I get up each day, and excitedly do so.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

Showers, flowers, and...prayers

 April 5, 2023

Ah, it’s the month of showers, flowers and Pilgrims. The time in spring that the sun is going to shine only when good old Mother Nature’s not giving us those showers. All necessary so that those little green shoots can become plants that grow and bloom, repeating the annual cycle that is written in their beings.

At least I can say that according to this family’s tradition, winter is over. Winter weather may not be, but the season has turned. The sky is still what I call a winter blue, and I am really looking forward to my first sighting of a deeper hue.

As far as I can tell, the world is still going to hell in the proverbial hand basket. Which has to be a bigger basket than I had ever imagined, when you consider all the lies that it is holding these days. That said, here’s something that I do wonder about, and often.

All those known and proven liars that seem to flood our airways lately, most of them have children, don’t they? So when they catch their own children lying to them, what the hell do they do? Give them a two-thumbs up salute? Score those lies on a scale of one to ten with an annual medal going to the child who told the most or the best lies? Do they tell the junior liars that mommy and daddy are proud, just so proud of them? What on God’s green (or soon to be green) earth do they do?

You see my problem, here. I really can’t easily assume that of course they will punish those children for lying, even if it does mean making themselves seem to be even bigger hypocrites than they already appear to be.

You may shake your head at me. You may even scoff and say that Morgan can now understand that lying liars will lie; but she still can’t accept that they don’t give one good damn about the example they are setting for their children, or anyone else for that matter. And you’d be right to do so. I don’t know what my problem is here. I clearly recall my mother saying to me, “do as I say, and not as I do.” I mean, that was an often used expression heard in my younger years, and not just at my own house. Mind you, that was in the 1950s and 1960s and was intended to underline the difference in acceptable behavior between children and adults. There was a clear distinctive line between what children could claim as rights what adults were empowered to do and believe me when I say that never the twain did meet, at least in my experience. But still.

I doubt this inner conundrum of mine will be solved anytime soon.

I’m still waiting for that warmish day to open my windows and doors and get some deep cleaning done. I figure I need several days in order to cover every room. There’s still a part of me that believes I can accomplish, physically, a lot more than I really can. I can’t decide if that’s sad, or just normal. Yes, hope springs eternal. Especially in springtime and especially when it comes to my desire to spiff up my nest.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Mother Nature seems to be fully in the grip of a tantrum, and it’s a doozy! I watch the news every evening and I always have the same reaction when I see the devastation wrought by the tornadoes that have been ravaging the U.S. mid-west and south: where does one start? I’m no stranger to having a home destroyed. I’ve lost two houses to fire. The first one we were able to rebuild; the second one, we had to sell as is and move into the house we’re now in, as tenants. We later worked an arrangement with the owner, and over time, bought the house from him.

In the aftermath of our fires, I recall just putting one foot in front of the other and doing what had to be done. I remember the tears, and the heartache, and swearing to my self after the second time that no home would ever mean so much to me ever again.

In other words, I reacted as most humans do in the face of a loss.

But the horrendous losses I’m seeing on my television screen make what I endured seem as nothing. I get annoyed by those who decry the use of “thoughts and prayers”. Yes, concrete action needs to happen no matter the situation at hand. But I know a secret to that process, and of course I’m going to share it with you.

In the face of every situation that one may encounter in life, one must begin with the prayers. You see, they’re the fuel that empowers all good action.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury