Okay, if you've been reading these posts in the order they were numbered, you have taken my post-stroke journey with me since my big-ass stroke and the emotional quagmire that followed. Good for you. You're a real trouper. Now that we've reached the point at which I am no longer suicidal, that brings the Half-Brain Train to somewhat of a station. So now I'm going to change things up by posting the very first thing I wrote following my stroke. Yes, it took me almost nine years to bring myself to a place of feeling like I again had something to say. But earlier this year (2025), following the inauguration of Donald Trump, I felt compelled to write the following, which I posted on my Facebook Page:

Racism

I sometimes wonder if I would have spent my lifetime so adamantly opposed to racism had I grown up in a place steeped in a history of racism, where blacks and other persons of color had forever been viewed with disdain, malice and cruelty by a significant portion of the white populace. Had I grown up in the Deep South, say, instead of being raised largely on overseas military bases oblivious to the toxic racial divide in my homeland. Had I grown up in the Jim Crow  racist strongholds of Alabama or Mississippi, the product of generations of racial  hatred, would I have had the courage and humanity to recognize and vigorously denounce that mentality as being little different than that of the Germans under Hitler? Suppose in 1965 I had been a shy 13-year-old southern boy with an adolescent crush on  the cute granddaughter of a KKK member whose idea of social activism meant burning the churches of black congregations? But no, I was a military brat  growing up on  bases far from my father’s hometown of Paris, Texas, which  three decades before his 1926 birth had been the site of as heinous a racist atrocity as can be imagined: the very public torturing and burning alive of a “mentally retarded” black man, before a white crowd treating it like excellent entertainment, many of them having traveled hundreds of miles just to be there. I remain in awe of my late father, who despite his childhood in a place that had  suborned such an atrocity was never a racist and would assuredly have whipped me  had I ever behaved as one.

I doubt my father ever learned of that horrific blight on his hometown’s history. I only learned of it while in college, when I read a book entitled “the white response to black emancipation,” which sounds like a KKK manifesto but was an exhaustively researched and footnoted documentation of a century of atrocities committed by American white people upon black Americans since the abolition of slavery that should be required reading by all whites  who don’t fully recognize this dreadful chapter of their cultural heritage, during which a law banning lynching was considered controversial and took decades to pass.

Why think of these things now? Well, white racism has never been confined to African-Americans. It has long been wielded against anyone we deemed “different”, whether by skin color, language, religion  or geographic origin as evidenced by the pervasive prejudice against Irish and Italians during eras  of their widespread

Immigration, against the peoples who inhabited this land centuries before the arrival of white settlers, against Jewish people and now, with the most xenophobic president in American history in office, against seemingly anyone from beyond our borders.

This still-great country was founded and built by immigrants to be a melting pot of humanity with high ideals that my (white) people have always had a difficult time living up to. We really need to  do and be better. Just sayin’.