James C. Struck: Author of The Curious Snowflake

Hello, everyone, long time no speak!

I have decided to run another free book promotion on Amazon, and to promote it I have started a Thunderclap Campaign.  Thunderclap is a program that allows me to post a one-time-only message on the social media of everyone who subscribes to my campaign. By hitting hundreds if not thousands of feeds all at once, it gives my promotion a huge boost in visibility.  It is completely safe (I help out other authors with their Thunderclaps all the time) and helps me out a ton.

To subscribe to the campaign, click this link:  (http://thndr.me/dX0PIW)  If you want to know more about Thunderclap, go here: About Thunderclap  Thanks in advance for your help!

Jim

This day fifteen years ago was a Tuesday. 

I remember this because I slept in. Tuesday was Laundry Day for us back then, the only day of the week both my wife and I had off. We would go to Blockbuster (still a thing in 2001), rent 4 movies, and spend the day watching them while we sorted, folded, and schlepped clothes up and down from our 3rd floor apartment to the laundry room in the basement. Our oldest kid wasn’t 3 yet, and it was him who woke me up. 

“Daddy,” he said, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, “cartoons won’t work.”

Grumpily, I tossed the sheet off of me and stumbled out into the living room. Sure enough, instead of his usual PBS fare, the TV instead showed what I thought was the demolition of some building in Chicago. I grabbed the remote and started thumbing through channels to find something to appease him, only to find the same smoldering image on every station. Then I read the news ticker across the bottoms of the screen, and I immediately rush back into the bedroom. 

“Love, wake up, you need to come see this.”

No movies were rented by us that day. Like every other American, we  watched the news all day in a sort of awe-struck horror. At one point I walked across the street to pick up something from the convenience store, and I was shocked by the silence. No cars on the road. No planes in the sky despite being just a few miles from one of the busiest airports in the world. The whole country came to a standstill. 

****

By coincidence, I am flying today, the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. As I sip my Starbucks in the terminal, the news shows those low-definition images again of what we now call Ground Zero.  We’ve once again gotten used to such scenes only including foreign faces, so to see Americans streaked with soot and blood shocks me just as it did on that beautiful, quiet, horrible day. The talking heads pivot the story to the upcoming election, and how each of the candidates plan to speak about it. I can already imagine how those speeches will go, so I turn my attention to boarding my own flight. 

It is strange to me, to think I have lived through an event that will forever be in the history books, right along side Pearl Harbor, Gettysburg, and Lexington. It deserves to be, because it was the day that America was shown that there are people in the world who do not view us the way we view ourselves. To be blunt, we see ourselves as superheroes, mighty yet benevolent. 9/11 showed us how untrue that daydream truly is. 

Sadly the realization didn’t stick. 

This is the lost lesson of 9/11. We had a chance to understand what America truly is: an empire, no different from Rome or Britannia or any of the others throughout history. Yet as the intervening 15 years has shown, we haven’t learned. We want to have the power of empire but keep this veneer of heroism, but chaos is the only result that can come from such self-delusion. 

Will we learn?  Can we become the heroes, behave as such?  Or will we become bullies in mind as well as fact?  Only time will tell. 

I am privileged.

I am male.  I am white.  I have a college degree.  I am American.  I was raised in a middle-class, suburban neighborhood.  I am over 6 feet tall.  I have green eyes.  I am in excellent health for my age, albeit rather out of shape.  I have never been truly poor.  I come from a family where several members have lived into their 90s with all their mental faculties intact, and both my parents are in their 80s and going strong.

I am, pardon my French, privileged as fuck.

But a lot of people like me really don’t understand what privileged really means, and what it entails.  This does not mean that I have not experienced hardships, nor does it lessen them.   I may not have been poor, but I have been very, very broke.  Like food pantry broke. I may have a college degree, but I am both significantly underemployed and still-endebted.  I may be white, but I have been in situations where I felt afraid simply because  of the color of my skin.  I may have good health, but I still feel the aches of middle age.  I may have good genes, but I could still die at 47, as my oldest brother Mike did.

Privileged does not mean my life is perfect.

But what it does mean is that I have a leg up on just about everyone in the world.  I never had to worry about getting shot while waiting for a school bus.  I’ve never clutched a weapon inside my purse while walking through a dark parking lot.  I never grew up wondering about my next meal.  I never had to worry about the quality of my education, nor about getting into my college of choice despite my very-average grades.  I have never been pulled over because of the color of my skin.  My only experience with chaos or war or armed militias is through the filter of a TV screen or Internet connection.  I’ve never been cat-called.  I have never had to worry about dysentery, or malaria, or dengue fever, or any of the myriad diseases that plague poorer parts of the world. I have never felt threatened because of my religion.  I have never had to worry during a job interview that my skin color didn’t match that of my prospective employer.  I’ve never had to ask a girlfriend to watch my drink while I use the bathroom.  I have never had to walk miles just to get water.  I have always had a toilet that flushes.

I have never truly feared for my life.

This is privilege.  There are hardships, problems, fears, and frustrations that simply do not appear in my life, not because of any effort on my part, but simply because of luck, geography, and genetics.  Now, as a privileged individual, I have a choice.  I can be blind to my good fortune, and thus dismissive of those who do not possess it, or I can be aware of my luck and grateful for it, and instead understand the hardships of others that I have, through no effort of my own, avoided.  From this place of understanding, I then can use my privilege, use my good fortune to try to level the playing field.  I can give what I can, whether that be money, time, support, words, or actions, to try to make our world more fair, more even, more inclusive.  I can basically use my privilege to destroy it.

This is my mission, and should be the mission of every other educated white middle-class male American with half a brain and an ounce of decency.  Anything less, to put it bluntly, is selfishness, greed, and hubris.  Anything less truly is privilege.

The green creeps upward in Spring.

First grass transforms from thatch to verdant

seemingly overnight,

then the first plants, peeking out from under last autumn’s leaves.

Soon after, the shrubs join in,

spreading a faint haze of life through the undergrowth

hiding the skeletal branches in a wrap of green.

Then, at last, the explosion of life,

flowers bursting from ground and branch,

leaves finally leaping to the treetops,

banishing winter’s final remnant of bareness,

and softening the wind’s voice

from whistle to susurrus.

Life wins again

It’s a good time to be a geek.

Everywhere you look, geek culture is booming.  The movies based off Marvel Comics franchises have pulled down over $19 billion, video games sales hit $91.5 billion in 2015 alone, and sci-fi and fantasy have been the top-selling book categories for years.  For the generation that has grown up with Harry Potter, XBox 360, and smartphones, these things are and, to their eyes, have always been cool, or at least acceptable.

Let me assure you this has not always been the case.

I am 41 years old, the perfect age to ride the cusp of technology from childhood on.  I remember playing endless games of Oregon Trail on monochrome-green Apple IIe screens in the computer lab in grade school.  I got to experience how Ronald Reagan’s changes to the Federal Trade Commission turned Saturday morning cartoons into 30-minute geeky advertisements for toys.  I played Pong, Asteroids, Breakout, Pac-Man, all of them as they released.  I had a front row seat (and have the packed-away issues to prove it) to the great shift in comics storytelling.  In many ways, the 1980s were the Golden Age of geekdoms, where much of what is beloved today had its roots, and that was my childhood: Atari, Star Wars, Iron Man, Tolkien, and Transformers.

But it was not much fun to be a geek back then.

I may have been part of the first electronics generation, but these entertainments were seen as fads, fringe, or just plain weird by most people.  My parents, part of the Silent Generation,  refused to get cable TV, a microwave, or any video game system past a 1970’s solid-state Pong rig.  My friends couldn’t understand why I would rather read than play outside.  My schoolmates thought Transformers were cool but didn’t understand my obsession with the Macross Saga and Battle of the Planets.  I found a small clique of similar outcasts and we spent our weekends playing 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons and watching Monty Python marathons, but our entertainment obsessions meant we were on the outside of the popular world looking in.  We claimed we didn’t care, but we all did.

The shift, I feel, began in the mid-90s.  By that time I was in college and in my short-lived goth stage (never dyed my hair black, though), but I was still a geek at heart.  The Internet was just becoming a thing, and with it the realization that it created a space where like-minded people could find each other.  BBSs and AOL chatrooms became meeting halls for the socially awkward, where interactions were kept quite literally under glass and even the shyest among us could find a voice, even if it was just in text.  In the roleplaying game scene, this was the era when live-action roleplaying, or LARPing, exploded, where people would go beyond paper and dice and actually become their characters for a day or evening or weekend.  Suddenly we geeks had a social crowd of sorts, though the tabletop purists despised it.  Looking back, it is amazing how big it got.  I attended a weekly gathering for White Wolf’s vampire LARP that consistently drew 150-200 people, and once had over 350 show up.

As the internet matured, LARPing fell by the wayside, replaced by a black hole of geekiness that even I have never ventured down: massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs.  Starting in 1997 with Ultima Online (though others existed before that), suddenly geeks had an entire visual world to meet up at and hide in.  Stories abounded in the early 2000s of people getting addicted to MMOs, to the point of losing jobs, relationships, and in a few cases, even suicide.  This level of obsession has even been lampooned in The Guild, the Web TV show that launched the career of Felicia Day.

But if there is one event, one turning point where geek culture and mainstream culture truly began to merge, it can be described in one name: Harry Potter.  Suddenly, a new generation of geeks had a rallying obsession, a new generation of parents who grew up in a much more geek-friendly era had a tool for getting their kids to read, and we who had grown up on Tolkien, Brooks, and Lewis finally had a common ground with the rest of the world.  This explosion of interest in fantasy got Hollywood got involved, and soon after, Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings went on to win 17 Oscars.  With this, geek culture finally went mainstream.

Perhaps I am a little bitter that today’s geeks don’t have the uphill climb I and my generation had, but not much.  A whole new slew of problems have crept into geek culture that I never had to deal with, from the addiction problems I mentioned above to sexual harassment in the video game industry to the fake geek girl idiocy.  But when all is said and done, I’m just ecstatic that all these things I’ve loved all my life are no longer denigrated as shameful or stupid.

Geek for life, man.  Geek for life.

Generosity.  Giving.  Charity.  If there is one thread that binds all of the world’s religions together, it’s that generous acts should be encouraged.  Charity, generosity, and giving to the poor are mentioned in the New Testament over 30 times, Zakat, or donating a percentage of your income to the poor, is the third of Islam’s Five Pillars, daana, or charity without expectation of a return, is a key aspect of Hindu teachings, and Buddhism celebrates even the simplest acts of kindness. Even the IRS encourages them by giving tax breaks for charitable contributions.  But why is it so universal, and what does this imply?  What does this say about humanity?

Every one of us have given a small bit of our abundance to those in need at one point or another.  We’ve dropped a handful of change into a Salvation Army red bucket.  We’ve slipped a dollar into the guitar case of a street musician or the cup of homeless veteran. One January when I was in college I saw a guy playing the tuba at 9 o’clock at night on a Chicago street corner.  I handed him $5 (a big deal for a broke college student in the 90’s) and told him to get inside before his lips froze permanently to the mouthpiece.  And this made me feel good.  Really good, actually, and I’m sure that you’ve felt the same way if you’ve had a chance to do something similar.  This is beyond simple conscience or empathy, beyond the norms of our society or the teachings of our religions.  Something about being kind just feels . . .  right, like an affirmation.  Reaching out and helping another person feels genuine, like doing so is an acknowledgment of something.  I’ve given this a great deal of thought, and I have a theory about why, but first I need to explain a little about my beliefs.

If I had to put a label on my belief system, the one that would come the closest is Pantheist.  Pantheism is the belief that all of existence is an interconnected whole, and that this whole is, for lack of a better term, God.  Not the God of Christianity, Judaism or Islam, for those religions teach that the Divine is separate from Creation. Instead pantheism teaches that the Divine is existence, in a very real and literal sense.  To a true pantheist, all of existence is holy, and the only sins come from fighting against the truth of our interconnection. Now, my beliefs deviate from this in quite a few ways, but that’s not important here.  The key fact is that I agree that “God” is not separate from us, and we are not separate from each other.  More importantly, I feel that the joy that we get from being generous is proof of this interconnection.

Take this experience we’ve been discussing, this joy of generosity, and apply it to other spiritual points of view.  To a monotheist, generosity is an edict from on-high, a requirement from God to behave in certain ways in order to earn a reward.  To a reincarnationist, kindness is merely karmic book-balancing, an attempt to work off negativity from previous lives. To an atheist, charity is an acknowledgment of empathy and a way to  keep the unfortunate and unlucky from destabilizing society.  Yet none of these explain or even acknowledge the joy of generosity.  They see it as nothing more than happy aftereffect or a result of Divine-given conscience.

I look at it differently.  Stop and consider for a moment  how it feels to receive generosity rather than to give it.  Once we get past any feelings of guilt or shame (which I believe is just an unfortunate result of living in a capitalist society), receiving succor also feels good.  It feels like an acknowledgment that we are worthy, that we deserve kindness. Think about this.  Being generous and receiving help both trigger positive feelings.  If we are individual souls trying to earn salvation, reincarnated souls seeking balance, or just bodies and minds going through the motions of our brief existences, why would receiving help feel as good giving help?  It doesn’t make sense.

Ahh, but what if we are interconnected?  Then a logic beings to take shape behind all these feelings.  Now, when someone is generous to another, it makes perfect sense that both would receive a similar positive emotion, for at a deep and esoteric level, there is no “other”.  There is just one Soul experiencing things from different perspectives at the same time.  Now, I know this is an odd, even alien concept for many people.  We are all taught the myth of the Rugged Individualist, we are all exposed to the rather lonely philosophies of most major religions, and what I am trying to describe runs counter to these in many different ways.  I am not here to convert anyone to any particular way of thinking, but I do want you and everyone else to think about this, and think deeply.

So the next time you feel the desire to give, stop for a moment.  Look into the eyes of that street musician, that homeless person,  that bell ringer.  See them as another person with hopes and dreams, joys and disappointments, foibles and graces.  And just for a moment, try to perceive in their returned gaze a flicker of that Divine Spark that lives in all of us, that crosses creeds, classes, and colors.  Look for that moment of namaste, the God in me acknowledges the God in you.  This is what generosity is truly about.  It is a chance for us to express our interconnection in a real and tangible way.  Few things in life feel more fulfilling, because few things in life better reflect what I believe to be the real nature of existence.  I give to you because you and I are connected, and if you lack something, then at some level so do I.  I receive from you with gladness, for I know that I deserve kindness and that you feel as much joy from this act as I do.  In this way, charity may be the most holy act we humans can do.

Serious post this time, ladies and gentlemen.  Sorry, no bad knitting this week.

Hidden behind the tragedy of the Brussels attack and the drunken monkey farce that is the American presidential primary season has been a series of truly horrendous terrorist attacks across Africa and the Middle East over the last 3 months.  The worst of these in magnitude of sheer brutality was on Easter Sunday, when a bomb went off in an amusement park in the city Lahore, Pakistan, killing nearly 70 people and wounding at least 300.

I found this attack far more horrible than most because of who it targeted.  Lahore, a city of over 5 million people, is in eastern Pakistan, not far from the border with India.  It is the capital of Punjab province, and the hometown of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.  Lahore has a very small Christian population, about 2%, but they have been targets of attacks in the past.  A pair of bombs went off outside a Catholic church on March 15 of last year, killing 15 people.  A splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for both that attack and this one, siting that it intended to target Christians, even though the majority of the victims in Easter’s attack were Muslim.

Now I can, with great effort, stretch my mind and my morals to comprehend the motivations behind an attack such as the one in Brussels. From the point of view of the IS terrorists, they are religious freedom fighters, doing all they can to destroy a great and powerful enemy of their faith.  While I find this indescribably twisted, there is a dark sort of logic behind it.  Flawed logic, yes, but it is there.

This attack in Lahore, on the other hand, makes no sense to me at all.  What is the point?  Why lash out so indiscriminately?  Why harm the most innocent, the most powerless?  Why target such a small group?  Why do it in a way that harm many who, at least on paper, might agree with your ideals?  What cause does it promote?

I do not believe in Big E Evil.  The idea that there is some great external malevolent force that wants to lead humanity down the path of annihilation seems both childish and illogical to me.  Evil, to me, is a very human thing, born of our ignorance, our fear, and our insistence that we are separate from each other rather than interconnected.  When I am tempted to act selfishly, to make harmful assumptions, to separate myself from my fellow humans, I believe in my heart that it is me and me alone who is responsible for these feelings.  There are times that I am afraid or disconnected or thoughtless, and I allow these feeling to interfere with my ideas of who I am and what I desire.

But  I cannot imagine ever being so disconnected that I could deliberately kill dozens of strangers.  I cannot comprehend being so threatened by others’ ideas that I would want to silence them through violence.  This is beyond me.  Yet these are thinking, feeling humans who carry out these acts.  In their minds, they are not monsters or evil.  They are the heroes of their lives, not the villains.

There is an idea in many New Age circles that I feel has a degree of merit.  We see that we encounter the same negative situations over and over again.  We get into the same sort of romantic relationships with the same sort of people over and over.  We attract the same sort of “friends”, make the same mistakes, sabotage our lives in the same way.  The idea that some people have floated is that we do this deliberately, at some deep level, because there is a “lesson” we need to learn there.  If we do not learn it, it repeats.  Now I do not believe that life is some sort of school.  We are not here to have some lesson beaten into our heads.  But I have also seen this pattern in my life, and I do believe that we draw certain circumstances to us.  Not because we need to learn anything, but because we wish to experience something in order to choose who we wish to be in contrast to that.

So I have to wonder what experience we as a world desire, that we continue to draw this sort of violence to us.  Whatever it is, I hope we finish soon, because these tragedies break my heart.