The Twilight of Our Idols

[this article was originally posted to my Facebook page in June 2015]

I can remember hearing, on my car radio in 1997, of the death of actor Jimmy Stewart.  Two things immediately came to my 29 year-old mind:

* "I kind of thought he would live forever"
* "I feel sad for my parents' generation"

Today, nearly 20 years later, we learn of the death of actor Christopher Lee. It has been a long time since I could forget that even famous people pass away.  And the sorrow I feel this time is for my own generation's loss.

We see them now a little more often than we saw them before, don't we?  The online posts about heaven gaining another angel.   It could be a pet.  It could be a classmate.  It is, with increasing regularity, a cherished relative of the previous generation or a parent.

And, here we are: the 40-something masters of the universe, agog and bewildered that the people we all looked up to for so long are turning over the keys to the kingdom, increasingly, to us.  I marvel at how many of us announced their children's graduations from high school this year.  We have now produced a new generation of adults that look up to us the way we looked up to our parents (whether that's been clear over the previous several years or not).  Many of them will have felt, on learning of the death of Christopher Lee, the way I felt when learning of the death of Jimmy Stewart.

So, besides evoking a sense of poignancy with these observations, what is my point?  Simply this: Life waits for no one.  We, the remnants of the Baby Boomers and the vanguard of Generation X, find ourselves, finally, in the driver's seats of our worlds.  No more hand holding; no more training wheels.  We are now "they", "them" -- "those people" who, increasingly over the next two decades or so, get to say how our families, our neighborhoods, our governments, and our society will go.  There is no longer the shadow of someone greater than us hiding us from our moment in the spotlight.

Seize the scepter - lay hold on the empty throne.  Our idols have grown frail and are abandoning us.  We 'get to say' now; it is our turn to be looked up to.

Do Talk To Strangers

In November 2014, two children belonging to Alexander and Danielle Meltiv were picked up by police officers while walking home from a park a third of a mile from their home at 5 p.m. The authorities did not contact the parents about the whereabouts of their kids until three hours later and would only release the children into their custody after they had signed a "temporary safety plan" promising not to leave their children unattended.[1]

There is a big problem with perception vs reality in the United States today. I'm talking now, specifically, about the misinformed and idiotic trend toward reporting, arresting, and charging parents with child endangerment for allowing their kids to play outside unsupervised. Given the reality of the risks involved, this embarrassing state of affairs constitutes a true tyranny of ignoramuses in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

In the US, a child aged 14 or younger is more likely to die of a sudden, unexpected heart attack than to be abducted by a stranger. We have 60 million kids in this age group[2] and, in the latest year of compiled statistics, 115 of them were abducted by strangers.[3] That works out to a 0.00019% chance that, in a given year, a child aged 14 or younger will be abducted by a stranger. In fact, you are more likely to find a child dead of accidental drowning in a bathtub than you are to have him or her abducted by a stranger in any given year.

The most laughable (and tragic) misunderstanding of these odds is that many people feel that exposure to society is more dangerous for kids today than it was 20, 30, or 40 years ago. But this is not the case. From 1990 to 2007, for instance, "substantiated cases of child sexual abuse have declined 53% and physical abuse substantiations have declined 52%."[4] Rape, attempted or completed, against children fell a further 43% from 2003 to 2011.[5]

I could launch here into an exposition about why more people today are more likely to imagine that American society is more dangerous than it was in previous decades. But I'm not going to do that. It would only give a false air of legitimacy to the perpetrators of this trend. In the end, it is an uninteresting mystery to solve -- in the face of the active curtailment of liberty that is going on due to the breathless intervention of uninformed busy-bodies.

It really just comes down to this for parents: are you going to be influenced more by the true facts of the world or by fear of looking bad to people who are going to judge you regardless of how well you take care of your children? And to law enforcement, the courts, and the various child protective services agencies out there we need to say, "Enough is enough." What happened to the Meltiv family in Maryland should never happen to any family.

[1] Slate.com story about the Maltivs
[2] 2013 US population numbers by age range, US Census Bureau
[3] May 2013 Washington Post opinion piece by the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hamshire
[4] Trends in Childhood Victimization, Crimes Against Children Research Center, University of New Hamshire
[5] Free Range Kids.com crime statistics page

Celebrating My Mother's Life, 26 Years After Her Death

26 years ago on a Friday the 13th, I was at a rehearsal for a Christmas play at Jimmy Swaggart Bible College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana when the Dean of Male Students interrupted us to escort me back to his office. Nothing could have prepared me for that call from my sister, informing me that our mother, Norma Jean "Stormy" Falor, had died.

She was a fighter. She was a crier, She waited tables to put herself through secretary school after dropping out of high school to elope with her sweetheart in the Air Force and then facing the disappointment of divorce It was as a waitress that she met my father. After getting a break to join the steno pool at Toledo Edison, she worked her way up all the way to Executive Secretary to the President. (All while helping my dad produce his Masters thesis.) When John Williamson would fret and fume over corporate difficulties, she would take him by the arm and lead him to the glass walls of his 15th-story office, point to the streets of downtown Toledo below, and say, "Look at all those people walking around down there, Mr. Williamson, just as if the world weren't coming to an end!"

When I was born, the doctor had to inform her of my heart defect, warning her that I might not make it to infancy when surgery would be possible. She looked him in the eye and said, "Bet me!" She made many mistakes, some of which (drinking and smoking) drove me from her home and put her in an early grave. But none of that can ever blot out my admiration of her, my gratitude for all she was and did for me, or the sweet sorrow I feel that she did not live to see me come into my own and lead an extraordinary life.

I've lived more years, now, without her in this world than with her. Yet the memories and the love remain strong. I know she would be proud of me. The occasion of today's anniversary gives me the opportunity to express publicly, "I'm proud of you, Mom and I celebrate the brief, dazzling spark that was your life."

Why I Believe In Open Relationships

Twenty years ago, while facing the end of my marriage, I happened upon the late M.Scott Peck's book, The Road Less Traveled. In a footnote to a section about "The Myth of Romantic Love", he mentioned a book by a couple named O'Neil entitled Open Marriage, commenting,

My work with couples has led me to the stark conclusion that open marriage is the only kind of mature marriage that is healthy and not destructive to the spiritual health and growth of the individual partners.

I was certain he was wrong at the time, but not certain enough to dismiss the idea completely. I put it on a back burner of my mind.

For seven years after my marriage ended, I entered into a series of relationships with the best of hopes and intentions, collapsing my identity into each new "us" and then suffering great heartache whenever a relationship ended. I was convinced that if I were simply wonderful enough, the other person could not fail to reciprocate the contributions of devotion and attention I lavished upon her. Except that she actually could. This was a shocking revelation.

During this time, I picked up Peck's book again and much more of what he had to say about mature adult behavior began to sink in. In addition to other ineffective behaviors, collapsing my identity into each relationships created a mutually suffocating situation that was never sustainable. In becoming so interested in her, I was failing to be interesting. What she needed was a man who she could respect and admire more than a sensitive, doting devotee. As I reflected upon these facts, I knew that I deeply desired to love someone who I could respect and admire as well. My romantic relationships improved dramatically.

Around 2005, I was exposed to a worldview which taught that true happiness could never come from another person or, indeed, from any source outside of the self. For, if it came from outside, it could be diminished or taken away by something outside the self and was therefore not true happiness. I swear I heard a band of angels singing the "Hallelujah Chorus" when the full impact of that insight penetrated my mind. All of my life to that point, I had been waiting to find "the one" who would complete me and make me happy. And the joke was on me: I, myself, was that one. Not only could no one else do it for me, it was unfair and unrealistic to hope or demand that she could. The women in my former relationships hadn't left me at all. Instead, I had inadvertently pushed them away.

As I started to pull all of these insights together into a coherent framework for living, a number of unexpected implications arose. Since love is infinite and unlimited, it never makes any sense to say "I love you if ..." or "I love you as long as ..." Also, there is no because to love. If I love you, I love you because I love you. Having a rationale for your love would be like like calculating a mathematical formula for why you like your favorite color. It follows therefore that true, authentic love can never depend upon the behavior of the one who is beloved.

And, if you think about it, you have never changed for the better because someone has demanded it. You may have altered your behavior to assuage your own guilt or to avoid unpleasant confrontations. But real change only happens under the nourishing rays of openness and acceptance. When you realize that someone truly believes in you and trusts in his or her heart that you'll turn out just fine in the end, there are literally no lengths to which you will not go in order to to prove that person right.

And now for the part you were expecting me to address much earlier in this article: monogamy. Here's all you need to know about monogamy: jealousy is rooted in fear. Perfect love casts out all fear. Therefore, insisting on monogamy as a condition of love is a contradiction in terms.

That may be all you need to know, but I'll develop the idea a little further for the benefit of the uncynically curious among my readers. Consider that if you and I share true love:

• I can no more hurt you by having a romp with someone else that I could by eating broccoli or washing my car. The source of your happiness and completeness remains within you.
  
  
• Worrying about what your family, friends, neighbors, or co-workers will think of our situation may be an interesting concern, but it has nothing to do with the love that we share.
  
  
• Imagine the powerful bond of intimacy we could build if we would laugh at one another's weaknesses and trust that nothing in this world could threaten what was real between us.
  
  
• Prohibition has never been an effective behavior modification policy. It usually only serves to create a flourishing black market where people with perfectly normal human tendencies go in order to find what they are looking for and a bloated prison system with millions of lives wasted and prevented from reaching their full potential.
  
  
• Dr. Peck was right. Only adults treating other adults as adults get to escape the myth of romantic love and discover a life where interesting, whole people can share in each others' lives without suffocating one another.
  

Losing An Uncle, Gaining A Family

I'm not sure why it takes a death in the family to spur us to reconnect with loved ones we've lost track of, but that's what the last few days has been like for me. My beloved Uncle Stan died on Valentine's day and I traveled to his part of the country to attend the memorial service held in his honor last weekend.

Stan lived a long and interesting life and he was rich in the areas that count most, love and life experiences - as well as being well off materially. Like a star, his homestead attracted the nearby dwelling places of his natural and extended families. His own fascinating house commands an incredible view at the top of a low summit aptly named "Love's Hill". It's tempting to write about the cool cars he drove and raced, his pilot's license, his professional ascent to Chief of Medicine at the hospital where he worked, as well as the less auspicious but satisfying medical work he did at local schools and prisons. My dad says that his brother "Wanted to do everything, try everything." It's pretty clear from my life history that I inherited that part of the family's genetic sequence myself.

Whether it was the turbulent transition from the sixties to the seventies or personal transitions in their own lives, my father and uncle left the wives of their 20s and 30s at a similar time, stranding cousins and aunts from the regular contact that would have happened if it had not been so. We all went by nicknames back then. I was "Buddy" (Bernard II), Stan Jr. was "Chummy", and his brother John was "Johnny". My paternal grandparents were a hub of occasional re-uniting, and it was always fun to get together. Well fun for me anyway, I was the youngest of us three. I'm sure I was a bit of a pain in the butt to Chummy and Johnny, but it was the good kind of pain in the butt - they got back at me whenever we went outside and played catch. Guess who got to be the eternal and everlasting monkey in the middle? Good times.

And then the inevitable high school commencements and goings out into the world, some to college, some to the military. We were spread out all over the country. Every once in a while one of us would make an effort and re-establish contact. But like in the parable of the sower, "the cares of this world" took their toll and it would often be years before we would hear from one another.

So last weekend, I got the chance to hug the necks of some dear people I hadn't seen in a good long while, not just Chummy and Johnny and their mother, but Stan's second family and friends of the family as well. Miss Baltimore came with me (I had been visiting her for Valentine's weekend when I got the news) and it was a delight to introduce her to them and vice versa. It felt so good to be so connected again after all the years. I hope we all make the effort to keep in touch and visit from time to time.