Franksummers3ba's Blog

“I have a telephone appointment with the Social Security Administration Monday August 27, 2012. I need a lot of rest these days and there five calls to remind me inclded one that woke me from one of the better sleeps or naps I have had since I went to the emergency room on August 7, 2012. I have lost some weight since then and have spent a good bit of money on copies and various kinds of postage as I seek to make a Social Security claim. I have been walking and doing other forms of rehabilitation therapy that I have learned from decades of dealing with all sorts of chronic ailments and lingering injuries. I have paid very little and more than I could afford to the hospital for the bill that did not get to me until weeks after it was mailed. Since then things have progressed in the usual American ideological tyranny of doing things unjustly with great conviction to the point that I cannot address the debts of my one hospital visit in many years at all.  I  asked them to send my mail to the post office where I get my mail and not to the home address where I almost always have a horrific experience. Then I did many other small things until it became impossible even to to try in this country so often horrible to me.  This physical adjustment and its associated consequences  may be my last adventure in life and it is certainly not the way I would choose to end the journey.

But it is not the worst way either. I still at long intervals and in much diminished intensity feel the metaphorical fingers of death in my chest and left side.  But physically, I am feeling a lot better. I feel that will struggle on for quite some time and while I do I will write about change. Sometimes I am not that unhappy. My life has brought me many adventures I would not have had if all had gone as I had planned. I am grateful for those adventures as well as the few clear victories I have had in the fray of life.

News paper article about China

I was a big fan of John Denver’s early work and like a lot of his fans not so much of the songs that came many years after “Rocky Mountain High”, “Annie’s Song”, “Poems and Prayers and Promises” and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” had faded from the charts and record store shelves. But there is a part pf one of his later songs that impressed me which I quote or misquote here from memory:

When You asked how I’ve been here without you
I’d like to say I’ve been fine and I do.
But we both know the truth is hard to come by
And if I told the truth, that’s not quite true

Some days are diamonds some days are stones
Sometimes the hard times won’t leave me alone
Sometimes a cold wind blows a chill in my bones
Some days are diamonds some days are stones.”

Well Allen Bares Jr. whom I did not know Jess Spiehler, my last remaining grandparent,   and some other people I knew here and there have died, including the last sibling of my father’s mother, since that incident and not I. I have not gotten completely well, gotten Social Security disability nor died. My father has come a lot closer than I have arguably. But I still feel closer to the end since that day in August. In this blog post I have layers of connecting back throughout my life which are cited in various ways. But the connections go several layers deep. In this note I am drawing on various other sources i have written in the past in part to reduce my efforts here. I do this to some degree with the blog-style obituaries and other biographical sketches. I pull together material from this blog and add new material to produce a piece that is new and distinct but not entirely so. In this plagiarizing of myself I will be recycling below some material from earlier Notes on my Facebook Timeline. That is most likely to be from “Risks Remembered, Touching the Time for Turning Four Dozen Years Old and Longevity” other notes which have been more autobiographical in nature. I hope I start to feel better than I currently am feeling. I have been in recovery and rehabilitation mode before and I am now.

My incident on August 7, 2012 was not technically a full-blown heart attack, probably because I detected the early signs, Mom woke up and drove me to the hospital and got good care at the emergency room. When they put me on the monitor I was showing some pronounced symptoms, they gave me nitroglycerin, put a tube in my nose with drugs to increase oxygen flow and pumped oxygen in — when the process built to the spasm which is where death and permanent injury occur my body was dropping into an artificial state and it is only a little bit of a metaphor to say that the worst of the storm rolled over me with less harm when i lost consciousness. I think I was spared most permanent results, there was great pain and semi-paralysis all along my left side the next day and I am still recovering. Probably there was some permanent brain damage I continued to have moments of distinct confusion for weeks that were different than before but I seem to be almost back to to pre-crisis function and am more fit now. Yet there are times since which are different than any times  before. However, I was already experiencing plenty of bad physical times before this.  I definitely lost some weight, toned up and have gotten more regular sleep since the incident.

What was my life then prior to the incident? Well I will spend a bit of time on those years before my most recent readjustment.  I came back from China, wrote an article for a cultural newspaper I had written for before many times and took a job with an assisted living agency caring form my brother Simon who is handicapped. Then Hurricane Rita came and I was injured. I will probably revisit these events but since than and until my visit to the emergency room I was never really able bodied or fully well.

Country chapel of St. James after a massive flood destryed interior.

The 2006 to 2012 years brought me to the pre-crisis position in 2012 which does not need its own category.There have been more nephews and nieces and some good times with my brothers and sisters and parents. I described earlier the work I have been able to do between hours in bed or on a couch in home-made therapies. I will not go through that again in this paragraph. However, I have mostly noticed how may of they physical injuries of the past have come back in varied forms to collect a new toll on my health, time, energy and happiness. My health since I returned from China to the United States has revealed new troubles and woes to me bit by bit. My role in Family Missions Company founded on work that consumed me for decades was miniscule before I went to China. When I got back but before my heart problem many demands were as bad or worse from the many people I served but my roles and recognitions diminished even more. My experience of American life as a whole was ever more hellish. I am not sure my health matters much to me any more since so much of my life is about being out of contact with so much and aspiring to so little that requires vigorous good health. It was in these years that my cousin Severin Summers was killed in Afghanistan. I had the opportunity to remember a long conversation I had with him about the ideas and commitments of military and more or less civilian people in combat and in other kinds of more or less justified violence. I remembered him carrying the cross at his grandmother’s funeral. It has been a strangely huge experience I would not expect anyone to validate or understand because Sev and I were not close by any standard that makes objective sense. I have blogged about Sev on occasion including in a post for Memorial Day of this year. Sev left this life through violence while the picture of health.  His death also was marked by the great fraternity of the United States Armed Forces. He made different choices than I have made and had different experiences. Like those who buried  Bares his brothers in arms saw him laid to rest. Acknowledging in both cases without saying so that the system they all serve was an imperfect assurance of safety.

My life is altogether about the struggle against great odds. To the extent that it is barely about anything else most of the time it has been about that but so are many other lives. In my hometown we have a fair number of Vietnamese immigrants and some have slipped back to Buddhism who once were Catholics. Others have lost all real sense of a religious home. While I am a Catholic Evangelist I do not have much animosity for Buddhism but I do know how much the Vietnamese Church has sacrificed. Fortunately we have a Vietnamese Mass and the image of a Vietnamese martyr. But we still have many challenges to meet there and in many other areas of life here. Liệt sĩ may mắn của của Việt Nam.

Hemingway was very interested in writers with whom he himself was contemporary.  He was more interested in Fitzgerald in this regard than in most other writers such as Baroja y Nessi and Gertrude Stein who also came in for serious review by Hemingway in print and conversation. Hemingway said of Fitgerald as a writer that, “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings”.

This is a post written for anyone who wants to read it but it is very much addressing American ideas and issues. It is very mush rooted in an American history more rich and diverse than most people think. One political triumph I have seen recently that I had almost nothing to do with but did support shows how ancient America and this land of Louisiana actually are. You can something  about that recognition of an ancient archaeological site right here. It is also called Poverty Point and poverty is a bit of theme in this blog post.

America may be the nation with the largest economy for a few more years but it is also the nation that survived the Dust Bowl, the Civil War and many economic crashes and natural disasters. An American life can be one complicated by adversity.  I think our politics must address all the realities of our lives as individuals and a society.

So poverty and ill health have something to do with my view of the world no doubt. In general my view of my health is that it has been degradced by a compounding effect of numerous insults ( or damaging acts or occurrences of limited impact) to my health. These insults include:

childhood asthma
being bitten by a copperhead snake as a child
repeated hospitalizations for sunstroke.
Several broken bones throughout childhood and adolescence
near death from multiple insect poisonings
amoebic dysentery
Dengue fever
Giardia Lamblia
numerous traffic accidents including a head on collision with a car while riding my bicycle
a probably normal number of other diseases and injuries common in America with some neglect. There are other factors such as these which could be discussed in private with some people but will not be done here (and no, none of these secrets are sexually transmitted diseases — as far as I know I have never had any and I have been tested for many things that should have shown them over the years). Several who have taken my x-rays have said on occasion they have found real arthritis including chiropractors. But nobody has given me an official diagnosis. The truth is I have worn out generation of braces, slings and used countless back-plasters and remedies to get this far.

Me backpacking in Kunyu National Park, Shandong, China

I have shown that I have suffered perhaps .But these are not the signs of direct evidence of a life lived in the struggle for socio-economic renewal. Perhaps the recent post on my life in Asia here and here show some connection between this life and politics but it is not a clear connection. Compared to Martin Luther King, Adoph Hitler, John Brown, Mao Zhe Dong, Thomas Paine or many others I seem to have done nothing for politics.  Direct evidence of a life lived in at least a quasi political opposition is hard to come by. One reason for the small footprint in pure politics is that I believe in a broad  reform to make politics broader and more full and rich of a human endeavor than I find it to be in America today. I have discussed connections and while I have been writing this I have also written e-mails to other people including to an old college companion. With last names edited out my most recent e-mail said:

Dino,

Thanks for all of that. I hope get started on organizing and eventually using them. I also realized Tom Howard (not even sure that is his name) was the bearded guy who father had some kind of missile defense job and who had our whole road-tripping group at his house. I get the feeling he was less close to most of us than average but he definitely was in the group. I mainly bring him up because I was making a list before — and of course I would be happy to have his email if you have it. I have nothing for Matt or Terry. I do not remember a Gerry C. right now.  Is KCJ Jack K.? 

 

I do have several e-mail addresses for Mark and he and I met down here last year in early October when he was doing some research at LSU. He bought me dinner to discharge an old debt on a bet and I made arrangements to have him put up at a friends house for a couple of nights. Their family has been vacationing in Rome.

 

I assume you know Maureen K. is very sick. Unless there is a miracle we will all have to decide if we can make it to her funeral fairly soon. I mean it could be years but not a lot of years unless she beats some very long odds.

 

All of our correspondence assumes that the world as we know it will endure. I am not sure it will.

 

Beyond all of that I think the country could run into some serious crises soon greater than anything since the 1860’s. You and I have discussed politics a bit fairly recently. Here is a synopsis of what I see: We are straining resources without solving any of the long term needs, debts of injustices which plague our constitutional arrangements. We have effectively lost our agreement to limit internal conflict in the key ways we all accepted whether good or bad. Our border and our military are in distress. We are reaching the point of engendering maximum international hostility. Nobody trusts us as diplomatic actors. I fill in the details on my blog but this is not sustainable. 

 

In addition to everything else the largest areal staging base where every European and British Commonwealth air force in the world can deploy to sweep south is on our Northern border. Russia has a massive build up to sweep East across Alaska and Latin America is readying massive resources for a united sweep North. With the right responds most of this will sink back into the shadows indefinitely and we can try to gain ground. But these are our friends. Our enemies are drilling and organizing all around the world to bring us Jihad and vengeance.   No offense to you paisanna but I am not sure Pelosi can grasp all of this and I know damn well that the GOP hawks can’t. We are running out of time to wake up. If we do wake up then there will be some bitter medicine to take on the road to recovery. 

 

Peace and Good,

 

Frank

I am used to bitter medicine and while I live I sense the Christian exhortation to carry the cross as well as the image of the Taoist vinegar drinkers.  Whatever politics I have comes form a place of not fleeing from pain. But I did not write this to someone out of context.  I was writing to an old friend about other old friends and we have history which gives our discussions of any subject context.

College Household at FUS

I correspond with People on Facebook as well. Like this post, not all of it is about politics directly and in fact much of it is not about politics.  At the time I typed this post I was on a bit of a down tick but still had over a thousand Facebook friends.  One of them remains at this writing and is a very successful science fiction author, lecturer and blogger by the name of David Brin. He recently posted something about working in that medium on his timeline for all his friends to see:

I am thinking of (slowly) cleaning up my FB feed. Trolls are already gone. NEXT I’m afraid I will be easing-out folks who pour forth silly “respond to this!” jpegs. Like “Type a word that starts with…!” Or “ grab an object to your left to fight a vampire!” Or “What was your first concert?”

Please, this is no judgment on you! It’s your time, spend it as you like. Also, I won’t banish folks overnight. This will come slowly, as I shake my head and grumble. (Yes, like an old grouch muttering “get off my lawn!”) But my FB needs are different. Also, I have a waiting list beyond my 5000 FB friends limit.

If you find you are no longer getting my friends feed, feel free to “follow”! I wish you all well and here’s hoping for civilization.

I responded to this general comment about the state of expressing the ideas that may make up a venue for an opposition or for any political platform in these words that follow:

 I would hope we both choose to keep this connection, I have enjoyed the David Brin Facebook friend connection. It may endure or not but I know that things become complicated in making those decisions. Back when I got on FB I administered a lot of groups around the world and arguably that made my profile a better nexus for all kinds of information than it can be today. I chose to shut the groups down when the structure changed and I do not regret it really.

I had some great conversations with your friends back in the day, When you posted about the space elevator design from Japan for instance. But every few months I play with the idea of shutting down Facebook and keeping in touch with family elsewhere and everyone else at http://franksummers3ba,com
Honestly,with friends on FB in the thousands (even very low figures like my 1000s) this becomes a bit page-like without some of the old structures. But thanks for the years of friend feeds. It has been a long time since we chatted and so I won’t be surprised if it does not last forever.

Design for the LACRIMA robot to cap an early outpost crater.

We will revisit this matter of correspondence, including more of my correspondence with Dino later in this post. But I know this not the proof of some massive political career.  We will move right or left and either way it may have little enough to do with me. I have a lot of little distractions when I am putting these posts out.  Or it might be argued that this blog is a distraction from all that I have to do.   I have political correspondence with those who are not outsiders as well. some of this is visible on international scale in the comments section of two sites (here and here) where commentators are not searchable  but my comments are plentiful enough to find and even bloggers responses to them can be readily found. I have also corresponded significantly over the decades with US political figures. Most recently I contacted the three who represent me in Congress about the matter of Merriam Ibrahim.   I also have been to town halls and such held by a number of political figures. In that context I contacted Representative Boustany about my health crisis that already distant August week. Shortly after that instance I posted sincerely enough:

Then I have worked very hard in the hours when I was not resting at a subsistence position for room, most board and a borrowed car on my parents compound for the last seven years after really becoming diasbled from injuries in Hurricane Rita which left me unable to walk well for more than a month. But however, bad such a choice may have been I hoped to recover and find work. My mind was still strong and I could prove it. Although feeding dogs, washing tens of thousands of dishes, moving tons of garbage and catching horses was what I did to earn my pittance I had other outlets where I could invest my mental capital and hope for the best and could prove I still had some capacity there. But this new event has sapped my strength and resilience at a new level. Yet if I were rich, popular and successful I could probably keep working with my good health insurance, ego boosted resistance, caring spouse and other such things. I am in fact long in decline and have reached the point where a recent shock has left me with stroke symptoms and I am at the end of my rope in so many ways, I really need the help I insured for hoping it would be in retirement at a full age. That there may be for some others choices and ease which are not relevant to my case leads me to seek access to what may be able to get from my social security premiums, I have paid FICA to about twenty employers where I have done much less than a majority of my work and I will have to cash into that to make it any further as a responsible citizen. I am turning to Cngressman Charles Boustany Juinor M.D. ‘s office for support as well as to a Social Security lawyer I have known for years for support even while I struggle to do this on my own. I was going to tag Congressman Boustany in this note as he used to be my Facebook friend but what Facebook tells me when I click on his name is ” This account has been deactivated. Only you can see Charles on your friends list. You have the option to unfriend Charles”. I do not pretend that the issues are simple, I honestly believe America owes me more than it is able to pay but that is true of several people I know and that does not absolutely and certainly mean I should get this social security benefit and the medicare that comes with it. We will see what happens next. I already received a quick disapproval of claim and with my travel have to say to a few doctors “please help me establish my medical record if you can”.

Nothing much can be said about those efforts except that they fit with the context of the rest of my life and my experience pretty well. I since have had my life get worse and my health problems persist in many ways. I also have tried and failed to comply with the requirements of Obamacare.  But this post is not mostly about my health although my health may be one of the major defining and limiting factors in this whole mess. The mess which is largely my life.

Louisiana State Bird a victim

I think America and the world are ready for a change in American government. I just do not know that my efforts will have much impact on how that change takes place and what it leads to over time.  But one does not seek such changes over decades without getting one’s hands a bit soiled. I have been deep in the muck of our society many times and I see that also in political terms.  Prior to the 1996 to 2000 years of my life I got a Bachelor’s and a Master of Arts Degree. I studied a lot of law political science and history although I never got a law degree I studied a lot of law. I have been through a lot of bad times but through  a divorce some legal entrapments, legal maneuverings, crimes I could not prosecute and my own faults  I really came to see America as probably to bad of a place for me to allow for any hope of a decent working to reform the system in a conventional way.

My graduate degree diploma

These years were the years when I suppose my life really became mentally  hell in the sense that I accepted the idea of a whole series of outcomes in which I would find no really appealing major points between the present and a possible death of old age. Yet while that mental depression was going on there was redemption too in a seemingly apolitical aspect of life where I found new joys in nieces who were born in those years and had become part of my life. Yet in them and in my brothers whom I tutored and other things I did I found  an outlet for continuing to provide subtle political education. I had enjoyed having nieces by marriage who rightly or wrongly I lost by divorce but these were the children of my oldest sister who, being younger than I was starting a family. During those years I had less interaction with violence than some periods but the work I did was still pretty edgy, I did drive people to jails, hospitals and bus stops. I did help people talk to abusive spouses and creditors. None of these people felt extremely secure or hopeful in America and all felt exposed to violence from known and unknown sources.    I used the money I earned from these straining activities to pay for a business distributing books, prints of art pieces, greeting cards and jewelry to the public and vendors all around the state, the country and the world. It was at this time as well that my parents and mostly my father basically gave me some land I would basically give back to him before going to China. I did  a lot of productive work on the land but like everything in America I  was amazed at how mired in misery and futility the experience mostly was. This farm and that redistribution  business while voting for regular candidates by major parties may not seem political but it formed me and I had a political word or two to deliver now and then,. The 2001 to 2005 years began as I and the  country  went through the tragic events of 9/11 and the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the heroic fight on United 92. Those years also saw Hurricane Lili badly affect the school system in Abbeville which affected my work. This period would see me work and live alone in China.I have blogged a good bit about that and I encourage you to seek the posts out and pages but the guide to my time in China and this period in general is right here.

Students & in English Corner meeting on Campus SDIBT Yantai.

The end of this period of years would see my health take another dive. It would see me involved with recovery from Hurricane Katrina and then going through Hurricane Rita and leaving injured to go to San Diego and then down into Mexico to stay with my sister and her children. China was a great experience and so was getting to know a generation nephews as well as continuing my relationship with my two oldest nieces. Oddly enough in some ways I am doing things now I never did between late  2005 and 2012 but I have new physical limits.  The good thing is that since 2012 except for killing snakes and ants which bite me or try to in clearing the new yard where I live with my parents my life has been more peaceful than usual. Peace has been marred by concerns about a series of crises in the country and the world.  This kind of violence continues in the recent Bares incident. It also relates to the constant reports of violence. But probably people I care about are experiencing violence and I am simply not around enough people to be affected in any way any more.

Returning to the huge police presence in Abbeville and the death of Deputy Allen Bares Jr. one know Americans need and realize they need government and law enforcement. At times like this the police receive wide support. But America owes more than most great powers to the contributions of people who have struggled completely outside the law or along its edges.  The dirty cop of some movies is in fact often seen as the one who seeks to bridge the gap between the law books and reality. But sometimes  America faces the kind of violence that killed Deputy Bares. Then compromises and the like seem very far away. All the school shootings, theater shootings, school stabbings, terrorist attacks and the like may have complicated roots but most of us just want them to stop. We have seen images of cities burning around the world and that includes London.  We all know that some of those dealing with trouble are bound to be keeping the fabric from ripping apart and we know our social order as written out is not doing such a great job. my political sensibilities reflect that reality too.

Protests are going on in many places

There was a movie that came out recently which captured some of that tension with the underworld in American history better than most. That movie was the Baz Lurhmann film The Great Gatsby. How I came to feel that major political change was needed in our country is a long story to be pieced together out of many parts of this blog and other writings and images. But let us continue with economic reflections, I think that I have had and continue to have a fairly unusual relationship to wealth and money. I am interested in American and other views of wealth when expressed in the arts of fiction and film. Movies life Blow, Scarface, The Godfather, Wall Street and Trading Places have all dealt with the connections between varied crimes and money in ways much more explicit than the way in which The Great Gatsby deals with these issues.  We know Jay Gatsby is a bootlegger but neither his crimes nor the problems he may have with the police really happen “on camera” even in the novel. The more securely rich people in the novel drink a great deal of prohibited booze but Gatsby must have a grander house in the less fashionable West Egg because he is associated with the underworld. His extravagance is in part to get along with the influential people at his parties and avoid their prying eyes in the part of his life we do not see either. In an America dependent on sweatshop labor abroad, millions of undocumented workers in the USA and with un-taxed industries from drugs, to internet sales of all kinds to much of the sex industry we have to ask if the equivalents of East Egg respectable rich people today are living in more or less of a fool’s paradise than the characters in The Great Gatsby.I have known lots of people rich and poor as well as people on both sides of the law and as I see our deficits soar and our social cohesion in trouble I do wonder about America’s relations to the people both like and unlike Gatsby in our own world. I am very far from being a Jay Gatsby myself but can relate to him in a number of ways as I imagine many can.

Gatsby doubtless acted violently outside the law but mostly worked hard to provide products and services virtually all the Americans he knew wanted to buy which the law prohibited. He tried to create cultural value and opened conduits for negroes, Jews, working class folks  and the elite WASPS of his adopted region to interact in a magical Jazz world. In the end his efforts were perhaps doomed. But this man seems a contrast with crime as Allen Bares Junior experienced it recently. I do not know all the facts. But putting together what I have heard Deputy Bares was the kind of officer who looked around at what was going on for many years whether on duty or not. He was cutting grass and checked into the activities of a group of young black men he did not recognize in the neighborhood. It is alleged that they were burglars operating in a systematic way and on becoming aware they were being investigated by a possible law enforcement officer one of them shot and killed Deputy Allen Bares Jr. This picture shows the funeral procession to burial.The world is a rough place and I am not a cop nor did I know Deputy Bares personally nor the accused. But truth is that this is a story with plenty of tragedy. The funeral was in the church where I was baptized, made my first communion and was wed.

In recent events on the border we see a different kind of social energy to assist the less privileged than the Gatsby type of energy. I think Obama has empowered this other kind of social energy more than almost any other president and there have been many who did empower this kind of assault on law and order. Before the film came out I previewed and more or less recommended it with a blog post which said in part:

Leonardo Di Caprio and Carrie Mulligan will be seen in a new film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in a few weeks. God willing, I hope to see it. I like the Robert Redford, Mia Farrow portrayal quite well. Yet I hope to and believe that I will like this Baz Lurhmann directed film even better.  I like reading Fitzgerald well enough. I am also a fan of movies and watch quite a few but this one is perhaps closer to the heart of some of Fitzgerald’s insights than many of his works were. There is less fantasy and more realism than in some of his short stories… Fitzgerald’s works and his relationship with Hemingway are among the defining products of modern American culture. The Great Gatsby is also a work which brings up the period of Prohibition and also the parts of that period which connected with the last glow of the Gilded Age. Perhaps an argument can be made that the Gilded Age which created the Newport Mansions which really are transported to and amalgamated with the most fashionable New York country homes on Long Island to create the odd blend of Robber Baron and Bootlegger in the evocative residence where the fictional Gatsby lived, the Prohibition era in which he lived and theperiod in which Fitzgerald wrote form three acts of a continuous Jazz Age inAmerica. So the story has some kind of real historical resonance. It is also about wealth in America. I want to spend a little time in this blog post discussing these aspects of the work and what it means to me…

For me it is important that whatever politics I espouse for America grows out of American life and culture and responds to American problems and concerns.  For me that has not always been an easy path and my writing of all kind reflect that sometimes harsh experience. I have been blessed with a number of good things in my life but I truly believe that I can look back on my life with clear eyes and see that I have moved through layers of pain, grief and suffering for a long time. I have moved through layers of darkness and evil for a long time and through layers of joy and enlightenment as well. My life is like that of other who can see the world and life in moral terms. However, only a few such people feel the need to turn to political issues in all these matters. For those who do turn to politics not all are willing to limit our politics to a place in a larger and freer human condition that includes an inner and a private dimension for all citizens.  But I am more weary and wounded than some and I really think I have done about as much to maintain vigor and energy as I could ever reasonably have expected myself to do in my life. Some of my weariness has come form political efforts in the largest sense — a struggle against great odds.

I have maintained a variety of personal connections and  ties and blog about them. But as well as being a Christian I have some contacts all over the world who are not Christian.  Although I am a proud Southerner, I have ties with the Franciscan University of Steubenville and other places in the country. It was at Steubenville that I began some discussions about politics in America that are ongoing today. It was there that I met the mysterious Dino P. who can reveal his surname if he wishes to in a comment. We were in Ahim Adonai Household together. That fraternity continues to exist today.  Dino recently contacted me about something less horrific than World War III.

Hey Guys:

 Bill, Ed and I and our wives are getting together in Ocean City, MD on Saturday, July 19. We would love to see you if you are interested. I have invited Kevin, Rob and their husbands as well as Mark and his wife. I am not sure if anyone is able to meet in MD, but if you are, we will be there.

Dino

I have stayed in touch with these guys over the years and Rob and Kevin both know I do not support Same Sex Marriage in general. I think they know I think domestic regimes in the USA are the province of the States and probably they know I believe homosexuality is less noble and good than heterosexuality in its essence. They also know I believe many homosexual people can be far superior people to some heterosexual people. They know that in my personal life I am polite always to old friends if possible and most of the time to anyone I can be polite to as well. I wrote back to Dino.

My Sophomore Class Award from FUS

I met Dino at Steubenville when my parents and siblings still lived in the Philippines. My still complicated life had a different shape in those years. That was the Frank Dino knew and contacting him and others brings me back a bit. Back to the 1981 to 1985 years which began with me interacting with the people of New Zealand and then moved to living and working with the people of the Philippines and also with the Francisan University of Steubenville after my first semester at USL.  All four of these venues  were very different places. In New Zealand I interacted with people at what I would call a Redemptorist high school, although it was known as Bishop Viard College or Viard College. I interacted with a youth group and a music ministry in the local church parish, ministered to an old folks home, volunteered at a weather station, visited with a Maori Catholic activist and did a lot of hiking on the coast. I also worked as an apprentice to a master craftsman. A child we fostered there to one of my few possessions a knife and slashed most of my favorite and newest clothes to entertain himself.

The Maranatha Youth Group in Titahi Bay, New Zealand with me in it.

I did many things in the Philippines with my family and alone. The story of these years involves a lot of good and bad times and the story is not complete without the memories of being bitten by a man who left a set of toothmarks in my shoulder that took years to fade. He and I had a conflict going on and he did no bite me for no reason. But I feel that the most important part of my life there reached a focus in a small period of time and a small place. It was a project called the Bukidnon Catholic State Youth Conference and The Bukidnon State Youth Congress. I worked most of all with Student Catholic Action of the Philippines but also with prominent families, the diocesan authorities of the Catholic Church, informal associates in the police department, leaders from the Ang Ligaya Ng Panginoon Covenant Community in Manila and my parents associate in Couple for Christ and the Jesus in the Mountains Evangelization Team to lead, create and direct a project which was very much my responsibility from the ground up. The Congress consisted of a few informal meetings of varied leaders as well as group members and the exchange of contact information and flyers. The Conference consisted of a small fee paid by constituent group subsidized by donations of about ten times that amount and reduced speakers fees. hundreds were housed fed, taught and participated in workshops, plays and planning for three days with dozens participating an extra day in leadership training. Marxist and right wing political backgrounds, Muslim and animist family ties were brought into a comprehensive dialog which was part of my larger ministry and large connections that I helped facilitate. It is one of the things in my life which I am most proud of having done. That is partly because of the situation, risks and dangers involved in the time and place. This occurred in Malaybalay, Bukidnon.

Meeting at Big Woods with Filipino friends who are US citizens now.

Here in America I have had a dew different close calls of various kinds. Some were my own fault others were not but they have continued to provide insults to my health all these years which still form my experience.One of my female relatives hired me to work moving asbestos. Where no doubt I was exposed to a very large amount of asbestos considering the amount of time involved even the limited safety precautions I was able to afford on my own were frustrated and thwarted intentionally or unintentionally. It was not the first or the last time I felt that people in what I and others around here would consider my family did not consider my safety and survival an important concern.

One real risk is that one of the most extreme pedophile priest was in this area — Gilbert Gauthier. I distrusted him and he abused some of my friends but never abused me at all. In my life across the years and lands of the world I worked, studied, lived and traveled with hundreds of Catholic priests in relatively private and confidential settings. I knew a very few priests who had relationships which were stable and secure as could be made and had children and were in love with women they were not married to and whose congregations protected them from church authorities because they considred these to be marriages. I knew some priests who seemed to me to be in committed homosexual relationships of a very discreet kind with a group or a single other priest in their religious community or diocese. I knew a few women who were the rare sexual partners of a distant priest who lived very long period of time in profound celibacy. I knew some who became known for being in trouble including for underaged sexual partners and I met one who was a rather unsavory pedophile of an extreme kind and who I though was possibly just such a man when I was a child but I never actually saw him do anything improper. I just felt he was not trustworthy. The remainder of priests I knew comes to about 90% of those I met. In all these cases of the 90% they managed to keep their sexual lives out of my view, to appear and behave as would be suitable for a vowed celibate at all times I was with them.

I have known some mistreatment as a child but it was not from pedophile priests. That makes for a strange experience now when I knew so many priest and today so many pedophile priests make the news.  However, in this 1981 to 1985 period I met the only priest who, when I was over eighteen, misinterpreted something I said and made a nonphysical homosexual advance of a rather subtle but unmistakable type. His embarassment when he realized that I may often do without but remain entirely heterosexual in both desire and action made me aware of some of the burdens of his life. I have been approached by other homosexual men and been angry enough but I felt very far from any sense that this man was a threat and sad to sense that he was really unsure about whether I would choose to persecute and hardworking, genteel and cautious man who spent much of his life marrying off heterosexuals, helping families and wearing a sort of sign in life saying “I have decided not to have sex with women”. I resent many homosexuals for many things they have done and said but I was never ashamed to have this man as my priest. I would like to have some diocesan priests who are married but not have them become bishops as is the Eastern Christian tradition and I think there must always be a strong celibate clergy to both for the really abstinent and for some class of homosexual and bisexual Catholic leaders who are committed to a humane life and community. Yet that encounter was still a sorrow in my life because somehow it made me more aware than ever of how complex human life is if one aspires to any sort of real civilization. It is in this context that I knew the friends I had at Steubenville who were homosexual  has their own moral struggles.

Where I went before and after Steubenville and received my degree.

During these years  before meeting Dino and which formed my frame of mind most at Steubenville friends of mine I knew or people I worked with or talked with or ministered to were shot to death, stabbed to death with ice-picks, run over by cars, beaten to death, raped and beaten to death, blown apart and savaged by trained attack dogs and otherwise killed. Two of my associates committed suicide. This was not a single person nor in a single place but a variety of different people in different places. I also had friends and associates who inflicted violence on others. I thought some were justified and some were not. It is true most of these incidents did not happen in the USA but some did. So any way back to my current self corresponding with Dino from my room in this house at Big Woods in Louisiana. I answered his invitation to get together as follows:

Whatever opposition to Gay Marriage being forced on Louisiana and other places may amount to as an additional factor in my life it is only part of a long history of political alienation.  But I have not only been alienated I have had political successes I cannot take space to discuss here. In addition, my whole life has not been about politics nor will it ever be only about politics. I am someone who has many things to look back on with satisfaction in my life. Many people have in their lives evidence of a contribution or other I have made and my accomplishments on paper in official records are substantial.  I have also made many marks, although some have not endured, in creating material changes in the world and also in preventing damage to the world.

It is true that I have a sense of accomplishment, but I am not successful in the American sense of the word. Other than vested credits in the Social Security System which can be worth as little as the minimal death benefit because my spouse divorced me about twenty months before she would have become permanently eligible to receive a spouse survivor benefit and while I have supported many children partially I have no children of my own. My death benefit could be even less than that if it is not collected. I am someone with almost no personal assets which can be found by a thorough paper search and not many more with a more thorough accounting borne of speaking with me.I live in an America that has a largely false history being taught that as scholar of history I cannot applaud. I see the Louisiana State Legislature retroactively protecting oil companies from suits and BP using the courts to get back money from the pittance it paid out for its sins in the Macondo leak and I see horrors in the drunken insane right to match the horrors of the drunken insane left. what i do not see is much reason to hope.

So all of this reminds us of why Americans are sometimes alienated from all but the underworld. It makes us look again at the lens of Fitzgerald on America.  Gatsby cannot win but he does help himself and some others rise above despair and grinding poverty in a world where one is allowed to hope that is possible.  One thing I would have us think about is Gatsby firing his servants. In the book they are replaced by secretive underworld servants and in the Redford movie he leaves them blankly out and gets by with caterers and guests mostly. What about the struggle for jobs such as the servants had? As Americans watch Downton Abbey as well as contemplating migration and work laws do we have a plan for making class relations work in our confusingly complex and blurry social order? Now the crisis on our southern border is reaching spectacular proportions. But years of effort that were not undertaken cannot be replaced by a few rash decisions now. We have much to do in understanding our own social order.

Besides servants and immigrants and those close to the underworld America has done a poor job reaching for justice for the aboriginal peoples and territorials in our Union.  It so happens that my childhood was one where I was a child who spent some time with Navajos and American Samoans.  The 1970 to 1975 years would find me spending some early part of that time with an eye-patch from an injury that threatened my sight. I would discover that for me going to school would repeatedly mean getting into fights that I felt I could not avoid. In every block of years in my childhood I got into fights and I cannot remember any individual years when I did not. Nor can I say my last physical fight took place as a child. In these years I suffered another broken arm. This arm injury was caused by a playmate. In addition this was a time of many injuries of more happy context that resulted in the scrapes and bruises coming from learning in a variety of sports and also outdoor leisure and work occupations. I also had happy memories and many of the best times I shared with my father are of him teaching me to shoot, hunt, fish and ride horses in those years. It was late in this period that I learned to ride a bike and also a “minibike” which was was a small motorcycle. It was in these years when I had many injuries on outdoor adventures on the farm including stepping on two nails — one with each foot. These were on a hidden board sunken in a swampy lake where I often hunted, fished and collected berries and bait as well as varied memories. I never was very happy in school and often was very unhappy. However, it was also in these years when I first knew the experience changing schools which is painful and exciting, this was first a transfer to a school in New York and then back to Louisiana. The America I know was formed by the campgrounds between my Southern home and New York as well as by New York’s museums. parks  and open air theaters. Many good times happened there. That is one reason I believe in the importance of public spaces and decent infrastructure.

Later, my America was involved in the good and bad of transferring back to school in Louisiana from New York of having to give up almost all my childhood possessions and traveling to Tonga to begin school in a very different system and culture. Shortly after arriving in Tonga I was stung terribly by a substantial part of a swarm of flying and stinging insects. Then while there I was stricken with Dengue fever. A very painful disease which frequently killed children and the elderly, Dnegue struck me when my parents were too sick to give me much care. On my way out of Tonga on a very remote Island I had another very serious health crisis where I was stung by a poisonous centipede and poisoned by a natural poison in the food at the same time. I certainly did not receive an extraordinary degree of health care. Then after leaving Tonga to begin homeschooling in American Samoa and the continue in the area around Navajoland in New Mexico as well as in Navajoland. Then my sister Sarah was born and from there we went about traveling for a long while and that included my being the only adolescent enrolled in the Spanish language school I attended in Cuernavaca, Mexico. That was the start of new times which led eventually to the man I am and have been since about the time I met Dino and many others as a young man.

Sarah and her family live near where I live although I do not see them as often as I would like. We have had a long history since those days and  I have had much joy in the company of she and my other siblings. We also have shared our bad times. But the time I spent being a brother and an uncle is a great comfort to me. I look out on a world of troubles and write about it to an old college friend and I know that times may get worse but rejoice in years of joy I would never have known without my sisters and brothers. They still make me proud most of the time.

I am tired now but as I see these dark days stretching ahead of me and storms on all horizons I keep plugging away. The world is full of people and I talk to them. Thus Dino And I stayed in touch and before he sent me the email addresses mentioned earlier  he responded to my note which just above these words in order of quotes from correspondence;

Dino P.

To Me

 

Jun 29 at 6:48 AM

Frank:

We were trying to figure out how we all could get together. Many of us have changed, and I am trying to find a third way in which we all could share our lives once again. It is a difficult thing to do because for some, we are the judgmental Christians, and for others, we want to ensure that our witness is authentic. I am not sure if it will ever happen on a large scale; perhaps, we might have a better chance on smaller level.

It was good to hear from you.

Dino

Dino would actually send another note reproduced just below these lines as an afterthought. But his words made me think about our time at school. He and I worked together at Steubie U.  Were were both  working in public relations. I was very part time.  We both had an avowed interest in making money despite working with nonprofits and my desire for  both  theological study and ministry. Talking about all the futures we had in mind was one of the ways we passed the time in the household.

my Insurance Certification Course Diploma

 It seems like a good idea to choose a path in life which is more likely than not to create a sense of accomplishment and provide for the needs of daily life.  Dino and I and others sought such things as we believed would help us to find such a path. But of course some of us are greatly predisposed to conflict political opposition is a kind of sustained conflict.  I suppose that I am one of those people more than Dino or any of the others I knew then who sustains a struggle for change based on conviction and passion. I have done and I continue to do many things besides seek out conflict. In fact even today I stay pretty busy with activities not directly related to any kind of political or social agenda in an activist or confrontational way. I do a lot of lawn care and gardening and I do a lot of work to  increase the support I am able to give to family members.

Few people would consider F. Scott Fitzgerald a political writer. In fact two series of Young Adult films and novels popular right now are much more openly revolutionary. One is based on the second novel I read on Kindle  —  Veronica Roth’s Divergent. The other is the Hunger Games based on the books by Suzanne Collins. I think these are more revolutionary times than Fitzgerald’s because he expresses real discontent.  I like the two books I mentioned and consider them art and the movies quite good. But Fitzgerald is producing fine art in my view. Whatever Fitzgerald is saying it is how he says it which matters most. Typical of Fitzgerald’s prose Gatsby is able to use well-crafted language to convey details of setting,character and plot without getting lost in a great deal of excessive language,the books and stories which are sometimes about elegance are also often elegant. But elegance is never the primary manifestation of wealth inFitzgerald’s works. He really did enjoy the society of the wealthy and enjoyedspending money. But he found the compulsions of excess in his own life and his wife’s life. Fitzgerald’s books are not usually called cinematic but he had acinematic vision and worked much of his career as a Hollywood screenwriter.  He claimed in an autobiographical piece tohave made a good bit off of movies as early as 1920 and he saw it as part ofhis publishing income on which he depended. He and Zelda were notorious for notsaving money and living in as high a style as their income would allow.Famously they went suddenly from making 20,000 dollars a year to making 36,000dollars a year and with an enormous desire to set money aside found that theystill saved nothing for the future and simply indulged a more expensivelifestyle when money came in and so it is not surprising he was not financiallysecure.

This personal way of life joined with the national economic situation in such a way that by the summer of 1937 was broke had a lifestyle that consumed lots of money and had made him very dependent on lots of alcohol. Facing these problems while in debt and discovering he could not readily dry out or control his own partying lifestyle he was ready to try something new. So he was going where money had come from before when F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood.  He worked in the huge army of people little esteemed by the Hollywood elite who were the screenwriters. Fitzgerald was not alone in this trip to the California coasts and the work of writing for movies.Others who did their time in Hollywood were William Faulkner, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Nathanael West and the British novelists Anthony Powell and Aldous Huxley. The move helped most of these writers but none found it the supply of long-term easy money they were hoping for. Di Caprio and Mulligan have probably not seen many of the movies on which Fitzgerald labored during his two and a half years as a screenwriter. These movies included titles such as ”A Yank at Oxford” and ”Madame Curie.” In the early part of the last decade the University of South Carolina acquired a great deal of what remains of what Fitzgerald produced.  There collection reveals something about the productivity of this man who never achieved real capital security in 2,000 pages of material — sketches, treatments, drafts, polishes, rewrites — much of it in soft-penciled longhand. This is called the Warner Brothers Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald Screenplays, is part of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection at the University of South Carolina’s Thomas Cooper Library in Columbia. Jay Gatsby with his war record, time at Oxford, chains of drugstores and fabulous home is not just a thug with money and is not quite part ofthe class with money in America which Daisy is born to even though American class systems are more porous than those in Europe.  Fitzgerald could relate to Jay Gatsby in analogous ways although his novel’s protagonist does not seem to have troubles with fiscal solvency or alcoholism.

Some brothers at Ahim Adonai table at FUS lunch

I am not at all sure how much longer I will live. Nor for that matter how I will die but one thing has become clear: I will at least write against a great deal of what is around me and wish till my dying breath that I could do more to change things. I have a lot to write about my own connection to things in America today and why I view them as I do. But I am likely to spend my life in opposition to a great deal of the established order. Nonetheless, I seek to live a peaceful and orderly life.