For The Children

***Author's Note***: The following essay deals with the problem of sexual abuse in American churches. It may be triggering for some readers.

Articles referencing the subject of this essay are tagged throughout.

Church is held up as a traditional American activity. People's right to worship is as fundamental as baseball and Free Speech. Families gathering to worship, to spend time in fellowship with others on Sundays and Wednesdays is part of the national skein of history and experience. But is this apparently innocuous activity as safe as it appears for our children?

It's a worthy question to ask since, as we now know, rampant anger over drag shows and pro-LGBTQ+ books at libraries and bookstores by Christian Nationalists and other believers has become a national problem drawing attention to cities and towns across the country where raging cadres show up to demonstrate or speak out at council meetings. Its source seems to be springing at least primarily from churches spreading a hate message to congregants, sharing homophobia (and other vile doctrines) as a Biblical virtue.

When our local brewery did a drag event, men (so-called) with guns and religious signs showed up to protest it. Several libraries and bookstores in North Carolina have drawn fire (figuratively only, so far) for holding drag story times or for having LGBTQ+ books for teens and children. One of those events occurred at the same time that someone fired a high-powered rifle into an area power station, thereby causing tens of thousands of North Carolinians to go without power during a frigid winter weekend. (Authorities are still investigating whether these two nearly simultaneous occurrences are a coincidence or not, but it seems too convenient to ignore).

The people who are up in arms (quite often literally) over these events and collections always claim the same thing as motivation for their actions: their anger is "for the children". Their reasoning is religious in nature and their placards are always festooned with Bible verses. The preachers who sermonize hate from their lecterns justify their anger with the Bible, where loosely collected bits from around the scriptures are compiled to suit their rabid homophobia. All of those spittle-flecked homilies are supposedly "for the children".

Irony doesn't exist for this insidious mindset. The credulous mind rebels at such nuance. The one place nationally where children are regularly and badly harmed by sexual predators is church. In a new study, sexual abuse of children by clergy in Illinois has raised an imperative question: are the people who are against drag story times and LGBTQ+ rights going to step up and say or do anything about preventing minors from attending churches where they are clearly not safe? I have never seen protesters outside of churches holding up placards that are “for the children”.

Sexual assault of minors in churches, both Catholic and Protestant, though deeply lamentable, is not new or surprising. Anyone who thinks that churches are safe to allow the youth to be alone with clergy or their representatives clearly hasn't been paying attention. At one point, more than a decade ago, as the Catholic church fell under international scrutiny for years of unchecked and covered up abuse, the Southern Baptist Conference (as well as other prominent evangelical Christian organizations across the nation) remained suspiciously silent. We now know why. In 2022, a vast investigation revealed that hundreds of churches in the Southern Baptist Convention had covered up abuse and countless young people had been sexually victimized for decades.

If ever there was a time to open up about such horrid realities—to confess sins and ask forgiveness and allow healing to begin, for example—it was then. But the revelations about these nightmare realities on both sides of the religious schism would wait, causing untold numbers of children to suffer in silence.

We might well ask how such evil has been allowed to go unchecked. Accountability isn't an option church organizations willingly take. Our unreasonable desire to "respect people's right to worship" has created a hell of secrets and coverups within the auspices of many church organizations that—in seeking to prevent bad press that would kill the church’s tax-free revenue stream—protect the criminals in those churches, allowing them to ruin lives again and again.

If and when concerned citizens speak out about this and other concerns, we are shouted down for being anti-religious, even anti-American. A common refrain to questions of this nature is "well, it may happen in those other churches, but it doesn't happen here." If these groups actually cared “for the children”, they might respond by looking inwards rather than defensively seeking to change the subject, lash out at innocent groups or ignore processes in place to report sexual assault.

When caught, the churches very often close ranks to protect their congregations, allowing other horrors to be covered up yet again. When an individual church leader is seen to have been allowed to damage lives in this way, their synods and conferences avoid accountability by distancing themselves from the church in question. The Catholic church and the Baptist Conference both allowed known criminals to be transferred to other states to avoid scrutiny, knowing full well that they were enabling those predators to start again. Additionally, it is rarely mentioned that this is a problem beyond the church where the recent news has broken (this was true until recently, when the SBC released a huge list of sexual predators across the South). If we were to understand fully that this is a systemic problem across all churches, perhaps we wouldn't be so quick to give privacy and "healing" for the churches that perpetuate sexual abuse of children.

It is well known that all churches have a propensity to harbor sexual deviants. Only the very stupid would continue to encourage their children to attend in these dangerous circumstances. For parents who force their children to attend, either falsely believing that the rumors are untrue or feeling that it won’t ever happen to their kids, their complicity is nearly as bad as their willing blindness to the abuse in their chosen church organization.

Even after the release of information naming names and the mass firings of preachers across the South, other evangelical and non-denominational churches have remained silent or diffident about their own internal issues. These revelations are enough to set whole towns ablaze with wrath. And yet, we rarely (if ever) see angry preachers banging on their pulpits about sexual abuse occurring in their own and neighboring churches. They are quick to scream about gay people, trans rights, bathrooms, books, drag events, "grooming" and anything else that draws attention away from the real problem, but they never look at the realities within. I often wonder if this is the real reason that church attendance in the last few years has taken a serious hit.

People who fall for the church’s scapegoating tactics are everywhere. Religious belief is predicated on the sense that religion is everywhere under assault by “progressive” ideologies. Revving up congregations with emotional topics like LGBTQ+ rights or drag events is a great way to keep membership up among a dwindling group of believers who like to nurse their grievances. If people believe their way of worship is under attack, they will become angry and believe anything that justifies their rage, like LGBTQ+ ‘agendas’ so-called and overt prejudice against anything that doesn’t fall within the nefarious dogmas of hate.

Religious homophobic propaganda has found its way online where hundreds of small groups across all platforms, usually using the term (unironically) "liberty" in their titles, promote safety for their children as they bombard bookstores and libraries to "audit" collections or crowd streets with guns and placards at drag events, looking for anything that they think might harm young people. This again, is always branded as "for the children".

The hypocrisy necessary to ignore the real problems and face out against unreal issues is a hint at just how deluded these organizations have become about their own culpability and sense of misplaced self-righteousness. Actually, like most of the far-right ideology, it is full of self-loathing and pathos and false victimhood mentality.

Far right political leadership across the country has adopted this mindset and has been fighting hard against LGBTQ+ rights recently by rolling back rights for their constituencies, but the evangelical movement has been seeking to nationalize their homophobic dogma for years in their own right. Political candidates have stepped up their fanaticism by adding religious values to their platforms. Their rhetoric has risen to the point where LGBTQ+ individuals are actively oppressed around the nation and every day their rights are being eroded. This clearly harms children and teens.

Meanwhile, right under our noses, children in churches right in our own towns are at risk, and in immense danger of being horribly victimized. There has never been one account of a child being harmed by men in drag at story time events, nor of them being "groomed" or victimized by getting the help they need finding books that affirm who they are.

The people fighting against LGBTQ+ rights have never heard of (or wouldn't understand if they had) the psychological phenomenon called projection. Projection causes a person (or group) to project its worst internal realities on an innocent group or individual in order to keep from facing their own culpability. It has a long and storied career as a tool by nefarious organizations that promote ideologies intended to remove the rights from people justified by motivations very much like “for the children”.

The most reasonable thing most of us can do to support and protect children is to be vigilant. Nowhere is perfectly safe, but clearly church organizations are the least safe. As summer begins and schools let out, the temptation to take one's children to church-run "Bible school" events will be strong. Perhaps with our refreshed understanding of how dangerous churches are to the well-being of our little ones, we might think twice about giving them over into the hands of organizations that have a long reputation for destroying lives.

If church organizations wish to protest this reality, they must first seek to remove the log from their own eyes. We now know just how culpable they are. Only a united effort led from within all church organizations to root out and deal with sexual miscreants in their ranks, and to once and for all acknowledge the unsafe realities of churches for children can be accepted. Until then, no child is truly safe.

No children are harmed by seeing a man in a dress or by reading life-affirming books. They are harmed by the ludicrously blinkered idea that churches are a safe place "for the children".

If you know or suspect that your church is covering up sexual abuse, notify the local law enforcement authorities immediately.

Moon Life

Author's Note: During the research for this essay, I read several articles from NASA, The Planetary Society and Space.com, among others. I've linked those articles for my reader to have a more in-depth look at the science behind my speculations. Enjoy.

The planet-killing cataclysm that rendered one quarter of our earth's mass into a space borne cloud of molten ash is inconceivable to us. Even those alive now who watched as Mt. St. Helens erupted, dashing hundreds of square miles of pine forest into kindling and sending pyroclastic clouds into the stratosphere would be unable to fathom the event that gave us our lone orbiting satellite. Such an occurrence, even done up in the grand cinematic style of movies that celebrate masochistic and catastrophic scenarios, is not something we can conjure in our most febrile dreams.

So why do we have a moon and where did it come from? Skipping over the mythological suppositions of our iron-age goat herding ancestors because we know what they believed, we can discuss at least two scientific theories worth considering. Early on in the discussion about our moon, it was widely held that a supermassive comet came hurtling out of deepest space, was knocked off course by an asteroid or other large object and then, zooming sunward, collided with our then somewhat larger home planet, cracking off a significant chunk which later solidified fairly rapidly into the moon. This is called the "capture theory" and it is at least mechanically feasible.  However, modern scientific research (including the Apollo trips to the moon to categorize the pumice on its surface) suggests something even more explosive occurred. It’s called “giant impact theory”. In this celestial melodrama, a smaller, Mars-sized planet on a dangerous orbital trajectory with our future home smashed into proto-Earth, filling the local neighborhood with chunks and splinters of both planets, but probably destroying the former almost completely.

What remains of this violent, literally earth-shattering event is our moon. That big white disc of floating spherical rock in the sky isn't just a moon, though. She is (ancients called her Luna or Diana, thus the female pronoun) almost a planet in her own right. She's nearly the size of Mars, our next neighbor proceeding outward in the Solar System and of a size with the largest of the other moons around us. The moon is completely devoid of life (except for remnants of our recent visits). She has no geological or volcanic activity. She has no subcutaneous water or signs of microbial history. She doesn't spin. She just floats there, providing a kind of mooring stability for Earth that is unique through the rest of our solar neighborhood. 

Other planets' moons cause gravitational disturbances that send their poles wobbling. This, in turn, encourages the weather on those planets (such as it is) to be unpredictable and malevolent. Some of the larger gas giants have many smaller moons, all of which provide incredible gravitational influence on their parent planets. Recently it was discovered that Jupiter had 12 more moons than originally believed. Not to be outdone, the Jovian gas giant's ringed brother planet, Saturn, proved to have 62 more moons.

I imagine the deeper gas giants as whirling monstrosities, gargantuan gods reveling in their own glory as they spin and swirl through our solar system. As they arc through space, they are pulled, pushed and pillaged by dozens of heavenly bodies caught in their orbit which torture their paths around our sun. Imagine trying to waltz with 62 children attached to you by ropes. Calamity will ensue.

By comparison, Earth is omni lunar. We deftly spin through the blackness of space, swaying not at all, our partner locked to us in a fittingly intimate gravitational embrace keeping us stable. As a result, we have tides, seasons, and even predictably dependent weather which allows for the rampant, glorious chaos of life in all sizes and all variations. Our moon may even be part of the reason why Earth rests in that ticklish realm of perfect temperance lovingly called The Goldilocks Zone because for life, it is “just right.” The ancient collision may have knocked us out of the infernally hot or desperately frigid zones occupied by Mercury and Venus respectively. True, our poles may be too cold and the equator too sultry, but nearly everywhere on the planet, including the teeming oceans, life can and does thrive. 

So far, life has eluded us elsewhere in the Solar System, or so we believe. We have found evidence on Mars of the possibility of life having existed at some point in the form of microbes in flowing water. It may be possible that life could thrive yet again, despite its current barren reality.

Our other solar siblings are either too hot (close to the sun), too cold (far from the sun) or are composed of atmospheres that, as part of their unknowable cyclopean qualities, would smash fragile space faring humanity like a steamroller hitting a fruit stand. In this deeply inhumane neighborhood of mind numbingly massive planets and vast distances, there is yet a small, albeit interesting possibility for life beyond earth: hundreds of moons. If there’s one thing our solar system does well it is to produce moons.

Recently, it has become a very pressing scientific goal to find earth-like planets that meet the nuanced criteria for supporting life. Not least among these doppelganger planets’ ideal traits is a watery, rocky terrain with a steady geological pulse. Lots of water and mountains, tectonic and volcanic activity, plus close enough to their own relative stars to create a habitat as similar to Earth’s as possible. The real problem with these particular ‘earth clones’ is that they are more distant than we could possibly even consider traveling to. We’re still daunted by the six-month commute to Mars. And yet, the distances around our own solar system are, while more manageable with the science we have now harnessed, slightly less inconceivable.

This is why scientists are also looking closely at some of the moons that have Jupiter and Saturn in raging competition. Three at least of those moons may be the kind of life-sustaining planet where humanity could survive and even thrive. Jupiter’s two elder children, Ganymede and Europa both have signs of icy surfaces, but they also seem to have oceanic water beneath the ice. Enceladus, Saturn’s moon (not his largest, but the only moon with its own rings), also seems to have oceans under the ice, as well as vast clouds of methane wafting from its icy surface.

Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system, larger by a hair than the aptly-named Titan or the planet Mercury. Europa is on par with our own moon. Enceladus, though tiny, bears the stamp of life in the plumes of methane. A common byproduct of digesting plants, this world creates gobs of the gas, a nod to its possibly life-friendly manner. Except that they orbit their gas giant parents, they might very well be considered planets rather than moons in their own right, both because of their spherical shape and because of their comparative sizes to the inner planets. It is feasible that they were once planets that were drawn into the orbits of the gas giants and away from their original planetary circuits.

Powerful infrared telescopy which helps scientists to view the aurora on Jupiter’s moons caused by the Jovian magnetic field, allows discernable spectral analysis which suggests that there is water under the icy surfaces of two of the three moons. The warmth of Jupiter and the gravitational forces produced by the other moons in the area may be enough to keep those watery depths from freezing, which could mean that the intrusion of the seminal proteins and amino acids that conceived life on Earth may also have penetrated the ice on Ganymede and Europa while riding on asteroids or on bits of fractured comets. 

Is there any chance that those water-bound beings will have discovered their place in the solar system or that their science will have developed a means of traveling toward the local star, passing Earth and our lonely, barren moon as they swing by? No one really knows. 

Nevertheless, for right now, as those other worlds teeter and roll, keeping their powerful secrets, our moon keeps us balanced just enough so that we can continue to evolve our ability to look up and wonder about what’s really out there. Soon enough, if we keep on at the pace we are burning ourselves out of a homeworld, we may find that those icy moon seas are a home for us until we can break the barriers of time and space and colonize an earth-like planet in another system. I just hope that wherever that earth-like planet is, it has a life preserving moon.

  

The Admirable Author

My wife is award-winning author Micki Bare. Yes, that Micki Bare. The one who wrote Relative Expressions, the Thurston T. Turtle trilogy, a weekly column in our local paper (and syndicated in the Arkansas News Bureau) for 18 years and her latest, the Zahra of the Uwharries series, of which, book two is coming out this week (May 18th, 2023). As I write this, she’s also just written a ten minute play for Asheboro’s Mental Health Awareness Week events. Her play and four others were performed at North Ridge Church to much fanfare. She can now add playwrite to her list of authorial accomplishments.

In our almost 22 years of marriage, I’ve learned a lot from my brilliant wife, not just in terms of emotional maturity, empathy, kindness, support, enduring love (and forgiveness) and that she has a beautiful and loving personality, but from her work as a hard-working writer. In fact, if I had one person who inspires me to keep on tapping away at the keyboard, it’s Micki. Sure, like the rest of us, there are other writers I admire, too. I don’t know many of them (Stephen King, if you’re reading this, we’re both big fans and would love to meet you someday) personally the way I know Micki.

But Dave, you say, of course you love Micki’s work! You’re married to her. You’re biased! Well, it’s true, I am proud of her and I do tend to like what she writes, but that’s got less to do with bias and more to do with true admiration. Unlike in ages past, one cannot simply write a book and have it published. The gauntlet that an aspiring author has to run through isn’t just daunting. It’s soul crushing and if you let it, it will squish and wring any aspiration for writing right out of you.

I’m an amateur writer and other than this blog and some forays into the world of newspaper columns, I’m not really driven to get any of my scribbles published. Micki’s dream, since she was a small person, has been to become a writer. She has the dream and the drive to catch it. This dream has led her a merry chase, too. She’s gone from self-published to published by a real book company; from working through women’s fiction genres to a full-fledged middle grades author (ages 8-12ish). It brought her to Raleigh last year where her first book in the Zahra series won her the 2022 AAU Young People’s Literature Award. 

To stand by her side as she faces the many trials of being a writer and see her cowed by absurd literary agents who seem to have the most nebulous rules for “what’s popular” and watch her pick herself back up and try again and again is not only heartening, but a master class in bravery. She’s gotten so inured to rejection letters that she merely shrugs and tries again. She has been seated next to other writers whose books were flying from the signing tables, while hers didn’t move and she never lost faith. Her courage in this vein was rewarded recently when she was the popular author at a book event. Far from letting that go to her head, though, she was gracious to the other author there and made a new friend as a result. Later that day when she handed her book to a very popular YA author (and acquaintance) for a signature and a photo, I foresaw that one day very soon it would be her at a table while hundreds of people queued to see and speak with Micki.

Her guts, her marketing genius, her skill with social media didn’t just come to her. They were hard won. She’s had many moments of doubt and discouragement over the years; times when she wondered tearfully why the world of writing and publishing is so difficult. And yet, not long after, she’d be back at it again, with a new gameplan, a new glint of determination in her eyes as her fingers flew across her keyboard.

Over the years Micki has worked at writing, she’s also dealt with all the other things that life throws at us. She raised three wonderful boys, worked in professional capacities in the non-profit, journalistic and public school teacher realms and continues to be the caretaker for her aging mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Micki loves to cook, garden, hike, spend time with her family and is an avid reader. 

Like many driven people, Micki often finds herself quite busy. While working on the redline edits for her latest book in her five book series, she was also finishing up the second semester for her masters degree in education and grading papers for her ornery sixth graders. She doesn’t do things by halves. If you want to be a writer, you have to be driven to follow your dream.

This week, as we celebrate Mother’s Day and the release of her second book, Blind Fairy (available on May 18th) and the birthday of the eldest son, it comes home to me that, as she has managed to balance between motherhood and wifehood and navigate the trials and challenges of professional and home life, she’s also managed to be incredibly adept at facing adversity and winning success as a writer. Her accomplishments have been the result of dedication and determination, discipline and drive. She is the kindest, most loving person I know, but when it comes to achieving her dreams, my darling wife is like chilled steel.

It’s not just bias on my part. I love her books, but I’m truly amazed by how she keeps fighting for her dream!

Click the links throughout this blog essay to find out more about Micki’s history as a writer and buy her books, especially Blind Fairy!

...none of us are free.

Author's Note: I wrote this article immediately after the Majorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida on Valentine's Day, 2018 for my column in the Courier-Tribune. Distraught and feeling helpless, I tried to use my platform for good. Both my boss and the then editor of that paper felt my tone was too grim and political for a library column, so it never got published. I've updated it where necessary. Incidentally, nothing much has changed.

Americans have an unusual circumstance in that we’re a famously pluralistic democratic and representative republic. We didn’t just get this freedom. We fought for it and won it from the grasping hands of the mad Hanoverian king of England. Over the almost three centuries since we won that first and greatest revolution, we have had to continuously fight against the worst impulses that would render us thralls to a similar power in our own lands. We, for example, had to deal with the internal social illnesses brought about by the failure of the founders and revolutionaries to deal with the problem of slavery.

In that time, we have faced some serious existential threats to our unity, liberty and equality. We have dealt with them, sometimes too slowly, sometimes congratulating ourselves too prematurely on a job only  partially done but things have gotten better, generally, and subsequent generations enjoyed more freedom than our ancestors. It hasn’t always been perfect or easy, but the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, as Dr. King once wrote. Or it did.

Freedom is a funny thing. It rebels against fear and inaction. Each of us bears the responsibility for the upkeep and preservation of our own freedom.  If we are too scared or angry to fight for our freedom, we cannot keep it and we, I’m sad to say, don’t deserve it in that case. Freedom comes with sacrifice, too. We seem to understand that, in order for me to be free, you have to be free too, which means that our work to preserve our rights comes with making sure others have the same rights. This is the cost of freedom. It isn’t a hard concept when looked at objectively, but it can become difficult in the muddy waters of social ills and tribal thinking.

In the last few decades, our society has faced one of its most deadly social issues. Rather than describe it, since we all know what it is, I’ll merely reference it at a distance. This problem is a severe and life-altering (and ending) one. It isn’t a disease or a political problem, though it has been exacerbated by both. It is a simple decision making process that is failing due to political corruption, greed and a failure of empathy. This problem kills and injures people regularly. It is fairly indiscriminate; it takes children’s lives and adults and all ages in between. It doesn’t matter where one works, what faith one adheres to or how much is in the bank account. This problem is merely a monster that devours and devours until nothing and no one is left.

Under normal circumstances, such a monster would be fairly easily subverted. That’s what Americans do, after all. We take power from monsters. We come together decidedly and we fight for what’s right. This is not always perfect, any more than any monster hunter is perfect, but it is nevertheless our m.o. Until now, that was how we dealt with things.

Today’s problem is a simple one. We have the power to stop the monster, but we choose not to. It’s that simple. There’s nothing more complicated than that. I use the term “we”, because, as I said, we're all responsible for each other’s freedom. This monster problem is a freedom remover. So long as it is our problem, not one of us is free. Not the people who want to keep it our problem, not the ones who want to solve it. None of us are free until this problem is solved.

What I’d like to know—what we’d all like to know—is what’s at stake to solve this problem? What sacrifices must we make to reinstate our freedom? Each day’s news brings us another nightmare scenario. Any moment it could be my place of work or yours. My home, or yours. My vacation or yours. My children's school or your's. None of us are safe. That’s not an exaggeration. Any moment, any of us could be a victim. It’s a matter of when, not if.  Our entire society has become a gruesome, absurdly morbid variant of Schröedinger's cat.

If we’re not safe, then we’re not free. It’s that simple.

The next question seems to be, who wants us to not be free? Someone has to be keeping us here, right? We don’t need to think about what the backstory is to this problem. We don’t need to try to diagnose the problem beyond its obvious source. We need to solve it, but this doesn’t seem likely, at least now. The people who can save us have refused. They claim that freedom is at stake if they solve it. But whose freedom? The other side of the argument merely writhes in impotent anguish. They cannot solve it either, or so they claim. More than seventy percent of Americans want their freedom back, but our leaders, especially those in the minority, keep us in place.

Today, while I write this, families across our nation are in anguish. The most unimaginable, unending pain has become a staple of our lives, now. At any given moment, a father, a daughter, a granddaughter, a mother, a sister, a son, a brother, a friend, a spouse or life partner will be taken from us in the most gruesome way possible, leaving a gaping wound where once there was love and hope and happiness. The people in charge have made it clear that this is now a necessary condition of our citizenship. It is a ghoulish lottery in which we all are guaranteed to lose everything one way or the other. The people in charge have tried to dehumanize the problem by saying that its source is something to do with mental illness or video games or whatever scapegoat they can muster, while they claim prayer will save us. This dissembling is part of the problem, but focusing on it, alone, is not a solution.

This problem will not end until we end it. Until then lives will simply stop and in honor of those lives, my essay will just stop. I hope it accurately and clearly symbolizes the promise cut short, but also that this problem isn’t just one person’s, or politician’s problem to solve. It belongs to all of us. 

Until we’re free of fear...

The Two Daves deal with Nonsense

We all have days where we are not mentally or emotionally prepared to deal with the nonsense that comes with being an adult. I happen to love my job and care about the work I do, so this happens less frequently to me perhaps, but I still have days when I do not have the capacity to deal with nonsense. Those are usually the days where nonsense seems to thrive and replicate easily. On such days, it can be really tough to force the exterior to look as though things are going well and that I am ready and willing to help, as needed. It requires being able to bifurcate oneself into two separate halves: one is good natured and eager to dig in while the other rests just below the surface, fed up, worn out and ready to light out for the territories.

Years ago, a former boss made a joke that stuck with me. They said that there are actually two Daves. One is a professional who ha(d) to wear a tie every day. This is “Inside Dave”. Inside Dave says yes to assignments and meetings, obeys when the bosses change the schedule in an adverse way and readily rushes to help with those ‘other duties as required’. 

Then there is Outside Dave. This is the Dave that mostly everyone outside of work gets to see. This Dave doesn’t wait to cuss until he’s out of earshot. This Dave is gruff and jealous of his free time. He prefers to be with his family and in his own home. This Dave really doesn’t willingly suffer fools (and there are just so many). According to his children, he sighs a lot and almost always looks ill-tempered. 

These two halves of my personality—as it were—are actually the same person, but the former is required to behave a certain way in order to stay employed. Since this is necessary to keep the family off the bread line, it seems tolerable most days. The latter is more churlish, less patient or eager to please, yes, but also usually a bit happier because he’s most often found where he loves to be anyway: at home with his family. Outside Dave is free and therefore freer to be himself. Inside Dave has a mold to fit and he does it daily without excuse.

Some days though, the act is harder than others. Some days, it is tougher to cover the natural man and pretend to be amenable to yet another meeting or schedule dispute or to put up with the often fantastically stupid behavior of others. Sometimes the banalities of professionalism irritate and wear me down and when this happens, Outside Dave, who has less patience for this nonsense, shows up with a deep sigh and the glint of battle in his eyes.

I have managed to train myself to keep this particular situation a rarity. Staying out of the public and my coworker’s eyes, if possible, is always preferable to throwing things or cursing loudly at coworkers. I have been known to train my anger into a highly focused cleaning session, which is good for everyone, I hope. I can go into my cubicle and close the shoji screen, or I can go out and work on the Mobile Library for an hour or two. I try to keep myself to myself on days like these, mainly because I cannot be responsible as much as usual for my facial expressions which will denote just how unable I am to deal with unmitigated baloney.

We all struggle from time to time to find and maintain balance between these halves of our nature. It can be difficult to feel happy all the time (or even any of the time). Happiness has been set up as a ludicrous goal of being. Cultural pressure seems to say if you’re not happy all the time, then you’re living your life badly. This is just more nonsense, however. 

Happiness isn’t a perfect or fully achievable state of being, nor ought it be an ultimate goal. There is no magical place where we cross an unseen threshold and suddenly we’re happy permanently. This is a myth sold to us by advertisers who think we only care about the absorbency of paper towels and the bounciness of space-age foam beds. No one is ever fully happy all the time and the mindless state that would ensue if that were the case would have us all in the laugh academy. 

Happiness, the ancients tell us, is a choice. We can choose to be happy when we realize that we’re actually quite lucky to be alive in the moment. Gratitude takes us to a place of joy, because things could always be worse.

There is a wonderful aphorism that I learned in AA, “Have a good day unless you’ve made other plans.” I keep a tiny piece of paper with this motto written on it in my office where only I can see it from my desk. It keeps me remembering that, despite how much I may hate it, I have full control over my response to the world and the absurd comedy of other people’s mindless and self-absorbed actions. I may not be able to control them, but I can choose how I respond. 

Another trick I learned is, if you’re having a bad day, you can stop, breathe, take a moment to recenter yourself and start the day over right there and then. No need to carry around a whole heap of bad attitude and grievances and frustrations from or for other people. Just let it all go (who is it helping, anyway?) and start the day anew. Outside Dave is fantastic at this trick. When Inside Dave is full to the ears with the people and the world around him, Outside Dave says, “Hey, restart!” It helps.

These may seem like cheap, pop psychology tricks but they actually work well if you take time to acknowledge how you’re feeling in the moment and then decide that you’re the one in control of how you respond to life's problems. It takes effort to realign the mental wheels. The first flush of emotion is often enough to set the whole day circling the drain. I have to work to rememnber that our days are limited and we’re often unaware of just how quickly they pass (or of how much they are worth in that moment). If we remember these tricks, though, a bad day can just be a bad few moments. It’s no one’s fault (or maybe it is!) but it doesn’t have to be a jot on an otherwise healthy and grateful life.

It seems like we often feel compelled to carry other people's negativity and resentments especially when their actions negatively affect our own sense of peace and gratitude. I’ve met some people who are determined to let other people ruin their lives. They have become addicted to feeling resentment and anger. Other people can be really ludicrous, it is true, and Inside Dave has to do and say things that are professionally appropriate, even when others are infuriating and stupid. Outside Dave can simply refuse to allow those people (or himself) to have sway over his peace and gratitude. He simply accepts that this is how things are, right now, and then he moves on. If necessary, he starts the day anew.

If I believed in resolutions, I would be resolved to spend a little more time each day focusing on how lucky I am in almost every way. Most of what irritates me on a daily basis is nothing but regular real life nonsense that we all have to face occasionally. If that is the worst that happens on a given day, then things aren’t that bad. I'd rather face it and know my feelings than hide behind a false façade and let the frustrations eat me alive. 

Life is short and I refuse (as either of my halves) to let someone else ruin my day. Happiness may be fleeting or even not real at all, but I’ll try to be grateful nonetheless and if someone or something attempts to ruin my chill, I’ll just let good old bluff Outside Dave remind me of how lucky I am and start fresh in the moment.