Category Archives: Inquiring Minds
My introduction page as a writer trying to get publsihed and a collection of posts showing who I am through ancetdotal musings about my life or how I am inspired to write or why I write and how I write in my own wierd little way.
My Gay Agenda by Alisa Hutton
Hello guys…
I ran across this blog by Alisa Hutton whom I do not follow, but was directed to by someone that does; a one Candice Louisa Daquin over at thefeatheredsleep I think it is a great post and sums up the feelings I think a lot of people may be having regarding the Orlando shooting whether as a family, friend, or spectator to it all like me…so please read this small excerpt, then head over to Alisa’s sight to read the remaining portion which brings ups very good points about our perceptions and place in life…
My Gay Agenda by Alisa Hutton
Sometimes I want to write something and I just don’t know how to start it. Sometimes something happens in the world and I want to cry and yell and grieve and shout words until it is all out of my system and the world is right and sensible again. I know when I feel like this that usually my heart is just hurting and what I need to do is just be quiet for a while and put a little extra love in to myself and others.
Call me crazy but when the world seems to be upside down on its logical head I feel the one thing we can do that won’t cause any more destruction is love. It seems safe to me, sensible and more here…
Your Moment of Silence Won’t Fix Anything (regarding Orlando shootings and others to come)
A conversation with Congressman Jim Himes, who is sick of the bullshit.
Below Article is copied directly from the online publication Esquire written by Luke O’Neil June 13th, 2016 . If you wish to see the article in its original format…please go HERE:
On Monday afternoon, Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), took to the floor of the House to address the shootings in Orlando. Unlike many of his colleagues in Congress, Himes said, he would not be participating in any moment of silence for the victims.
“Silence. That is how the leadership of the most powerful country in the world will respond to this week’s massacre of its citizens,” Himes said, before listing off the names of a few of the many victims whose lives were cut short “by a madman with a military rifle.”
Himes continued:
“And make no mistake. Cut short by this Congress’ fetish to repeatedly meet bloody tragedy with silence. Silence. That is what we offer an America that supports many of the things we could do to slow the bloodbath. Silence. Not me. Not anymore. I will no longer stand here absorbing the faux concern, contrived gravity and tepid smugness of a House complicit in the weekly bloodshed. Sooner or later, the country will hold us accountable for our inaction. But as you bow your head think of what you will say to your God when you are asked what you did to slow the slaughter of the innocents. Silence.”
The Congressman’s words came after a series of tweets he sent out on Sunday that called the government’s inability to do anything about the gun violence epidemic “gross negligence” and an “abomination.”
The approach marked a sharp turn for Himes, who says he’s not typically given to using such inflammatory and morality-based language. But this time, like many of us around the country, he says he’s had enough. I spoke with Himes by phone moments after he finished addressing his colleagues in the House.
How was your statement perceived?
Well, there aren’t many people here today. But I’m sure this will be characterized as something that it’s not, as another installment in people who want to take away your guns. And it’s not, because I actually support Second Amendment rights, I like recreational shooting. But, I got thinking about it yesterday, and my stomach turned thinking about these moments of silence. To me, it’s perfectly emblematic of utter inaction and gross negligence of the Congress. When 50 people are dead on slabs in Florida, what we’ve got is 26 seconds of silence for you. That’s just unconscionable. There’s sort of a faux-sanctity to it, by putting on my serious face, looking like I care, and being silent for 15 seconds, that that is somehow a contribution. We have a lot of tough issues. We’re never going to solve the abortion thing, we’re never going to solve the taxes thing, or when we go to war. But here’s an area, where the vast majority of gun owners, not just Americans, agree on a set of measures that will keep a lot of people alive. But no. We’ve got silence.
“There’s sort of a faux-sanctity to it, by putting on my serious face, looking like I care, and being silent for 15 seconds.”
Have we gone mad as a country? Why can’t we get anything done here?
My perception is that groups like the NRA have used the Tea Party movement to create kind of a cult of guns, where you believe you’ve got a liberal Harvard Law Review president that is hellbent on taking away your guns to fulfill his Islamic fantasies. If not Islamic, government takeover fantasies. And that caused people to believe things that are patently not true. Like the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. There was a good guy with a gun in Orlando and it didn’t work. Or it causes people to believe, as an untrained software developer, you’re actually going to be safer armed in your own house than if you don’t have a gun in your house. It’s objectively provable that that’s not true, but there is this cult. People like Wayne LaPierre, 10 seconds into his speech, slamming this president, creating this bullshit argument that Washington is intent on taking away their guns. And a lot of people have bought into that. My Republican colleagues for the most part are decent people, but they’re scared of that cult.
Being from Connecticut, you’re sensitive to this. But something people have been saying is that if we didn’t do anything after Sandy Hook, then we never will.
Well, I’m not willing to say never. One of these reasons I’m taking the stand on these moments of silence, and doing something I don’t normally do, which is speaking in moral language, is that we’ve just got to change the dialogue. If you have to talk about judgment and God to get the attention of people who are more comfortable in that realm, then let’s do it. Let’s really talk about whether Jesus Christ thinks that the answer is a good guy with a gun. But we say this time and again. Change doesn’t come fast. If we’d given up on Civil Rights in 1964 where would we be?
How do you feel Connecticut’s state laws stack up to the rest of the country in terms of guns?
Well to their credit, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, they actually passed exactly the type of passage I’m talking about, and passed some thoughtful gun safety rules. I think they’re pretty tough, like New York. But at the end of the day, when you can be in Virginia at one o’clock and Connecticut at four o’clock, you got to deal with the federal level.
You’ve spoken out against the opioid epidemic as well. Do you see parallels? Are we addicted to guns?
This points to another absurdity. Medical professionals want us to think about it that way. They want us to really study who gets killed, how, what are the circumstances. Always a good idea, since about the year 1400, to gather the facts. But of course Congress has said, no, we will not gather the facts.
They’re prevented from studying it.
Exactly. So maybe there is a parallel to be drawn with addiction, in as much Congress is very much in the phase of not understanding it has a problem.
This is something I don’t understand. Last year, the NRA spent something like 28 million dollars lobbying on the federal level. But if you break it down by each lawmaker, it’s not really all that much money, a few thousand here and there. You’re a congressman, is that how cheap it is buy someone’s loyalty?
No. I think the NRA is more powerful as a purveyor of insane falsehoods than it is as a donor to individual members of Congress. It matters a little, but, but I think my colleagues are more scared of being primaried by a rootin’ tootin’ gun absolutist than they are having their opponent getting $5,000 from the NRA.
People say, “Oh, so you’re going to take all our guns? Obama is coming to take our guns.” Which, by the way, he’s really waiting ’till the last minute here on that plan. You figure he would’ve done it by now.
Right! I mean the insanity.… I remember my first Congress, 2009 through 2011, he had exactly one piece of gun legislation, which was a bill to allow you to carry a gun in a national park, so it actually loosened things. But there’s Wayne LaPiere saying what he does.
What if we said no more high capacity magazines? No more military-style weapons? Is that a compromised place where we can start?
Yes. Look, this isn’t that complicated. As much as there are things like limits on capacity of magazines, the kinds of guns, universal background checks. There are four or five things that have broad support in the American population. Are they going to end gun violence? Of course not. But if this crazy, radicalized guy hadn’t been so able to go buy a military weapon, despite the fact that he’d been interviewed a couple of times by the FBI, I think a lot of people would be alive this morning. We’re not going to solve this thing, but we can do some things that a lot of people support that can save lives. And that’s why we need to talk about these things in moral terms.
Its So Hot… my cat thinks so as well
Quote of the day
Haikus of the Sword
One Breath~
One breath forming calm
Eyes tight on adversary
Bound energy flies
Beguiling Death~
Dragonfly wings cut
Up, down, left, right superbly
Entrancing your death
Young Sword~
Childish eyes unveiled
as a keen blade drawn for blood
Fire heart goes cold.
by Philip Wardlow 2016
Funny for Day
Nothing…yet Something
Nothing,
that’s what I feel like sometimes;
Nothing.
Nothing, no where, no how
as
I see a distant sun of vibrant gold
cradled in a bowl of purple and pink
on a horizon I imagine I will never reach,
It reminds me that I’m Nothing
and yet Something to even to be allowed
to see.
A nighttime sky, filled to bursting
with a voluminous marble of a moon
within a black bag of stars I can’t begin to sift through.
Yet I do, and that Something feels cool
on fingertips never finding purchase.
I know Life is a tangled sphere of yarn
wrapped around an onion
spinning and dancing in
an ordered rhythm with other crying onions
as they bump butts.
Nothing and Something,
A single stolen kiss in the dark with a girl,
yet readily given by her, for I am no thief;
soft yet firm, gentle yet wanting.
Nothing exists, not even
me in that moment,
and yet Something.
Clues and misdirection, blind alleys
and closed thoroughfares,
leashed to Nowhere.
Yet Somewhere will be the end when
the journey’s through
Humbled and awed
but at other times
petulant and angry.
I stomp my foot inside my soul.
I am tired of feeling like Nothing
Something sounds good.
by Philip Wardlow 2016
The many flavors of little girl/boy lost
Therapists say the core of us, from the defining moments of our youth, make up a great part of how we see ours lives throughout our whole existence through and into our growing “adulthood” until the day we die.
We all walk a path, and that path we walk sprung up to meet us whether we know it or not. Some have found that magical path and place among the trees where they know peace and a solid foundation under their feet as they tread a world still alien.
Most are not so fortunate whether you think they are or not.
Some of us walk it in seeming surety, with one foot right after the other; having all the answers to life at our lips and the tips of fingertips based on what came before. Those types outright scoff at times at those who don’t know all the answers or have it all together. They can truly be arrogant bastards; ridiculing the “underclassmen” saying they will never catch up.
((Secretly)) they know they do not know everything; no matter what they say. I have to imagine, that need in itself, to have to be sure all the time; it must drive them mad when their world falls apart at not knowing the answers when push comes to shove in their lives.
I truly do feel sorry for some of them. For I do believe that type of arrogance is needed in the world to get things done. Else many of us would be sitting on our hands saying woe is me and nothing else. But these types must pay the price at times when the chaos finds them in their own mind. For no one must see them weak you know.
Others of us walk in a meandering, stumbling, almost drunken course down a path where our footing is anything but sure. Always needing that tree to lean on, or that bush off the road to vomit up our urges and failings behind.
Yet, still they walk, for their is a determination in their lives that drives their legs into motion. They are not comatose. They are not in a vegetative state. They breath, they exhale, and they bring in life and let it out in small amounts. They evolve in their own course; through the volitions of some inner or external force which they cannot place, but it drives them, much like the arrogant ones above, that have already embraced a reality and be damned to anyone who stand in their way.
What else can they do in life but to try? And besides, they can’t look weak ; not to the arrogant ones that depend on them to prop them up from time to time when they speak.
Finally, there is that brow beaten soul. That lower than low. The one that goes home to sleep and sleep and dream and dream until the day has disappeared and night encapsulates and settles the debate of who has won that day, life or him or her.
They will not choose to try again the next day nor the next. Woe are they, to not even attempt. For that voice that once shouted has been muffled and thrown into a cage of the finest steel made. Never to be let out, never to be fed or watered, but instead to let whither and die in a lonely cage bound with a strength they gave away.
All because they believed they reached some end. Some place in their life they could not rectify, or redeem. Never realizing life is impartial, life goes on. So go on, life says go on, and don’t be afraid to look weak and go on.
Be that person you lied to yourself about that you told you could not be. This is a lesson for all three of you who walk the path you think you should.
See…the path before you. Just let yourself simply really truly see.
by Philip Wardlow 2016
Ozymandias by Percy Badge Shelley
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 – 1822
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ain't no rest for the Wicked - Philip Wardlow - The real and the sensual sides to life in all its facets.. 