Author: Sharron Burnett

And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow. Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.                         

——-Earnest Lawrence Thayer 

I know that I should be content that my University of Houston Cougars made it to the championship basketball game. They were among an elite group of teams who edged forward game by game until there were only two teams vying for the national title. Just being there should have been enough for me but my history of being a Cougar fan is more complicated than a single moment or a single game. The loss to Florida in the final moments brought back memories that have cursed me for decades. 

It was nineteen eighty-two and I was about to finish my decree after pausing to take care of my mother who had battled mental illness. My resolve to get back to school had stalled when my husband developed a rare fungal disease that put him in the hospital for months undergoing chemotherapy. In the meantime I had been blessed with two little girls who vied for much of my time. Eventually the challenges that had pulled me out of the university had subsided and I had returned to complete my degree. It was all about to come to fruition. 

There was another legendary University of Houston team that garnered the nickname Phi Slamma Jamma. Guy Lewis was the coach and star players like Akeem the Dream Olajuwon and Clyde the Glide Drexler were heading for the final game in the March Madness marathon. I was even in a course with Clyde and had worked on a group project with him. Hakeem would meet Clyde after class and I often walked behind them as I rushed to an English class in another building far away on campus. Ironically I was so focused on completing my studies that I did not associate those two with the jubilation that had infected the entire student body. i only knew that my group had received a failing grade on our presentation because Clyde had not shown up on our appointed day. 

When I complained to my husband he laughed and asked if the Clyde of my group happened to have the last name of Drexler. When I nodded he laughed and told me that Clyde was busy winning basketball games and moving into the finals. it all made sense when I though of how tall and powerful he looked. I was suddenly forgiving and understanding even as I nursed my disappointment in receiving the first failing grade of my university career. 

I was incredibly busy attempting to complete the courses required of my major. I was reading and writing papers and studying for exams with not a moment to fritter away. i was also responsible for the care and nurturing of my daughters and the main keeper of my home. When the final game came I had to keep to my unforgiving routines while my husband watched in the back of the house in our den. 

At the very end of the contest he called me anxiously announcing that I had to watch the final moments as it seemed certain the University of Houston and its Dream Team was going to win. I raced to cheer them on and just as I entered Hakeem missed a throw. My Cougars had lost. Me and my husband were stunned and I forevermore became synonymous with being a jinx. 

It all ended well for me despite my unrelenting disappointment. Clyde returned to class and the teacher realized that she had made a terrible mistake. We received an A for our project and not long after that I graduated and began my career in education. 

Of course a lifetime passed. I spent over forty years as a teacher and administrator. I earned a Masters’ degree from the University of Houston and my children grew up and left home. I finally retired and began tutoring and taking care of my elderly father-in-law. A new group of talented basketball players from the university fought their way to a spot in the final game. Once again the lure of a national championship seemed possible but in case my jinx was real everyone begged me to stay away from watching the game and so I did.

Of course our mighty team lost once again in the final moments. I did not see this and I was not the jinx but I still felt a bitter disappointment. It was difficult to believe that this had happened once again and unlike most I was not simply content that the team had lost. I selfishly wanted more for them. There was no joy in Houston and no joy in my home. I guess we have to wait until next time and hope that we finally get the gold. I hope get to see that because there is no fun in losing and I always think of Mudville when we do. 

I always become pensive during the week before Easter Sunday. It is a time in the Catholic Church when we recall the Passion of Jesus which was the ultimate definition of how we should all be. He engaged in human suffering and endured political violence and ultimately death in defense of the morality that he strove to teach us. He gave us the new commandment of loving our neighbor as much as we love ourselves. He demonstrated the pain and sorrow that we must sometimes bear if we are to follow that commitment. 

There is an irony taking place this season that should be filling the hearts all people of peace and goodwill. As we prepare to celebrate the glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ our fellow brothers and sisters are suffering indignities that many of them do not deserve. In particular our nation under the command of our president is welding a fist against people that he has deemed to be our enemies rather than demonstrating the mercy that Jesus exemplified throughout his short life here on earth. 

We may indeed have both foreign and homegrown criminals among us and it is right and just to remove them from society and constrain them in prisons, but this should only be done when we are certain that they are indeed guilty of the horrors attributed to them. Right now immigrants in our land are being plucked off of the streets with little or no evidence of their guilt. They are being sent to a jail of horrors in El Salvador without due process to determine the extent of their infractions beyond just being here illegally. 

If we are to be a nation of laws it is incumbent on all of us to demand that the deportation of individuals living among us be fair, not a mockery like the trial and persecution that Jesus endured more than two thousand years ago. Surely those of us who have heard the story of Jesus and read his words must know that cruelty without conscience is always wrong even when the reasons for it purport to protect us from harm. 

Ours is a nation built on fairness but we have certainly had moments when the ideals of our Constitution have been ignored. The United States is guilty of the national sin of slavery in the past and the harsh treatment of the descendants of slaves still reverberates more than it should even to this day. Now we watch often with silence as men are sent to El Salvador to rot in a prison so vile that it should be listed as a crime against humanity. Supposedly we had moved past such horrific punishment but instead those in power are applauding the psychological and physical destruction of people whose full stories have yet to be told. 

These same people purport to be Christians of the highest order. They want prayers in schools and the ten commandments posted in government buildings. They want the Untied States to be known as a Christian nation even as their lies and cruelty fly in the face of all that is holy. They celebrate their hatefulness and threaten those who would dare to question them. They humiliate the president of Ukraine and warmly welcome the president who resides over a prison that should be outlawed for its indecent treatment. 

I don’t claim to know what Jesus would do in the current situation but I know what he did when he saw such things in his own time. He pushed back on hypocrisy. He performed miracles to save people in defiance of rules that would have left them to die. He embraced those who were suffering. He made friends with outcasts. He forgave those willing to repent. He showed us how to live moral lives without prejudice or beliefs that one person was better than another. He bore the cross of hate and persecution.

I plan to protest on Holy Saturday. I do not want to be hiding in fear while seeing my fellow humans being mistreated. I will stand for the innocents who have been wrongly imprisoned. I will stand with trans men and women who do nothing to harm us but are subjected to humiliation. I will stand with the people of Ukraine who did not start a war, but who were attacked by a vile dictator intent on grabbing their land. I will stand for the message that Jesus gave us in his Sermon on the Mount. He taught us to love, to forgive, to be just and devoted to equality for all people. I will stand for truth and fairness. I will remember his words, “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that he taught. 

We all have work to do if we are to truly remember Jesus on Easter Sunday. He told us that it would not be easy to do what is right “when men shall revile you., and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.” Nonetheless we should remember that when we follow his example we will be blessed.

The coming days and weeks will be difficult. It will be easier to look away and pretend that all is well but as long as anyone is suffering we must respond in the ways that Jesus showed us. This is how we honor and praise him.

I doubt that any of us enjoy conflict, but the reality of being human is to endure conflict on some level throughout life. There are the angst ridden days of youth when encounters with playground bullies or the snark of gossip can rattle us to our very core. There are the conflicts inside our heads as we struggle to make important decisions. Sometimes we find ourselves enmeshed with cruel individuals who abuse us either emotionally or physically. We might become the innocent victims of conflicts between families, friends or even nations. Conflict may be a clash between beliefs or points of view. 

Each of us react to conflict whether simple or dangerous in differing ways. Some simply look away and attempt to pretend that nothing is wrong. Others go deeply inside themselves to the point of almost losing their identities. Then there are the people who boldly take charge of the situation, unafraid to advocate for themselves or others. How we react is at the heart of our personal philosophies, psychologies and totality of our experiences. 

I admittedly spent the early years of my life in a safe little cocoon carefully crafted by my loving parents. I had little idea about the kind of hardships that people were enduring. I lived in a world of sparkles and unicorns. That all changed when my father died. Suddenly I saw how difficult and cruel life can sometimes be. Still, my mother worked hard to be a positive role model for me and my brothers, never letting us see her worry. Nonetheless as I grew older I began to notice her whispered conversations with her confidantes that seemed urgent and worrisome. I was old enough to compare our new lifestyle with the one we had with my father. I realized that money was tight and that my mother was carrying a heavy load on her back. I quietly tried to be less of a burden. 

By my teen years my mother had finally begun dating. It was about ten years from my father’s death and she was quite tentative about the whole experience. She was only forty years old and still beautiful and vivacious. Some of the men she encountered were less than chivalrous and she often broke off relationships. I felt conflicted because I wanted her to be happy but in my mind nobody lived up to my father’s standards. Still, I knew that Mama was lonely and that dating was a healthy and good thing. I tried to find the good in the ordinary men who came to our home. Only one of them who was a charismatic and handsome history teacher lived up to my high standards. I was saddened when my mother broke up with him as well. 

Eventually she began to date a man whom she had known as a teenager. He and his brothers had rented a house across the street from her family home. She remembered thinking he was handsome but actually having a crush on his brother who was attending Rice University at the time. Nothing romantic happened back then, but somehow knowing that he had once lived near her made the man seem safe to her. In spite of declaring on their first date that he was not someone that she wanted to continue seeing, she was just lonely enough to keep accepting dates with him until he was asking her to marry him and she was delaying answers because it was not what she wanted at all. 

The more the man came to our home the more conflict I harbored about the whole situation. I was not so much adverse to the idea of my mother finding love again as I was to watching this man openly mentally hurt her. I wondered how bad he was in private when he made no attempt to cover his vileness in front of me. He seemed so shallow compared to my brilliant mom. He was in his fifties and had never amounted to much while my mother had a college degree and had been a respected teacher. I did not want to be materialistic, but I scorned him for driving a low end car while constantly boasting and threatening my mother with announcement about how much power he wielded. I wanted to tell him to get out of my house and leave my mother alone but I did not have the wherewithal to voice the words. I simply hoped that my mother would find her courage and send him away forever. 

I was unwilling to engage in conflict with the situation and so I sat watching my mother became quite mentally ill. This man had reduced her to a shell of her former self. I had heard him frightening her and tearing her down. I blamed him for her delicate condition that seemed to grow darker and more worrisome by the day. I was still a teen and unsure of what to do even though I was sure that something needed to happen. In a panic I called one of my uncles and told him all that I had witnessed. He was in many ways the most street smart of all of my relatives and I somehow reasoned that he would know how to handle such a horrible man. He told me to let him and his brothers take care of things. So I waited and while doing so got my mother the medical care that she so desperately needed. 

The man who had so damaged my mom never came to our home again. He never talked to my mother or attempted to get back into her life. She slowly but surely regained her mental health and never mentioned his name or the fact that he had seemingly just drifted away. I was glad he was gone and dared not even voice his name. That is how it ended but I needed to know the why.

In those days nobody had a cell phone. Making calls from a family phone was far from private. I had to ask a friend if I might use her phone to call my uncle. I told him how well my mother was doing and thanked him for whatever he he done to make the horrid man go away. He only revealed that he and his three brothers had visited their old neighbor and made him understand the he should never again contact or harass their sister. I let it go with that confession. I did not to want to know about any further conflict. 

I grown enough to be capable of handling such situations on my own, but I have been forever grateful to my uncles for so quietly and valiantly defending their sister. She never knew what they had done and none of us who enjoyed the truth ever said a thing. All of those folks are gone now and I miss them. I often wish that I had told them how much I learned from them. They taught me that horrific conflicts have to be faced. There would come many more times when I had to look conflict in the eye either personally or professionally. I realized that doing so in a dignified manner can be a sign of love. Sometimes I have to defend myself. Other times I would be derelict if I did not defend friends or family. Conflict is a part of life and now I am unafraid of it. 

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. —-Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was a witty man who used sarcasm to entertain. He was quite popular at the end of the nineteenth century until he was accused of having a homosexual relationship with the son of a wealthy and powerful man. He went to trial claiming that his alleged affair did not happen and he therefore attempted to sue his accuser for libel. Sadly his efforts backfired and he ended up being found guilty for gross indecency. He was sentenced to prison where he languished in a state of depression for the two years of his sentence. His reputation was ruined by the incident and he became an impoverished refugee in Paris. 

Of course in that era homosexuality was criminal and those who were gay or lesbian either attempted to deny their feelings or lived secretive lives in which the prospect of being caught was a dangerous reality. There is an irony that his most famous quote about being oneself was mostly impossible for him due to the dangerous nature of being gay. His somber end was often the fate of both men and women who had feelings and desires for same sex relationships. It would be another century before  homosexuality began to to be more accepted by society. Nonetheless there are still those who are unwilling to embrace gay and lesbian citizens as the good and normal people that they are.  

I grew up only hearing about homosexual people when I was teenager. Back in the late nineteen sixties the names for such people were grotesque and insulting. I assumed that I had never encountered anyone of that persuasion and had no idea what someone with those tendencies might be like. 

I remember my husband telling me when I was in my thirties in the late nineteen eighties that everyone knew someone who was homosexual and that there was nothing strange about them. I still was not certain that I had ever encountered such souls who were only beginning to publically embrace the title of being gay. 

Of course i was wrong. As society seemingly became more open friends, co-workers and even family members began to “come out.” It was a liberating time for them and a learning time for me. I realized that some of the finest people I have ever known were either gay or lesbian. Somehow it just seemed so natural to be able to openly support them as the wonderful people that I knew they were. 

I attended their weddings when society agreed to make their unions legal. Some of the most emotional moments I have ever experienced came from hearing their stories of being shunned or living in the shadows. As they became more and more open I began to wonder why they had ever been viewed as indecent people. I saw them as being kind, generous and incredibly understanding. I was happy that they were finally able to be themselves. 

The battles that gay and lesbians fought to find acceptance have been difficult. They were often spurned, becoming victims of violence. We have all heard the brutal stories of gay men and women being beaten and sometimes even murdered when they were never hurting anyone. History tells us of individuals who were castrated, imprisoned, spurned from society. it has been good to know that in recent times gay men can become governors and hold powerful positions in the arts, commerce and education. The shackles of secrecy have mostly been thrown aside but what seemed to me like a total reversal of the kind of ignorance that ruined the life of Oscar Wilde was not as universally celebrated as I had believed. There were still groups who found gays and lesbians to be unacceptable and of late they are threatening to restrict the freedoms of the gay and lesbian community once again. 

Even more troubling is the seemingly unmitigated hatefulness being aimed at the transsexual population. This group is so small that few people have ever encountered a trans person. They literally represent under one percent of the population and generally cause no trouble for others, but nonetheless have become the political pincushions of MAGAs. Just existing makes their lives difficult in some circles. There are groups that make no effort to understand them or to accept them even though there is strong evidence that their physical characteristics are out of sync with their brains because of hormonal events in utero or medically verifiable differences in their DNA. Instead of attempting to understand them, there are political efforts to deny the reality of their very existence. The kind of anger and hatred being hurled at them leaves them vulnerable and likely to endure hate and violence and poverty as they become outcasts in society.  

It is well known that people from the LGBTQ community have been around since the beginning of time and in all cultures and nationalities. In fact some Native American tribes have always viewed members of the LGBTQ community as being spiritually blessed. They honor such people for their uniqueness. So too did the ancient Greeks and other societies. Historically they have only been viewed as indecent or dangerous by hyper religious groups with strict rules of sexuality. 

I am hoping that my LGBQT friends and relatives will not be harmed or ostracized. I’d like to believe that we have moved past such judgmental behavior. Surely we can now see that they are more like us that they are different. They are good people who deserve to live in peace and harmony. I don’t want them to be hurt anymore. Surely we have moved past the ignorance that breeds fear of gender diversity. I for one have learned that those with unique sexuality are some the best people that I have ever known.    

It is spring time and my yard is bursting with life. The birds flock to the feeders that hang from a tree. They entertain me with their frolicking. My roses are budding and my amaryllis bulbs are showing off with blooms of red, white and pink. The hibiscus flowers smile as though they understand how much joy they bring me. My backyard is a refuge that fools me into believing that this is just another blossoming of a season in the long history of my life. Somehow I momentarily forget what is really happening and the worries that haunt me both day and night. 

I spend a great deal of time retreating to the quiet beauty of my little Shangri-La. It is a way of maintaining a semblance  of sanity in the world that seems to have gone mad. There are times when I feel that there really is a rabbit hole that leads to Alice’s Wonderland. I think that I have fallen through and now I must find a way to escape from the mania, chaos and confusion of what feels like a bad dream. 

I have never been a fan of Alice and her adventures. Her world was too upside-down for me. It was populated with characters that I did not like. While I understood it as satire, I never felt comfortable taking my imagination to a place that was so contrary to the personality that defines me. Somehow I found the cast of selfish creatures a bit too bizarre and mismatched with my own quiet and more logical demeanor. The population of fools and dictators annoyed me. 

Finding myself feeling as though I am now living in that upside down world is a source of great anxiety. I literally want to escape immediately but each new day tells me that I will have to learn to cope until our “mad king” who is ensconced in the White House one day goes away. My challenge is to survive and hopefully to find the kindred spirits who will help me to secure a better and more moral future than what we are all experiencing in this moment. 

The truth is that I understood the evil fomenting in our country. I was very aware of the lies and deceit being used to fool so many good people into believing that a seventy eight year old man spouting nonsense and vitriol was a savior. It frustrated me that I was unable to convince so many people that I love and admire that they were being fooled by a con artist. I hoped that cooler heads would prevail but I suppose that a master salesman understands how to sell lies to gain profit and power. 

I wonder how it is possible that we are allowing one man to take two hundred forty nine years of progress toward a more perfect democracy apart in a matter of days and weeks. I cannot understand the silence and even the cheerful support of so many. I wonder what has happened to our morals and our courage. Why are we playing along in a game that we know is absurd? How can any of us possibly believe that the man pushing all of the buttons and destroying our shining city on the hill is anything other than a spoiled fiendish snake oil salesmen. 

I have been told by good people that he was sent by God to protect us. I believe in God but I think that we have the free will to make choices and in this case far too many were fooled into believing that our president actually prays and considers the morality of his decisions. How could a man so vile be an agent of God? The hypocrisy of his beliefs and statements reveal the lie that he wants to protect anyone but himself. 

So I try to warn as many people as possible that we are going to have to work together to secure our nation for our children and grandchildren. I will protest again just as I did during the Civil Rights movement of the sixties. I will continue to write my blogs. I will wake up each morning hoping to see more signs that the foulness of the changes we have endured will end. I will pray for signs of life in our freedoms and in our bravery. I will hope that a movement as beautiful as my backyard will burst forth to save our nation and the world. 

I long to find my way out of the underworld that has become my country. I know there is a way out but it will mean reaching the common sense of more people than the choir that now follows me. I suppose that we will all suffer until we find our way out of Trump’s wonderland of freaks and monsters. 

Until then I will go the the sanctuary of nature in my backyard to keep my sanity and boost my resolve. We have a difficult road ahead but our cause is beautiful.