Thoughts on the Train

Oh, what a world. Do you ever wonder if in a different time and a different space under different circumstances, if another “you” has made that same statement? Maybe it was a young mother watching as the waters rushed through her small village taking her family and her life away in an alluvial flood plain in Mesopotamia. Or maybe it was the Jewish leaders watching as Queen Salome Alexandra died along with the independence of their people. Oh, what a world. Maybe it was a child, standing on Calvary, watching Jesus die and wondering why the act of helping people would deserve death. Maybe it was a crusader sticking his sword through the heart of a “Heretic” wondering, “Why am I doing this?” Oh, what a world Maybe it was a mother holding the corpse of her husband during the black death or a child screaming in fear as the plague doctor comes to take her parents' corpses away. Oh, what a world Or maybe it’s the man holding his lovers’ hand as that lover takes his las...

I am white. I don’t know what it's like to experience racism. I do know what it's like to experience discrimination. I’m gay and a Gen X’er. When I was in high school, I knew there were several other guys, and probably girls, that were attracted to the same sex. But none of us spoke about it or even intimated it for fear of repercussions from our back-woods hick community. Once we were out of high school…we were all able to come out of the closet and start to live our lives as open as we could. And to their credit, many of the people who bullied me in school turned out to be very decent people. Writing these few lines of what my fear was like when I realized I was gay are, in no way, a comparison to what it is like to be black or brown in America today. It is simply my way of showing I know discrimination. Not racism. I have imagined in my mind's eye a black father sitting down with his son and having a very different conversation then my father had with me. My father ...