Happy Independence Weekend

Thank you for visiting my blog. Happy 4th of July weekend. 

My mantra is I write to right. Authors like Jane Addams, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair, Sandra Cisneros, John Howard Griffin, and Florida’s own Rob Sanders, write or wrote to change social injustice. On this weekend as we celebrate our independence, should we reflect on how our nation has progressed?

Whether it’s labeled as hypocrisy, pretense, or deception, the act of causing others to accept as true a misrepresentation or lie has always annoyed me. Hypocrisy is especially irritating to me if it is wrapped in the robes and other vestments of clergy, the clothing of a public-school teacher, the uniform of a policeman, or the suit of a politician. When others take advantage of the less fortunate, I feel the need to write to bring the wrong to light.

A recent political moment during the protests over George Floyd’s death under the knee of a policeman troubled many Americans. It reminded me of a line from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Miss Maudie tells Scout, “You are too young to understand it, but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father.”

When you watched the President of the United States twirling a Bible that he admitted wasn’t his and posing with it in front of a church he rarely attends, did it give you pause? Did you think his photo opportunity was genuine or a sham?

When you watched Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest for abetting Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of young girls, did you applaud the arrest? Since my first book, Silent Screams, was written to warn teenagers about the dangers of the human-trafficking scourge on our society, I’m glad her peers have requested justice for the abducted teens. 

As you head to the polls in November, what standards will you demand from the politicians you vote into office? Should more women be on ballots both locally and nationally? What are wrongs you want righted?