HOPE

These last few years and months have been rough going for a great many of us.  We struggled through Covid and the restrictions it entailed.  Workplaces were restructured to allow many to work from home, schools were closed and students got their lessons via computer.  Families communicated through FaceTime with no physical contact.  Most types of entertainment became off-limits unless we could watch it on television or a computer screen.  Our leaders were not exactly brimming over with confidence and we were all aware of it.  

      As if we hadn’t lost enough lives, mass shootings became popular.  Children, who had gotten back into classroom learning situations, discovered the danger of a single, unstable person, intent on destroying their young lives.  Total strangers drew down on total strangers at bars and places of business.  Some killers used vehicles to plow down as many victims as possible.  

     The weather, always unpredictable, has been exceptionally so lately.  Fires, floods, and storms have become mundane.  Family sanctuaries have burned to the ground, blown away, or, in some cases, slid off their foundations.  Family memories were reduced to tattered paper and broken, sentimental objects. New memories are of reuniting family and locating shelter before starting the long process of starting life anew.  

     The world situation is dicey, to say the least.  As our older folk used to say, “The world has gone to Hell in a handbasket.”  I still don’t know what a handbasket is but we all get the point.  Powerful countries are at odds with one another, playing with very high stakes.  One single action or slip of a word could cause worldwide chaos.  

     John Rourke, main character in our Survivalist series, was prone to be a little over the top when it came to planning ahead for any type of emergency.  He stockpiled supplies, studied medicine, martial arts, and building skills as well as creating a library of additional knowledge that would have rivaled that of any town.  

      Keep in mind, that he wasn’t doing this for himself, but rather to protect his family.  If disaster struck, he had enough food, and the capacity to grow more, electricity and clothing to sustain them all for many years.  Rourke’s wife, Sarah, was thrilled that her husband’s idea of her wardrobe needs amounted to jeans and flip-flops.

     Rourke may have come off like a gloom and doomer but, he was proven to be correct.  He never wanted the entire world to collapse.  He hoped that he was wrong. He hoped life would be good and his children would grow up in a loving, safe environment. But he chose the right path and they stayed safe and sound while millions perished.  Sarah was still pissed off!

     The one thing we tend to have in survival situations is that no matter how overwhelming a situation can be, we normally maintain a certain amount of hope.  We know something bad is coming but maybe it can be avoided; one door closes and another one opens, etc.  We hope tomorrow will be better.  Hope is part of our genetic makeup.  Most of us can hit bottom and feel miserable and angry but we don’t want to stay down there forever.  We need the light.  

     Some of us need help getting back up to the light. Maybe they’ve been down too long and could use a hand up.  A smile or an encouraging word can go a long way, and so can making those in charge do the right thing, be it business personnel. educators, or local government.

Maybe if we all work hard at fixing the broken pieces, hope stands a better chance.

      Things on our planet look a little bit rocky right now but let’s hope for a better things to come.  Let's hope that our world leaders rise to the occasion and we can all have a better tomorrow.  And let's keep planning ahead, just in case.

Sharon

The Good Old Days

When I was young, I loved to spend time with my dad while he puttered around in the basement.  He would give me some scraps of wood along with a hammer and some nails, and let me attempt to build a piece of architectural wonder.  When necessary for the project, I was given a saw and a hand drill, and some screws or .  Dad was able to work on his project, my mother had some quiet time, and I was in hog heaven designing and building a lopsided, structurally unsound building -- or whatever it was. 

            My dad had some power tools but found many occasions to stick with his more basic instruments of construction/destruction.  I think part of it was the feel of the drill handle as he turned it, watching the shavings slowly build up.  When he used his handsaw or plane, he had time to control the depth and length of a cut before it was too late.  The man had patience and would rarely mess up.  He let me try his electric drill and before I could anchor the bit into the wood it ran away from me, skidded across the wood, and came straight toward me.  He grabbed it and pried my fingers off the switch before I became its next victim.  I got better at it but it took practice.

             I had a good look at another problem with electric drills when one year, I received a 1950s Sears Roebuck dollhouse for Christmas.  Of course, all the metal pieces had to be put together using tabs and slots.  Dad, who was never one to follow directions, insisting they were written by people in other countries who gave wrong information on purpose, said a few choice words acceptable for fathers at this time of year and got out his electric drill and hammer.  I think I had the only dollhouse drilled and bolted together and then hammered into a respectable shape.  Those razor-sharp tabs would never slash a little girl’s finger but it took a long time to get all the metal shavings out of the living room rug          

            We had a pretty large lawn back in the day, as well as a garden.  Dad would get outside each summer and tackle the grass and weeds using a push mower.  A long wooden handle and some sharp rotating blades and a set of wheels made up the entire contraption.  As soon as I was tall enough to reach the handle, he let me cut the level areas of the lawn.  Talk about fun!!!  Pushing down one row, then another, going as fast as you can!  What could be better!  On the even more plus side, it didn’t make much noise so the neighbors didn’t care if you were using it at eight am Sunday morning.  You didn’t have to fill it with gasoline, use oil, or worry about a mechanical failure.  As long as you didn’t hit a land mine you were in good shape.

            We didn’t own a car.  Living in a city, we had the option of public transportation or walking, most times it was walking.  If I wanted to go to the library which was a long way for a little kid, my dad would take me and we would stop at the hardware store on the way and look in the windows of other stores along the way.  We went through a viaduct and I hoped that a train would rumble over us, shaking the debris on the street and sidewalk. We passed the local ball field and the swings in the park.  The library was finally reached and I would spend as long a time as my dad’s patience would permit.  Books were selected carefully because I knew I had to carry them all the way back home.  I usually overestimated my strength and stamina and my dad would end up carrying the bulk of them. 

            Today’s world is certainly different.  Hand tools are considered antiques; landlines are becoming obsolete and the faster you can get something done is the most acceptable way.  I certainly don’t believe in living in the past because there are so many things that have greatly helped humanity such as our new technology.  The medical field has progressed by leaps and bounds.  Transportation is at a whole new level; to the moon and beyond! There are tons more breakfast cereals to choose from. 

            Who would have imagined being able to build an object by giving the specs to a machine and letting it do the rest, even a house! It starts doing its thing and BAM, you have a move in ready home of your dreams!  A few weeks ago there was a news program showing that today’s houses burn at a faster rate than those built years ago.  Two of the causes are that trees are cut at an earlier age now which means that the lumber used in building structures is less dense and, modern, inexpensive furniture is cheaply made of this same younger wood. Just a thought, if you live in an older home with vintage or antique furniture you have more time to get out unscathed.

            Old ways versus new ways aside, we can draw some wisdom from both and come to a place where both can fit in.  Patience pays off.  If someone wants to learn something that you’re capable of teaching them, do it.  Let them try, and if they screw up, give them more chances to succeed. Take a walk with a young person. Spend time listening; you may be surprised by someone else’s thoughts.  People will open up and express themselves to your face more than they ever would via texting or emailing and maybe, just maybe they’ll explain the meaning of life, or how to fix your slow computer.

            The world today moves at light speed.  Stop and smell the roses while we still can.

Sharon 

WHAT WOULD JOHN ROURKE DO?

John Thomas Rourke, the SURVIVALIST, sits on a boulder outside the Retreat; a thin cigar hangs loosely between his fingers.  The wind is blowing but with so many objects surrounding him, it’s hard to tell exactly from which direction it originates.  It flows around the rocks and through the canopy of trees above and around him, whispering, and then loudly gusting to a roar.

            Although the sky is filled with a scattering of clouds, Rourke can still make out the sun’s slow descent.  The evening chill will soon follow.  Alone, he contemplates the state of the world. The days of savage wild men and cannibals may be long gone for the most part but other evils still remain. The taste for power has never been stronger.  Some take and hold power through brute strength, some through financial wealth, and some through control of the media. 

            Safe homes are filled with women and children hiding from abusive family members who use their power to control their lives.  They have no money of their own, may not speak the local language, and are kept isolated from the community.  They live in fear of physical abuse but are not even aware of the psychological damage done to them.  For some, the cycle continues.  For some, they are able to break away and find help.  Rourke thinks of Natalia and of her uncle’s intercession in her abusive marriage. He wonders if good people still exist.

            Money is power.  It buys material things that keep families afloat.  It buys influence.  Money buys people, their hearts and souls.  Money is a drug that some people can never get enough of.  Money buys political support and influential jobs.  Money buys love.

            He wonders why is there such diversity among reports of news.  Shouldn’t they all be telling us the facts instead of swaying the story to fit in with a particular agenda by adding or subtracting to the original, or with the insertion of additional comments? Why do you only hear good things about certain persons or companies on particular news outlets whereas another venue may have an entirely different point of view?  It’s noticeable particularly when it concerns politicians.

            Talking screens have taken control over common sense. People we don’t really know tell us how to dress, what to eat, and what type of bathroom tissue to use.  The screens applaud the virtues of some and attempt to destroy those of others.  The masses stare at the screens and never see what is right in front of them.  The real world is in one dimension, the screen draws them into another, less complicated one.

            People hurt other people with no thought of the consequences.  They hurt with their words, their fists, their guns, or their vehicles.  They hurt people they don’t even know just to satisfy their anger or inability to cope with racial, religious, and philosophical differences.

            After all the world has been through, why do we still have wars?  In the end, no one really wins except the ones who supply the weapons.  The people who start them don’t get bloody.  They don’t even get dirty.  The soldiers get hurt and die.  The medical personnel get hurt and die.  The war correspondents get hurt and die.  The women and children get hurt and die.  Homes, schools, and hospitals get destroyed.  Civilizations crumble. For what?

            Rourke reminds himself that there are still good people in the world who love their country and respect law and order.  These people are trying to raise their children to have questioning minds and value the rights of all, not just those who hang on the farthest edges of the left and right.  Much is expected from these people to clear the excrement from the arena and do battle to save humanity from itself.         

            The sun has set and the temperature is dropping.  A nighttime hush has settled in and the creatures nearby have found their way back to the cave, their nest, or their burrow.  Rourke pulls out his battered Zippo from his jeans and lights his cigar.  He inhales and watches the smoke curl up into the air, contemplating the state of the world and what a mess it’s in.  Can life go on like this, he thinks?  Have we finally screwed up things beyond compare?  He stands up, stretches, and heads back inside, already thinking up ways to put things back in order. He won’t give up and neither should we.

Sharon

War Is Not Just For Soldiers

 Every time we’ve turned to the news lately there seems to be a brand new conflict or disaster catching our attention.  We read about them, hear about them, and/or watch them every day.  Random shootings and earthquakes have become commonplace.  Wildfires and hurricanes wreak mass destruction.  Insurgencies and war are available for our evening viewing.  No longer can any of us say that we are not affected by the news because these events are far away. Far away is as close as the remote on our TV.

     I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news giving us updates on the happenings in Southeast Asia.  Vietnam was the first war that we could see, and it was not pretty.  We saw the explosions, the bodies, the crying children.  We saw our soldiers, but we also got a glimpse of people we were fighting or protecting.  Did we always know the difference?  

     Just as young men went off to war throughout the ages, families and friends waited for their safe return.  For many of us, Vietnam was different.  These young men were our buddies from high school; football players, high scorers on the basketball court, members of the ROTC drill team, the school clown who put a fart bag on the principal’s chair at graduation.  They were sent far away, but we knew what they were doing and how dangerous their lives had become through the eyes of a journalist and a cameraman.

     The coverage of 9-11-01 has been burned into our minds forever.  The collapse of the twin towers, people running away, people crying.  The sight of poor souls covered in dust aimlessly walking, caught on camera.  Could we have envisioned the horror without the sights and sound presented to us by the equally horrified news crews?

Ernie Pyle spent his journalistic lifetime telling the stories of ordinary people and their struggles and accomplishments.  He traveled the world, sharing his experiences with the folks back home.  In 1940, when Germany invaded France, he knew he had to go see the front lines for himself.  He spent time in war-torn England, sending home his impressions of daily life there and of the struggles and determination of the people.  When Japan entered the war, Ernie followed the troops in North Africa, mentioning soldier’s names and their units and depicting the terrain and situations.  In April of 1945, Ernie went ashore on a little island off the coast of Okinawa.  He was riding in a jeep with an Army officer when a Japanese machine gunner opened fire.  He was shot in the head and died.  Soldiers thought that his columns gave the best depiction of what the war and the people involved were all about.  He was just forty-four years old.

     We turn on the news channel.  We see a man or woman standing in from of a burning building, a tornado-hit suburb, a flood ravaged coastline.  We see someone speaking to us holding a microphone explaining to us what happened.  Parents are anxiously waiting in a school parking lot to be reunited with their children after a shooting.  That same person turns the mike to a crying woman holding a baby or a person who has just managed to escape a burning building.  The person with the microphone may be wearing a helmet and the buildings behind them are nothing more than rubble; dust clouds can still be seen spiraling upwards.  Over the pictures we see; sounds of gunfire and bombs can be heard.  

     The next time we watch people reporting from dangerous areas we must remember that they may travel the world, see exotic locales, and eat foreign delicacies but... maybe they haven’t been able to wash their hair or shower for a few days or slept in a comfortable bed.  They have families at home that want them to be safe.  Some may be worried about the snakes in the flood waters they're standing in just to get a good shot or flying pieces of debris during a storm.  Some like Ernie, remain vigilant, knowing a bullet or bomb may be headed in their direction.  They are not standing there alone.  Someone is running the camera to get the best views for us to see the story.  There may be another person there setting up interviews or getting more information to pass on to us.  Just like any other occupation, some days are good, some days are bad, and some days could prove deadly.  These men and women deserve our respect.

Between 1995 and 2022,  1,668 journalists were killed

At least 15 journalists were killed since August covering the Ukraine/Russia war

As of October 15, at least 12 journalists were killed in Israel/Hamas war.  2 are missing and 8 injured

Sharon

An Author Bursting With Ideas

Many years ago, Jerry and I were fortunate enough to becomes friends with a young fan of our books,(always a good sign of a reader's remarkable intelligence), who aspired to become a writer.  He was always plotting out new stories and researching fine details to make them more interesting.  As for so many of us, life sorta got in the way and while he was still plotting them, the actual writing was put on hold.

Moving forward, these stories are no longer on hold.  Don has been busily putting his epic tales in book form for our reading pleasure.  His first two books are the start of a diverse character driven military-style, Science Fiction series entitled FIRST GUARD. Lots of action!  But that's not all!  He is indeed bursting with stories to tell in many different genres.  Let me introduce you to author DON TOPE

WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO BECOME A WRITER?

I started writing as a kid in school, writing short stories. Later I wrote scenes. Then I met Jerry and kind man that he was, he put up with me picking his brain, ‘how do you do this?’, ‘how do you do that?’, ‘How do I make this look like it isn’t?’ He patiently listened and walked me through it. Then I reached out to other writers and picked their brains. As I got older and raised a family, writing got put on the back burner, then one day I took it out and I finished something.  Several somethings later, I finished First Guard, which I started back in the 80’s and then mothballed it. Then I pulled it out and finished it.

GIVE A SHORT SYNOPSIS OF THE FIRST GUARD STORY

Fair warning. Spoiler alerts:

A benevolent empire,falling into corruption, loses a civil war with an evil confederacy. The queen and her family are trapped behind enemy lines. On the run they discover the survivors of an ancient race and a powerful creature.  Her personal guard are keeping her and her family safe while trying to get them home but there is an ancient prophesy that foretells all of this.

     In their effort to get home they become stranded on a back water world, staying out of sight, blending in. Her people back home are working tirelessly to track her down. Her rescuers find them only to have the direst part of the prophesy play out with them as participants while still having to cross a galaxy of enemy territory.

     This is an epic style story that follows the adventures of several groups of characters, showing how the paths of each of them plays out only to bring them all together again.

ARE THERE ANY SIMILARTIES BETWEEN TODAY'S COURSE OF EVENTS AND YOUR FICTIONAL STORY?

I wrote one of the opening scenes in the 80’s on a trip to Georgia. That scene would later become First Guard. I worked on it on and off over the years then shelved it for a long time, before taking it out and finishing it.

     The politics in the story are for the most part the same but today’s events seem to mirror some of it, with one exception, that being that today’s events are much more extreme than when I started the book. You see people being canceled and attacked for exercising free speech, and not agreeing with the left. You see attacks on people for their faith, and for people having the audacity to stand up for our country and traditional values.

THE STORY IS VERY CHARACTER DRIVEN.  ARE ANY CHARACTERS BASED ON REAL PEOPLE OR GROUPS?

My father was a medic in Vietnam, I have a lot of friends that are vets. I wanted to show what vets are up against, and show their struggles are real and there is hope.  I wanted to show various other victims of trauma in the story finding hope and a path to healing.  I have family members with ashburgers, what we now call neural diverse, and I’ve seen many times how they are treated. TV shows even openly mock them. That’s why I have a character that is neural diverse, and he stands up and does what’s needed despite the odds against him and what people think about him.

DO YOU SEE ANY OF THE TECHNOLOGY YOU CREATED FOR THIS SERIES BECOMING REALITY IN THE NEAR FUTURE?

In general, not really, with what the ships can do, they would need armor, or shields, or force fields or whatever you want to call them to keep from being destroyed at the speeds they travel. A single speck of dust can destroy a ship at close to light speed, not to mention faster. The energy alone needed to accomplish these things is well beyond our reach yet.  The same for the weapons, the power source is out of reach at this time.

     The closest thing I could see being developed today is the comms. The future version of the cell phone. You don’t see it much in the first book, but it makes it’s appearance a lot more in the next two. The comms are hand held in low tech areas of the galaxy, like they are on earth today, but in other places their comms are a piece implanted behind the ear, that can display on the eyes retina, and pipe sounds directly into the audio nerve. I can see that in the not too distant future.

HAVE ANY OF YOUR CHILDREN READ FIRST GUARD AND IF SO, WHAT DO THEY THINK OF THEIR DAD'S STORYTELLING?

No, I’ve asked a couple of them to read it and tell me what they thought. You’d think I’d asked them to clean the garage and write me a one page report on it. (I COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND)

ANY MORE BOOKS YOU'VE WRITTEN, OR IN THE PROCESS OF WRITING, THAT WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT? 

The sequel to First Guard is out now, The Remnant Shall Rise.

     I have another book series that is Urban Fantasy called the Rise of the Fallen under the pen name T.D. Raymond. There are three books out now in that series. Jack Frost, Brimstone, and Apocalypse.  I am currently working on Volume 3 of First Guard.  All of my books are available as ebook and print.

     I have a few other projects in other genres I want to write. One is a sword and shield fantasy, and a spy thriller, and a few others.

Don tope lives in the Midwest with his wife, seven children, and three dogs.  In his life he has been a nurse, construction worker, packing house worker, and worked for a commercial honey producer.  He has spent over twenty years in Information Technology.  You can learn more about Don and where to find his various books at Haniel House Press. https://hanielhouse.com/ and https://books2read.com/u/mvqkKJ

Sharon