Orlando...

I've been in shock for a couple of days now. A man walked into a nightclub in Orlando Florida and opened fire, killing fifty people. Like every other blogger out there, I feel compelled to give my two cents worth on the tragedy in Orlando. There is a sickness in the world (particularly in the United States), and lots of us are talking about it. So here it is, my opinion. Take it or leave it.

News stations are calling it an act of terrorism, claiming that the shooter had ties to ISIS, claiming that terrorist sects claim responsibility... It's all bullshit. Here's what happened:  It was a hate crime, plain and simple. A man walked into a nightclub, the patronage of which were members of the LGBTQ community, and opened fire. This raises two questions:  The first one, of course, being "Why?" The second one being "Why are the media treating this as anything other than the hate crime it is?"  I don't have an answer to the second one. But the first one? Yeah.  I know why.

Let's first look at the shooter, whose name I'll not put in print because I don't want to give him any notoriety. This guy was, on the surface, a happily married-with-children Christian Muslim father. According to reports, the week previous to the shooting, he became offended when his wife and kids saw two men kissing in Orlando. This, his father said, was the catalyst that caused his explosion of hatred and pain into that nightclub. Two men. Showing love for each other. Did either of them harm him? No. Did their lives matter to him? No. Did he even know they existed prior to that moment? No. But their very existence so vexed him that he had to commit an act of domestic terrorism to wipe out the gay menace.

But wait.

Then something interesting came out. The gay club he shot up? HE FREQUENTED IT. Not visited, not cased the place. He'd been in the club as a patron more than twenty times. He used gay dating apps and, according to some, propositioned men for sex, all the while continuing to keep up his stance that homosexuality is against the word of God, and is therefore wrong.

See where I'm going with this?

Take a child. Any child. That child feels love toward one thing or another. Then you, the parent, tell the child that such love is wrong and shameful. You tell the child that you won't love him anymore if he continues that kind of behavior. What you've done is created the perfect recipe for a psychopath. It's wrong thinks the child. But I feel this way, so I must be bad. I have to hide what I am. But if I'm that thing, I'm bad. I don't want to be bad. I have to get rid of what's bad so I won't feel tempted toward it anymore.  Though years of conditioning, shaming, blaming, and persecution, you create an unstable individual that hates everything that he is because he can't be it. And so he goes out and buys a gun, but not just any gun. He goes out and buys the kind of gun for which there can be no other use. Fast shots, high power. His only purpose was to kill a lot of people in a short period of time. Why? Because he hated them for being gay. Just like he was. Because someone, somewhere, told him that if he was gay, he was a mistake. God wouldn't love him. Parents wouldn't love him. If he was gay, he was bad.

Now let me drop a little common sense and truth on you people: If your religion, no matter what it is, teaches hatred and bigotry in any form, it is wrong. Wrong. It's not a religion anymore. It's a hate group. It. Is. Wrong. Period. I've not been a member of the Christian faith for a while now. I was raised Baptist, and my whole formative opinion of the religion was one in which hatred was the norm, the true path to heaven was money, and shitty people did shitty things except on Sundays when they got together and lied about how shitty they were. I've since learned that most members of the Christian religion aren't like that, but I can't go back. I still remember the taunts of faggot and queer, and they weren't even directed at me. They were directed at sweet kids in my Sunday-School class. In a church. Where the teachings should be centered on "love thy neighbor."

But, as I've said in the past, it's always the crazy ones who ruin it for the rest of us.

And while we're on the subject, there is only one reason a gun like that one exists. You can scream second amendment or hunting or home defense all you want to, but that gun exists for one reason, and one only. Lots of bullets, short period of time. Kill lots of people.

To the LGBTQ community, my heart aches for you. Everyone deserves to be loved. Everyone deserves to enjoy their lives, and to pursue that happiness with whomever you want. Love is never bad. Love is something to which we can all aspire. I'm so very saddened by this act of hatred, and I know it will take time to heal, but heal you shall. So many great strides are being made toward equality that I hope none of you give up. I hope you all stand tall and proud of who you are. And I will stand with you. I have so many friends who are gay, lesbian, trans... Only they're not gay, lesbian, trans, or any other label to me.  They're just my friends. I love them. And if anything like this happened to any of them, I'd be screaming at the top of my lungs for justice.

The shooter took the coward's way out. There will be no justice for this senseless crime. And that's the hardest part. The perpetrators of this tragedy all point at him and say "we don't know why," but they damned sure do. They made him. They made the hatred. They fostered it, nurtured it, and perpetuated it. And it needs to stop.

If you're the church-going type, I encourage you to go to your church and take a good look around. If your church preaches hatred or intolerance (which is like "hatred-lite"), leave. Believe in whatever God you want, but don't put that faith blindly into the hands of men who hate. Don't give yourself to that kind of cancerous nature. The LGBTQ community only wants to live, to have basic rights and dignity. They want the same things you do. They are you.

In closing... I said I won't give the shooter's name a mention because I don't want to give him that kind of power or press. I hope his name is forgotten, though not his actions. But there are people who must never be forgotten. There are people who did not deserve to die that night, who went out with loved ones to enjoy their lives, and whose lives were cut short. These are their names. Lest we forget.

• Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34
• Stanley Almodovar III, 23
• Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, 20
• Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22
• Kimberly Morris, 37
• Luis S. Vielma, 22
• Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30
• Amanda Alvear, 25
• Enrique L. Rios Jr., 25
• Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35
• Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32
• Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega, 24
• Javier Jorge-Reyes, 40
• Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37
• Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 
• Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, 22
• Darryl Roman Burt II, 29
• Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32
• Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21
• Anthony Luis Laureanodisla, 25
• Geraldo A. Ortiz-Jimenez, 25
• Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, 50
• Martin Benitez Torres, 33
• Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26
• Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35
• Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, 25
• Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez, 31
• Oscar A. Aracena-Montero, 26
• Miguel Angel Honorato, 30
• Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32
• Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19
• Cory James Connell, 21
• Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, 37
• Luis Daniel Conde, 39
• Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33
• Juan Chevez-Martinez, 25
• Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36
• Jerald Arthur Wright, 31
• Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 
• Jean C. Nives Rodriguez, 27
• Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, 33 
• Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, 49
• Yilmary Rodriguez Sulivan, 24
• Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 
• Angel L. Candelario-Padro, 28 
• Frank Hernandez, 27 
• Paul Terrell Henry, 41
• Antonio Davon Brown, 29
• Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24
• Akyra Murray, 18

Scott's Guide to Parenting

I do a lot of things.  Writer, martial artist, maniac... But there are very few things that actually define me. Those are things that are so ingrained on my system that to deny them would be to deny myself. Perhaps chief among those things is that I am, and always shall be, a father. It doesn't matter how important the meeting, how near the deadline, or how tight the budget, my kids come first. Period. Deal with it, or get out of my life. 

When I was younger, I didn't want kids.  Frankly, I was terrified of them. What could I possibly have to offer a child? I'm certainly not anyone's idea of a role model, and  as a grumpy selfish bastard, I figured children would have better things to do than hang out with a pile of misery like me. At least, that's what I told everyone. The truth wasn't far off the mark, but there was more to it. See, my biggest fear was that I would let them down. That they would hurt me in some way. That I would screw them up and make little monsters that were just like me. Also, children are noisy, smelly, and expensive. Don't roll your eyes at me. If you're a parent, you know it's true. If you say it's not, you're lying and you know it. 

I now have two kids, Anna and Zoe.

I wasn't ready to be a father when I met Anna. She was a year and a half old when her mother (Tabatha) and I started dating. But I fell so very much in love with her. That little smile, her bright eyes, her blonde hair... She melted my cold heart and I embraced being a father. And I made mistakes. Lots of 'em. And one of the biggest ones was being over-protective. Turns out, there's a fine line between protecting your kid and suffocating them, and it's amazing how easy it is to tap-dance across that line. 

Protecting vs. Smothering

See, we all are guilty of making the same asinine promise to our children. You know which one it is.  Sing it along with me. "I'll never let anything happen to you." You've said it, haven't you? You know you have. And the sentiment is a beautiful one. What we mean is "I will protect you. I'd take a bullet for you. I will save you from heartache and physical pain. I will shield you from all that is wrong with the world." Cue music, hand me my cape. And, for a while, you can keep that promise. For a while, we put ourselves between our children and their poor decisions, or things out of our control. We are a human car-seat, a loving cushion of flesh and bone to fend off the monsters of the world. 

We all wear tights.  Picture it. 

But what few of us realize is that, by fulfilling that promise, we do our children a disservice. Before you recoil in horror, hear me out. If you were anything like I was as a kid, I learned a lot of hard lessons. Oh, sure, my parents told me "don't do that dangerous thing" or "you should be doing this other thing that's better for you," but when I was a kid, I needed to do those things. After all, my parents were old, right? And times were different when they were kids, right? And besides, how badly could it hurt to put my finger into the empty lightbulb socket with electricity running through it?  

Hint... Don't do this...

Often times, as parents, we have to let our kids fall so they'll learn. We don't want to. We would rather take every fall for them. But what will they do when we're not around anymore? See, sometimes, all we can do is give the advice. It's up to them whether they take it or not. And it's hard. You see your kid making a mistake, and you want to grab them and say "what the hell is wrong with you?" But that doesn't help. It doesn't teach them anything. All it does is make them resentful, or more careful about doing things where you can see them.  See, if you eliminate the consequences of bad choices, those choices aren't bad anymore. There's nothing to teach them to not do it again. And then the fall becomes harder, and far more painful, when the kid is out from under your watchful eye. 

I'll give you an example. My youngest was (this past term) a sophomore in high school. Every day, I asked her the same questions:  Do you have homework? Any tests coming up? How was your day? How are your grades? The answers that came back were usually "nope, nope, fine, fine." It drove my wife insane. But I had a plan. See, colleges typically look at the last two years of high school (junior and senior years) and SAT/ACT scores. So the sophomore year is, essentially, the last year where a student can screw around and still not mess their life up. So the plan was this: Let her deal with it. Let her figure out how to study so it best helps her, and give her a bit of leash. It worked out about as well as you think it did. 

Pictured: Grades

Oh, she passed. Barely. But it opened her eyes to the fact that her approach wasn't working. And that break-through was what she needed to get her head straight and start looking at her grades more seriously.  Which brings me to the next point. 

Yes, we let them fall. But when they fall, we are always on hand to pick them back up. When they call, we dust off the cape and help them back to their feet. As Bruce Wayne's father said: Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up. 

I love my kids. I love them more than my own life, and I'd give anything for them. Some of the most rewarding moments of my life came from them, as well as some of the happiest, and tearful, moments. No one can bring me up or down like my daughters. And I'm not saying a completely hands-off approach is in order here. I'll still prevent them from doing anything life-threatening or catastrophic. I'd take a bullet for them, jump in front of a train, or even, yes, keep my mouth closed. Does that make me a good or bad father?  I don't know. Neither one of my kids came with a users' manual. But like every other parent, I'm just trying to muddle through. 

Until next time...

SAJ