I have never been one to abide an arbitrary exercise or willful abuse of power. Right is right; wrong is wrong. I was an advocate of the weak and outcast, grounded in strong ideals of right and wrong, rectification for its own sake, redemption as its own end.
Behold, I have made your face as hard as their faces, and your forehead as hard as their foreheads. Ezekiel 3:8
But he stood in the midst of the ground, and defended it, and slew the Philistines: and the Lord wrought a great victory. 2Sam 23:12
Those who spend any time around me quickly note a profound neurodivergence. More than just 2σ-ADHD and an auditory processing SLD, as I aged the evolution of my eccentricities and angularities strongly suggested highly compensated autism. And as one man said to me in 2022, if you’re not autistic, you’re damn sure in the zip code. Perhaps Adrian Monk is my doppelgänger.
I earned a doctorate which makes me “an expert” in Latin-American colonial writings and “an authority” on the Maya narrative known as Popol Vuh.
I suppose academic achievement does not mean much to most people. Yet when it comes to speaking truth to power, this solemn credential signals substantive discourse not to be casually dismissed. It represents a honed acumen for critical thinking, analysis, and disputation.
America is scornful and hateful from its 1620 start. Puritans developed an entitlement for religious judgment, intolerance, and expulsion of everyone with lesser piety. Religion-amuck brought Salem trials for mouthy wives (“witches”), hatred and robbery of Indians (“savages”), oppression and abuse of southern blacks (“negros”), McCarthy scourges of First-Amendment speech (“communists”), ostracization of homosexuals and transgenders (“perverts”). Americans have a pathological quest to anchor themselves by signposts of “sameness” and objectifications of “otherness.”
So to all those who revile me with labels and without actual cause, I say:
