#the government is doing down there) moved into the country and then just. promptly began picking fights with the villagers and the

[theinfinitedivides]

.

ey. it my mother's country and i love it to death but Dominica does vex me sometimes fr fr

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 18, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

A year ago today, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

In his plea to Senators to convict the president, Adam Schiff (D-CA), the lead impeachment manager for the House, warned “you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country.” Schiff asked: “How much damage can Donald Trump do between now and the next election?” and then answered his own question: “A lot. A lot of damage.” “Can you have the least bit of confidence that Donald Trump will… protect our national interest over his own personal interest?” Schiff asked the senators who were about to vote on Trump’s guilt. “You know you can’t, which makes him dangerous to this country.’’

Republicans took offense at Schiff’s passionate words, seeing them as criticism of themselves. They voted to acquit Trump of the charges the House had levied against him.

And a year later, here we are. A pandemic has killed more than 312,000 of us, and numbers of infections and deaths are spiking. Today we hit a new single-day record of reported coronavirus cases with 246,914, our third daily record in a row. The economy is in shambles, with more than 6 million Americans applying for unemployment benefits. And the government has been hobbled by a massive hack from foreign operatives, likely Russians, who have hit many of our key departments.

Today it began to feel as if the Trump administration was falling apart as journalists began digging into a number of troubling stories.

Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, appointed by Trump after he fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper by tweet on November 9, this morning abruptly halted the transition briefings the Pentagon had been providing, as required by law, to the incoming Biden team. Observers were taken aback by this unprecedented halt to the transition process, as well as by the stated excuse: that Defense Department officials were overwhelmed by the number of meetings the transition required. Retired four-star general Barry R. McCaffrey, a military analyst for NBC and MSNBC, tweeted: “Pentagon abruptly halts Biden transition—MAKES NO SENSE. CLAIM THEY ARE OVERWHELMED. DOD GOES OPAQUE. TRUMP-MILLER UP TO NO GOOD. DANGER.”

After Axios published the story and outrage was building, Miller issued a statement saying the two sides had decided on a “mutually-agreed upon holiday, which begins tomorrow.” Biden transition director Yohannes Abraham promptly told reporters: “Let me be clear: there was no mutually agreed upon holiday break. In fact, we think it’s important that briefings and other engagements continue during this period as there’s no time to spare, and that’s particularly true in the aftermath of ascertainment delay," a reference to the delay in the administration’s recognition of Biden’s election.

Later, the administration suggested the sudden end to the transition briefings was because Trump was angry that the Washington Post on Wednesday had published a story showing how much money Biden could save by stopping the construction of Trump’s border wall. Anger over a story from two days ago seems like a stretch, a justification after the briefings had been cancelled for other reasons. The big story of the day, and the week, and the month, and the year, and probably of this administration, is the sweeping hack of our government by a hostile foreign power. The abrupt end to the briefings might reflect that the administration isn’t keen on giving Biden access to the crime scene.

Republicans appear to be trying to cripple the Biden administration more broadly. The country has been thrilled by the arrival of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine that promises an end to the scourge under which we’re suffering. Just tonight, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a second vaccine, produced by Moderna, for emergency authorization use. This vaccine does not require ultracold temperatures for shipping the way the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine does. Two vaccines for the coronavirus are extraordinarily good news.

But this week, as the first Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were being given, states learned that the doses the federal government had promised were not going to arrive, and no one is quite sure why. The government blamed Pfizer, which promptly blasted the government, saying it had plenty of vaccines in warehouses but had received no information about where to send them. Then the White House said there was confusion over scheduling.

Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo has been following this story, and concluded a day or so ago that the administration had made no plans for vaccine distribution beyond February 1, when the problem would be Biden’s. Kovensky also noted that it appears the administration promised vaccine distribution on an impossible timeline, deliberately raising hopes for vaccine availability that Biden couldn’t possibly fulfill. Today Kovensky noted that there are apparently doses missing and unaccounted for, but no one seems to know where they might be.

Today suggested yet another instance of Republican bad faith. With Americans hungry and increasingly homeless, the nation is desperate for another coronavirus relief bill. The House passed one last May, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to take it up. Throughout the summer and fall, negotiations on a different bill failed as Republicans demanded liability protection for businesses whose employees got coronavirus after they reopened, and Democrats demanded federal aid to states and local governments, pinched as tax revenue has fallen off during the pandemic. Now, though, with many Americans at the end of their rope, McConnell indicated he would be willing to cut a deal because the lack of a relief package is hurting the Republican Senate candidates before the runoff election in Georgia on January 5. Both sides seemed on the verge of a deal.

That deal fell apart this afternoon after Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) with the blessing of McConnell, suddenly insisted on limiting the ability of the Federal Reserve to lend money to help businesses and towns stay afloat. These were tools the Trump administration had and used, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tried to kill them after Trump lost the election. The Federal Reserve’s ability to manage fiscal markets is key to addressing recessions. Removing that power would gravely hamper Biden’s ability to help the nation climb out of the recession during his administration.

It’s hard not to see this as a move by McConnell and Senate Republicans to take away Biden’s power—power enjoyed by presidents in general, and by Trump in particular—to combat the recession in order to hobble the economy and hurt the Democrats before the 2022 election.

Money was in the news in another way today, too. Business Insider broke the story that the Trump campaign used a shell company approved by Jared Kushner to pay campaign expenses without having to disclose them to federal election regulators. The company was called American Made Media Consultants LLC. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was president, and Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew, John Pence, was vice president until the two apparently stepped down in late 2019 to work on the campaign. The treasurer was the chief financial officer of the Trump campaign, Sean Dollman.

The Trump campaign spent more than $700 million of the $1.26 billion of campaign cash it raised in the 2020 cycle through AMMC, but to whom it paid that money is hidden. Former Republican Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter is trying to take up the slack left by the currently crippled Federal Elections Commission. His organization, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan clean election group, last July accused the Trump campaign of "disguising" campaign funding of about $170 million "by laundering the funds" through AMMC.

This news adds to our understanding that Trump is leaving the White House with a large amount of cash. He has raised more than $250 million since November 3, urging his supporters to donate to his election challenges, but much of the money has gone to his own new political action committee or to the Republican National Committee. Recently, he has begged supporters to give to a “Georgia Election Fund,” suggesting that the money will go to the runoff elections for Georgia’s two senators, but 75% of the money actually goes to Trump’s new political action committee and 25% to the Republican National Committee.

Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times note that are very few limits to how Trump can spend the money from his new PAC.

—-

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

[aion-rsa]

Clark Gable and His WW2 Death Wish

https://ift.tt/3oDIaDK

Clark Gable did not intend to see action when World War II came to America. Which is not to say he ignored the war. Gable was there that day in 1940 when President Franklin Roosevelt gave his famous “Arsenal of Democracy” speech from the Oval Office. And, indeed, the first thing the movie star did when he heard about the Pearl Harbor attack was cable FDR to offer his full support—and, tellingly, the besieged president promptly answered right back.

But then in the 1930s and early ‘40s, Gable was “the King of Hollywood;” the reigning movie star who could sell more tickets than anybody this side of Shirley Temple, and he didn’t have to sing or dance to do it either. He was a mustachioed and muscular alpha who appealed to everybody, even presidents, and was one of the few leading men who would tell Louis B. Mayer no (at least until casting for Gone with the Wind came along). The government saw the value in that kind of celebrity when the dark storm clouds of war gathered over Europe and the South Pacific, and so did Gable. Still, he was practically 41 when the bombs fell in Hawaii and more than happy to support the war from afar.

As he told fellow MGM stablemate Jimmy Stewart at the latter’s going away party in 1940—Stewart had just happily joined the Army—“You know you’re throwing away your career, don’t you?” When Stewart answered yes, Gable added, “You won’t catch me doing that, but I wish you godspeed.”

Gable had success, Gable had power, and for the first time in his four decades on this earth, Gable had something approaching peace thanks to his marriage to Carole Lombard, the firecracker screwball star. Yet in less than a year, all of those things turned to ash following Lombard’s violent death. When her plane went down in a fiery blaze, it was treated as a national tragedy around the country, and for her husband it was the beginning of the end.

The King became broken, despondent, and finally disillusioned enough to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. To this day, some say he went to Europe with a death wish, and on at least one bombing raid, Capt. Gable almost had it granted as a Luftwaffe shell passed right between his feet.

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard posing for photographers shortly after their marriage in 1939.

The King and Queen of Hollywood

Women were always easy for Clark Gable, and for a time so were wives. The first Mrs. Gable was Josephine Dillon, 17 years his senior, and she was introduced to him as an acting coach by another woman who was his then-fiancée. As a handsome, if unrefined son of an Ohioan farmer, the 23-year-old Gable was perfect clay for Dillon. She turned him into her greatest student, teaching him how to lower his voice and hold your attention. As his patron and wife, Dillon also introduced Gable to all her Broadway connections and the adjacent stock companies. It was even as the star of one of those companies that he met Maria Langham, a wealthy widow and oil heiress who was also 17 years his senior. 

As the second Mrs. Gable, Ria introduced Gable to Manhattan’s high society and exquisite living, teaching him social etiquette and the value of a finely tailored tuxedo. One wife taught him how to play at being an actor, and the other taught him how to play at being a gentleman. They served their purposes and they were both brushed off.

But Lombard? He couldn’t brush her off ever.

The first time Clark met Carole, it was a surprisingly chaste affair. The two were cast as the leads of 1932’s No Man of Her Own. Unlike many of his leading ladies in the 1930s, Gable made no passes at Lombard, who was married to movie star William Powell at the time and intended to remain that way. Nevertheless, they hit it off, as the breathlessly quick-witted Lombard did with almost everyone.

Gable wasn’t yet “the King of Hollywood” then, but he was well on his way. Two years later, he’d star in the film that popularized screwball comedies, It Happened One Night (1934), which won him an Oscar for Best Actor, and two years after that he would lead the granddaddy of all disaster movies, San Francisco (1936). By ’38, he was already Tinseltown royalty when then-gossip columnist Ed Sullivan overheard Gable’s drinking buddy and sometime-rival, Spencer Tracy, affectionately refer to him as “King.” Sullivan immediately lit upon the idea of holding a national poll for the “King and Queen of Hollywood.”

More than 20 million people voted and, by a huge majority, Gable was crowned “King” for the rest of his career. Meanwhile, Myrna Loy was elected “Queen of Hollywood.” The fact they were then filming MGM’s Test Pilot (with Tracy) certainly suggests the results might’ve been tampered with. It also likely struck Loy as ironic since her first encounter with Gable ended with her pushing him into a hedge bush after he drunkenly bit the back of her neck while his second wife, Ria, was sitting in a nearby car. Gable refused for years to talk to Loy socially after that rejection, including between takes on film sets.

So yes, the King was a womanizer—complete with a secret baby born out of wedlock to co-star Loretta Young—in a sham marriage at the beginning of his reign. But things began changing when he finally ran into Lombard again, and at last he found his matching monarch.

It was at the White Ball in 1936 that the pair’s paths crossed a second time. By now, Clark was fully estranged from Ria, and the two lived in separate houses. Lombard, meanwhile, had risen to her own stardom by bringing her transgressive life-of-the-party persona to recent screwball comedies directed by Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch. Vivacious, whip smart, and an eventual inspiration for Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lombard was a hard-drinking and giddy star with her own orbit.

According to Clark Gable: A Biography by Warren G. Harris, when Gable saw Lombard on the dance floor, he went up and said, “I go for you, Ma.” After a moment’s confusion, Lombard realized he was quoting their characters’ nicknames for each other in No Man of Her Own from four years earlier. She responded, “I go for you too, Pa.”

For the rest of their lives, they’d always refer to each other as “Ma” and “Pa.”

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard play with horses at the Encino ranch in 1939.

The Love of His Life

That first night on the dance floor actually ended in the pair’s first of many fights. But in a trick that would come to define the pattern of their relationship, Gable woke up the next morning in his hotel room with two doves sitting on his chest. They’d been secreted there with a note on one’s leg: “How about it? Carole.” 

Unlike Gable’s other romantic entanglements, Lombard always controlled the tone and tempo of their courtship while Gable offered Lombard an escape from the glamour goddess, society girl image she’d molded herself to in Hollywood. She was an athlete growing up and, alongside Pa, she picked up outdoor-living again.

Clark taught Carole rifling, skeet-shooting, and camping. In ’38, she joined what had up to that point been Gable’s all-male hunting club with fellow actors and Hollywood talent. When the other men complained about a woman being present and sharing their bathroom, she brought along her own trailer with a private bathroom—taunting Clark and the others by then keeping him out. She crawled in the mud next to the dudes, and would soon be on all of the Gables’ hunting trips.

The pair eloped in ’39 after three years of courtship. This occurred in large part because Photoplay magazine revealed the two were living in sin (Gable was still married and too chintzy to get a divorce). Shortly after the embarrassment, however, Gable paid off his second wife and Lombard became the third Mrs. Gable.

“I just think of that husband of mine all the time,” Lombard once said with her usual candor. “I’m really stuck on the bastard. And it isn’t all that great lover crap, because if you want to know the truth, I’ve had better. No, I’m nuts about him and not just about his nuts.”

When the two moved into their Encino ranch, Gable made his gun collection the centerpiece when you walked in the front door, and Lombard began raising chickens and cattle. It was about as far from Beverly Hills as you could get, or as Lombard enthused, “The best little shit house in the San Fernando Valley.”

It was here that Lombard planned to soon retire, beginning with a one-year sabbatical in an effort to have children. Yet after a year of trying, they only had two miscarriages to show for it. They agreed to keep trying, but they’d soon run out of chances.

Clark Gable and wife Carole Lombard circa 1940.

The Loss of His Life

When the bombs fell in Pearl Harbor, it was Carole who urged Clark to telegraph Roosevelt as soon as possible. She was also in the White House for the president’s fireside chat in 1940. And unlike Gable, she was furious when the president responded, “You are needed where you are.”

With the war finally here, Lombard urged Gable to join the Army in December 1941 while she hoped to join the Red Cross. For Christmas, instead of her usual lavish presents she sent all her friends engravings announcing she’d made a donation to the Red Cross in their name. And when she got wind of MGM publicity chief Howard Strickling trying to position Gable for a safe desk job in Washington D.C. for the course of the war, she told both men, “The last thing I want for Pappy is one of those phony commissions!”

Gable preferred helping the war where FDR told him he should—from the comfort of Hollywood. On Dec. 22, 1941, he presided over the first meeting of the Screen Actors Division of the Hollywood Victory Committee as its newly appointed chairman. The committee functioned as a way for Hollywood stars and leaders to organize all activities in support of the war effort. His wife was the first at the meeting to pledge her cooperation in donations, bond rallies, and touring the troops.

When a request came from the Treasury Department for the Victory Committee to launch Indiana’s participation in the national campaign of selling war bonds on Jan. 15, 1942, Gable recognized his Indiana-born wife as the perfect talent to send along. Carole was thrilled to go, although apprehensive about leaving Clark behind.

Gable couldn’t join his wife on her journey by train because he was about to start work on Somewhere I’ll Find You: his second film with Lana Turner. Up until then, Carole had been very open-minded about Gable’s continued infidelities and little affairs, even after they were married. She turned a blind eye to more than one rumor of him sleeping with a co-star here, or a starstruck journalist there, because she assumed you had to let Clark Gable be Clark Gable. But she drew the line over rumors about Clark and Lana, the latter of whom was infamously dubbed the “Sweater Girl” when she was discovered at a soda fountain at age 16. Blonde and buxom, Turner was 20-years-old when she first worked with the 40-year-old Gable. These stories did get to Lombard.

The evening before she left for Indiana, the couple had a huge blowout during which Clark failed to convince his wife he never slept with Lana Turner. The last night Gable and Lombard were under the same roof, they slept in different beds. The next morning, he did not see his wife off to the train station.

As with many of their fights, things cooled almost immediately. Before she left, Lombard still delivered a pack of handwritten love letters to her live-in secretary Jean Garceau to deliver to Clark, one at a time, everyday she was away. She also had the prank she planned before their fight still be delivered, so when Gable returned home from work that night he found a naked blonde dummy in his bed with a note. “So you won’t be lonely.” Gable reportedly laughed until he had tears in his eyes.

According to Garceau when the two talked by phone the next night, they sounded like “lovebirds” again. And according to the You Must Remember This podcast, Gable had Carole’s hotel room in Indianapolis be covered in red roses when she got in. But before even then, Lombard’s train stopped in Salt Lake City where she saw the troops marching and immediately telegraphed her husband, “HEY PAPPY, YOU’D BETTER GET INTO THIS MAN’S ARMY.”

On Jan. 15, Lombard intended to raise $500,000 in war bonds. Instead, she raised over $2 million. Afterward, she was so eager to get home to Gable following their fight that she decided she’d fly back to California instead of returning by train. This was expressly forbidden by the Treasury Department. Commercial travel was still relatively dicey, and they feared she’d be a target for Nazi saboteurs. Additionally, she was traveling with her mother Elizabeth Peters, a superstitious woman who’d never flown and was deathly afraid to start now. She was also there with Otto Winkler, Gable’s publicist and buddy who was best man at their wedding.

The morning their flight was to leave Indianapolis, Otto got Carole to at least agree to a coin toss. Heads they fly, tails they take the train. Carole won. From Indianapolis, they would make multiple stops, including Wichita, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas. TWA Flight Number 3 never reached Burbank.

That night Gable arranged a surprise party to welcome the three heroes back—as well as a surprise male dummy with an erection waiting for Carole upstairs. He was reportedly giddy waiting for the phone call from limo driver Larry Barbier, who was supposed to report when they landed. Instead, Clark got a call from MGM fixer Eddie Mannix.

“Can I get back to you?” Gable asked. “I’m expecting word on Ma’s arrival any minute.”

Mannix cut him off. “King, that’s why I’m calling. Larry Barbier just phoned from the airport. Carole’s plane went down just a few minutes after it left Las Vegas.” She was gone.

Clark Gable stands next to co-pilot Lt. Col. Robert W Burns beneath B-17 “The Duchess” after bombing raid in September 1943.

Clark Gable Goes to War

The fallout from the literal wreckage of Lombard’s flight was national news. A bewildered Gable joined Mannix and other MGM brass for their own chartered flight to Vegas. He could see the burning debris that Lombard’s flight smeared across Table Rock Mountain from the air. Locals in the city described it as “apocalyptic” and like an “inferno.”

Mannix refused to let Gable go on the rescue party climbing the mountain—convincing him Carole, Otto, and Bettie might have survived and were now walking to the city. So the star stayed behind and drank. The next morning, he received a cable from Mannix. “NO SURVIVORS. ALL KILLED INSTANTLY.”

In truth, the bodies of Lombard and everyone else on board had been more or less cremated by the fire after impact. And while Mannix couldn’t be certain, he believed he found what was left of Carole: a decapitated, charred body with a few blonde strands of hair and the remnants of a ruby and diamond pin Gable had given his wife the year before. He never told Clark about what he saw, but brought back the hairs and piece of ruby.

The next day, FDR sent Gable private condolences and publicly awarded Lombard a medal as “the first woman to be killed in action in the defense of her country in its war against the Axis powers.”

The official and (likely) reason for that flight’s crash is it was overloaded with servicemen and movie star luggage, and the pilot failed to see the mountain in front of him, on which all lights had been turned off to preserve wartime power. Although, according to Orson Welles (as per You Must Remember This), Hollywood and government insiders all knew Nazi saboteurs did in fact bring down the plane, and Roosevelt covered it up to prevent a nationwide panic.

In the months that followed, Gable grew quiet and despondent, losing 20 pounds despite drinking untold amounts of Scotch every day. He dined alone for all meals and began wearing a locket with Carole’s hair and ruby remnants within. According to household staff, he rarely slept and stayed up all hours of the night watching 16mm prints of Lombard’s old movies he had sent over (she’d given him the projector as a Christmas present). Now he had time for no woman except the one he lost.

When he discovered MGM was still trying to keep him from being drafted—with the age range now being raised to 45—Gable grew furious. A scriptwriter pal put him in touch with Col. Luke Smith of the Army Air Corps, who told Gable he should consider applying for training as an aerial gunner since it’s one of those jobs no one seems interested in.

“Everybody wants to be a pilot,” Smith told Gable. “Your becoming a gunner would help to glorify the plane crews and the grease monkeys.” Gable made up his mind to enlist in spite of the wrath of MGM head Louis B. Mayer. He also defied the constraints of his age of 41 by passing the physical—save for the need of getting triplicates of his new dentures (Gable had false teeth his whole career).

On Aug. 12, 1942, Gable enlisted into the Army air force. Right beforehand he told Jill Winkler, Otto’s widow, “I’m going in, and I don’t expect to come back, and I don’t really give a hoot whether I do or not.”

Capt. Gable posing for the press with a gunner’s weapon in June 1943.

The Aerial Gunner with a Death Wish

There is still much speculation over whether Gable actually wanted to die in World War II. His superiors eventually reached that conclusion based on his cavalier attitude, and he at least seemed ambivalent about the whole affair. However, it is interesting he joined the air force considering that, after Lombard’s death, he developed a fear of flying for the rest of his life. Following the war, he would always prefer to make his transatlantic crossings by ocean liners instead of planes.

But during the war? Frankly, he didn’t seem to give a damn one way or the other.

Gable’s biggest fear during the whole conflict was his struggle to pass officer’s training in a 90-day course stateside. A high school dropout, Gable was challenged by the academic course work, which he ultimately got around by treating each textbook like a script he needed to memorize.

Once he was an officer (and allowed to grow back his trademark mustache), he seemed in relatively good spirits for the first time in months. Before going overseas, he told Garceau, “I have everything in the world anyone could want, but for one thing. All I really need and want is Ma.”

In April 1943, Gable was shipped off to join the 351st Heavy Bombardment Group in Peterborough, England, about 80 miles north of London. Gable also received an automatic promotion to the rank of captain, although this had as much to do with the heavy losses of Allied officers as it did with Gable’s leadership.

In truth, Gable likely enjoyed playing the part of officer more than he entirely became it. The military loved letting him pose for the press as a gunner with a bombardier’s bullets wrapped around his neck, but that wasn’t his actual job. While Gable did on at least two occasions take on the role of aerial gunner in combat, his official role was as an observational gunner—he was there to pick up the weapons in the side or rear of a B-17 if the gunner operating it was injured or killed (which did happen).

Otherwise, Gable was there because the Army wanted him to film footage they could use as propaganda, glorifying the role of gunners. While in officer’s school, the Army reunited Gable with cinematographer Andy McIntyre, who would become his sidekick and cameraman in the air. And after his graduation, Gable arranged the transfer of his scriptwriting buddy John Lee Mahin, then a lieutenant serving as an instructor in Combat Intelligence, to join them. In all, Gable and McIntyre built a film crew of six men to film the other fliers on B-17 missions. They were called “the Little Hollywood Group.”

More than twice the age of many of the pilots and gunners he flew with, Gable found himself facing heavy skepticism in his early training.

“None of the kids believed he was going to do anything at all,” Mahin recalled in Warren’s Clark Gable biography. “They never thought he was going to expose himself to any kind of danger. They said it was all a lot of bullshit. It really killed Clark that the kids shunned him.”

The brass, however, loved Gable at first. Many of his superiors invited him nearly every night to dinner, an annoyance he’d soon relegate to one evening a week. And while he welcomed the press to photograph him at the planes, he also refused the special treatment of having private quarters set up, which earned him more respect from the young fliers.

He’d also soon prove himself as a member of Col. William Hatcher’s Chickens (a nickname for his bombing group) when he went up in the air on May 4, 1943. Hatcher was onboard the same B-17 that day as group commander and co-pilot; the 351st were tasked with taking out several factories in Nazi-occupied Antwerp, Belgium.

During Gable’s first combat mission, flak from ground defenses took out one of the plane’s four engines and its stabilizer. More unnervingly, after delivering the plane’s payload, a German’s 20mm shell pierced the center of the plane, with the corner of the shell passing through the heel of Gable’s boot—lifting it clean off—and then exiting the aircraft inches above Gable’s head.

On another mission, Gable took over for gunners who were wounded or killed (there was at least one of each that day). Fifteen holes were found in the fuselage. For Gable, such horrors were also a vindication, as he fully won the respect of the kids around him.

“They adored him,” Mahin recalled. “They couldn’t stay away from him. And he was proud that they accepted him.”

Portrait of Capt. Gable after arriving in England in 1943 as part of the the 351st Bombardment Group.

Hitler’s Prize

At Peterborough, Gable grew increasingly chummy with the other fliers serving. He bought a used motorcycle and would make small talk on trips around the base. And on more than a few weekends, he would head to London to screen at MGM offices some of the footage he shot in the air. He also would meet with his pre-war Hollywood chum, David Niven, who was serving as an instructor for British Commandos and had recently married and had a son.

“From then on our cottage became Clark’s refuge from military life,” Niven recalled. “With Carole’s death, he had been dealt the cruelest of blows, but on the surface at least, he was making the best of it. In his own deep misery, he found it possible to rejoice over the great happiness that had come my way, and he became devoted to my little family.”

Niven added, “Clark’s personal wounds seemed to be healing, but Carole was never far from him, and the very happiness of our little group would sometimes overwhelm him. [My wife] found him one evening on an upturned wheelbarrow in the garden, his head in his hands, weeping uncontrollably.”

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Still, Gable seemed to be settling into a new happy rhythm of camaraderie on the base, frequent trips to London, and even playing the field. He renewed an affair with a pre-Lombard paramour in London, the English (and now married with children) Elizabeth Allan. Nonetheless, he may have been enjoying himself too much for his superiors’ liking.

Robert Matzen, author of Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe and Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3, told me he believed Gable had a death wish.

“Carole Lombard, his wife, wanted him to go fight and she’s killed,” Matzen said. “So he then decides, ‘Alright, I’ll go fight and hopefully I’ll be killed too.’ That’s why he wanted to be in the Eighth Air Force, because he wanted to die in a plane crash.” Also, unlike Stewart, Matzen stressed, Gable never fully adapted to military culture.

Said Matzen, “Gable was much more interested in being Clark Gable in England than Jim Stewart was interested in being Jimmy Stewart in England.” This weighed on the mind of Col. Hatcher, as did the growing understanding that every B-17 Gable was on became a prize for Nazi Germany.

The day the 351st arrived in England, Nazi radio propagandist William Joyce, aka “Lord Haw Haw,” broadcast from Berlin the following: “Welcome to England, Hatcher’s Chickens. Among whom is famous American cinema star, Clark Gable. We’ll be seeing you soon in Germany, Clark. You will be welcome there too.”

Adolf Hitler apparently adored Clark Gable, considering him his favorite American actor. A movie nut with a love for British and Hollywood cinema, Hitler even allegedly smuggled a film print of Gone with the Wind before it opened in the UK. Hitler therefore marked Gable as one of the most prized “war criminals” in the Allied Forces, offering a handsome reward to any German soldiers who can bring Gable to him alive.

The actor was terrified of being paraded through Berlin like King Kong and was only half-joking when he told a friend, “If Hitler catches me, the sonofabitch will put me in a cage like a gorilla and send me on a tour of Germany. If a plane that I’m in ever gets hit, I’m not bailing out.”

While his superiors might’ve appreciated the sentiment, they feared the humiliating spectacle of one of their gunners becoming a Nazi political tool—or the actor putting a bigger target on their bombing group. Additionally, Gable didn’t follow protocol as intended, at one point threatening a military doctor after the physician apparently said nonchalantly that Gable’s pal had hours to live while the young man was awake and listening. And, again, the opinion became that he wanted to be shot down.

So it was in October 1943, after only five combat missions, Capt. Gable was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal for “exceptionally meritorious achievement while participating in five separate bomber combat missions.” Hatcher apparently pulled the strings to get Gable out.

Clark Gable in 1960 on the set of his last film, The Misfits, with Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift.

The End

Even though Gable’s time in combat ended in October of ’43, he still wound up with 50,000 feet of film at his disposal. He was apparently shocked when he learned the air force really didn’t care what he did with the footage since gunner recruitment was up. So he returned to Los Angeles, having been reassigned to the city’s photographic division. Allowed to cut the film at MGM, Gable put together five short films that could be used for instruction on operating B-17s. But by the time it made its way through the Pentagon’s chain of command… the war was over. The footage mostly still lies unused in government archives.

After finishing the films, Gable had expected to be assigned to a new bombing division in the Pacific Theater. As he waited months for the orders to come in, he found out on the news about the D-Day landing in Europe on June 6, 1944. Feeling forgotten and discarded by the Air Corps, he requested to be discharged on June 12, which was his right as a volunteer over the age of 42. A captain named Ronald Reagan granted Gable his discharge after 670 days of service.

Clark eventually re-acclimated to Hollywood and restarted his career, but by 1945 his days as “the King” were waning, and he saw more flops accompany his diminishing hits. He also had many more affairs with leading ladies, extras, and socialites. But for years he refused to marry, telling friends, “It wouldn’t be fair. I have nothing left to give.”

For the rest of his life, Clark mourned Carole, including on Jan. 15, 1944 when he was on hand for the launch of the SS Carole Lombard. Gable was supposed to speak at the event. Instead, he mostly cried.

Eventually he did remarry, twice, and finally had one child who wasn’t disowned in secret. But after the star died of a heart attack at age 59 in 1960, his fifth wife, Kay Williams, honored his final wishes: Gable was interred at Glendale’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Next to Ma.

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[genuflectx]

4th Dimensional Being/OC - CH2

Full Length: 19,543

Chapter Length:  3,238

Main Themes: Other dimensions, tentacles, confinement, nsfw

Other Warnings: politics,  "godly" behaviors, vomit, feeling of loss of autonomy, comparison to a toy

(all images in aesthetic board are labeled for reuse with modification or are mine)

Remember the entire story (including downloads!) is up for Patrons wink wink.... enjoy CH2  (WILL BE NSFW IN LATER CHAPTERS)

The 4DB Chapter 2: Gabriel

One moment she'd been processing letters and packages for barely above minimum wage and then the next moment she'd been processed into a cold research facility. Her body was exhausted from the day-and-a-half trip. And her mind? She was still only partially sure this was truly happening. All she really understood for certain was that something had spoken to her, and that something was being called a '4DB.'

The white-coat in the heels asked to be called Gale, short for Nightingale. Chris knew this was not her actual name. Regardless, Gale was currently the nicest person she'd met so far and she was the one to finally brief her... after Chris gave her own story, of course. But when Gale did eventually explain the situation to her Chris found herself slowly sinking into awe.

The 4DB had begun speaking to seven humans on Saturday, a mere three and a half days ago. Gale had even gone so far as to give Chris the list of names, as if they would have some meaning to her: Chrysanthemum Sain, Aaron Boucher, Morgan Airhart, Cole Artrip, Nathan Hunter, John Barker, and lastly the president's name.

“And it really just wants to study us?” She'd asked.

Gale had smirked a little and folded her hands up. “Make no mistake. We are studying it, too.”

However, the 4DB did speak to the staff as well. Just in short, stern bouts of command. Do this, do that, prepare this, prepare that. It had no concern for the staff. It just wanted its six human subjects in a secure location. Seemed that the scientists being on site were a compromise.

Chris tilted her head minutely, eyes squinted. “Six? But there were seven humans?”

That made Gale chuckle. “The president will of course not be joining us.”

“...Right.”

Chris was then told a limited amount of information about the scientists' studies. Since they had so little time to re-locate on-site the facility was currently understaffed. That meant, unfortunately, no real research had begun. Though no experiments had been conducted the group was able to conclude that whatever the 4DB was it was not traceable. There were no changes in temperature nor air pressure in any of the rooms which it had spoken, neither during nor after. As far as they were able to gather with their limited resources the creature was... just not there. No one could see it. No one could feel it. All they could do was hear it and that wasn't even recordable either, as it gave no sound waves.

“Wait wait. But it touched me,” Chris had interrupted, confused.

The look of joy upon the scientist's face was genuine. “And that's why you are so interesting. It hasn't touched any of the other subjects. Well, unless they've lied to us. And we've one last subject yet to arrive as well. We will see.”

Gale continued. Though they'd yet to learn anything meaningful that would soon change. After all, the subjects were nearly gathered and her skeleton team had been diligently working to outline experiments. With the factor of the unknown it was going to be a challenge, but everyone was steeling themselves. Whatever this strange god-like creature had to say, whatever it wanted to do, her crew would be in wait ready to record it.

In short, the scientists hadn't learned shit yet. If Chris hadn't been so exhausted she'd have been frustrated. Instead she had slumped down into her chair, confusion stuck upon her features, and then promptly yawned.

The last thing Gale did was stand abruptly, finally gather Chris's cell phone up, and then open the door to the hall. “Come on, get some food. You can meet your peers and then be shown to your room.”

So here she was, sitting in a too-big cafeteria poking at strange rations upon her little plastic tray. It was like high school all over again. Chris nibbled at something green. She supposed it was meant to be peas, but it was mushed up. Like baby food. She shuttered.

Suddenly another tray clanked against the cold metal table and Chris looked up to find Cole settling in. He smiled at her, way too wired considering how little sleep they'd had. It was probably adrenaline.

“Guess they couldn't get real food in on such short notice?” He complained. “Gotta be a grocery store within driving distance right? Geez.”

It was at least nice to see him again. It had felt like hours in that dim room. Gale was kind but it did seem like she had been watching Chris way too closely.

“Feels like we're animals in a zoo,” Chris mumbled, tired. She tried to eat some more and made a face.

The older man shrugged. “Guess they told you everything too! Don't know about you but I'm looking forward to this. Doesn't it feel like something greater? Like a calling? Hey, maybe we ought to say hello to those fellas,” he gestured with a nod.

Three men sat at a further table chatting. They'd hardly glanced at Chris when she'd been shepherded in, though the youngest had smiled at her. “That's okay. I just want to eat then go to sleep. Why don't you go talk?”

Cole looked at her in thought. Then he smiled and patted her shoulder amicably. “Don't be a stranger, stranger!” He stood up and moved away.

He was a nice man. Chris wondered if he had any children. He certainly hadn't had any family photos at his house. She sighed, blinking sleepily, and hurried to try and finish her food.

They waited and waited. Chris had finished her food nearly half an hour ago. Finally Gale came into the cafeteria with another woman at her heels.

“Everyone's together now! Great! Someone will show you to your rooms shortly.”

It was like a dormitory, with two beds to a room. Everything was clean and tidy, the walls and floor a glaring white. There was at least a curtain for courtesy, which could be used to cut the room in two. Some quiet men brought their bags for them.

The woman who'd been with Gale turned out to be the final subject and was meant to share a room with Chris. She was relieved that she'd not need to sleep across from a strange man. As they unpacked and made the room more cozy Chris gave some pleasant small-talk, though the other wasn't that receptive.

“You can call me Chris. What's your name?” She asked.

The other woman, who was currently unpacking a teddy bear, answered. “Morgan.”

Chris nodded and folded some clothes away. She didn't think she could do much of this before she passed out, but it made things feel less weird. She could imagine she was back in college. Or that maybe she'd just moved. Yeah, she'd moved across country to somewhere small and warm. A cozy beach house rather than a cold, cramped dorm. She'd left her old job behind and settled into an early retirement. If only.

“So uh, where do you work Morgan?” Chris continued. “I was told everyone here is from the government.”

“The DMV,” she said curtly, frowning.

Chris chuckled awkwardly. “Oh, haha, yeah.” She didn't know why she laughed like that. For some reason it just felt tense. “I work for the post office so I know a little bit of how that must be. Lots of customer service.”

Morgan nodded. “Yeah...” She paused then moved to pull the courtesy curtain. “Well. Goodnight.”

Chris watched as the curtain cut the room, stranding her. She sighed. That was fine, she was pretty sleepy anyway. It was time for bed. She found sleep a difficult bear to wrestle. It was so cold and foreign, and no one ever really got a good night sleep somewhere cold and foreign. She could not for the life of her get her feet to warm up. When she did sleep she did not dream.

They were awoken by a knock, a metallic creak, and a “Rise and shine!”

The morning started with breakfast. And then, one by one, each member of the waiting group was taken away into another office where they were made to fill out paperwork. When they'd leave the room they'd have a lanyard and I.D. around their neck. Chris was fourth to go. She caught glimpses of the word liability as she flipped through a stack of documents. That wasn't frightening at all.

Once everyone was locked in as a member of the facility, and each had their clearance cards, they gathered before a bolted metal door. Soon a man who introduced himself as Jay began speaking, the features of his face void and controlled.

“Today the 4DB wants to talk to each of you. Individually,” he looked up over his glasses. “We will be monitoring everything. You will have a microphone attached to your chest. However, our studies have proven that we cannot hear the 4DB through the recording equipment-”

“How is that possible?” Interrupted a young man. Chris could see from his I.D. that his name was Nathan; he'd been the one to smile at her the night before.

Jay's expression flattened and wrinkled, as if he'd had to deal with this particular subject for too long already. “We have theories and those are currently classified. Now, you will go in alphabetical order and have thirty minutes each.”

Morgan cautiously rose her hand like this was a classroom. “And... what if something goes... wrong?” She questioned.

Jay blinked, Then he said: “Let's begin. Airhart Morgan, you're first,” he unlocked the great metal door.

Her eyes went wide and she froze like a rabbit on the road. Jay nearly had to force her in. After all, she was under contract now. She signed the papers like everyone else- as if they had a choice. She had to do this. Morgan took tiny bunny steps inside. When she left the room thirty minutes later her eyes were downcast and lips a tight line. She didn't want to talk.

“Artrip Cole,” Jay called.

Chris's kind older acquaintance just about skipped to the door. As everyone sat in wait for his thirty minutes to be up, Chris couldn't help but feel like she was in a doctor's office, which was of course the closest thing to purgatory one may get. She imagined the white-coat Jay as a gatekeeper, his voice calling forward those to be judged by a scrutinizing doctor's glare. Cole returned just as happy as he'd entered.

“Barker John,” Jay called.

“Boucher Aaron,” Jay called.

“Hunter Nathan,” Jay called.

Chris had been waiting for two and a half hours now. Everyone who had already spoken to the creature had left the waiting room so she remained alone. She'd had enough time to conjure up some good questions, and every time someone else came from the room with a strange expression she added a question more. Nathan came from the door and silently left the room.

“Sain Chrysanthemum,” Jay called. “Last one up.”

She stood. She slowly made way to the door. She stopped there a moment, thinking.

“Go on. Don't have all day,” Jay nudged her back.

“Right, sorry,” she nodded, entering.

Chris watched the door close gently behind her. Then there, in the center of the room, was a massive neon pink square twice her size. She gawked, speechless, and all the questions she'd accumulated leaked from her brain onto the white floor.

“Chrysanthemum,” came that loud, near mono-tone voice. It rushed into her head yet sounded from every direction at once. “Good to see you again, though I have been watching.”

She didn't register what had been said and instead stepped tentatively closer to the square. Chris was so distracted by it that she hadn't even been bothered when the 4DB called her by her full name. “What is this thing? Woah.” As she tried to walk around the square it followed. No matter what angle she took it remained a flat, consistent shape.

“It is equipment. You may only see a piece of its face or its inside, and it turns as you turn. It records your voice and your movement, just as that little equipment on your chest.”

She lifted her hand, her eyes following the plain to its high top. It felt...strangely textured. Like a giant sheet of paper, but more solid or plastic. She'd expected it to feel smooth.

The 4DB, on its other end, tilted themself curiously. “You are the only one who has touched it. Are you not still afraid, little creature?”

Chris dropped her hand and backed away. “I... guess I am a little. It's impossible not to be a little afraid of something that can bend reality. You, uuugh,” she shuttered, holding herself. “Touched my insides. It was like feeling an eel wriggle around in there.”

“Tell me about your government,” it asked abruptly, changing the subject.

She rose her brows and stared at the pink square like it was an eye. “What, the president wasn't good enough for that? Heard you talked to him.”

“You do not ask a government to judge itself. You ask those whom it affects. You work for this government and were chosen from a pool of many,” it explained. “So you will tell me.”

Chris paced slowly, looking at the ground. There was something between the lines with what it said and it bothered her. Finally, she said with no small amount of fear: “Or what?”

The 4DB was taken back. They had not expected that particular response, despite the rivers of possible time before them. “Or what?”

“I'll tell you... or what?” She waved a hand. “The scientists told us only so much, and Heaven knows they didn't give us time to read those lengthy contracts and legal documents. I'm not an idiot. We're being forced here against our will, right? There really wasn't a choice for us to come here or stay. We can't leave,” Chris stopped pacing. “If one of us doesn't cooperate like you want, will you kill us, Gabriel?”

“My name is not Gabriel.”

Chris blanked. Then she nearly doubled over with laughter, tears budding at her eyes. “That- that- all that and you only get one thing from it?”

“...I am... for once... confused,” the 4DB admitted sheepishly. “Why are you laughing? You didn't answer my question.”

She wiped the water from her eyes and caught her breath, feeling somewhat less tense. Really, of all she had just asked the thing only heard Gabriel. It reminded Chris of herself. This creature did not understand the people it was studying at all, and she supposed that was why it wanted to so badly.

“You didn't answer mine either!” She shook her head and leaned on the wall, feeling much lighter.

The 4DB's many, many tentacles twirled absentmindedly, again and again around themselves like a pool of snakes. “Your planet, your universe, your dimension, is of some interest to retain. However... you are small. And there are billions more to see.”

She felt sort of dizzy now, as if the absurdity of the situation was hitting her all over again. Just like when the creature first spoke to her in that parking lot. Chris had to let her mind slow down before speaking, though Gabriel didn't seem to care.

“So you mean yes. Yes, if we don't cooperate you'll kill us. Maybe the whole planet too,” she sighed and rubbed a hand down her cheek. “What do you want from us so badly that you'd hold us hostage for a little information?”

“We are deciding if you are worth the space you occupy, little creature,” the 4DB explained, though there was far more to it than that. After the ranting Chris had done they nearly felt too guilty to admit that playing with tiny insignificant things was just fun. Like an ant farm. One could nurture the ants or one could drown then. Were the ants of the Earth worth nurturing? That was yet to be determined.

She drummed her fingers on her forearm. So, she'd have to prove her worth. That scared her. All she could think about was that dream she'd had when she'd passed out. Those tiny, tiny shapes jittering on a plain below her feet. How they screamed in confusion. How she'd crushed a building by accident as she fell through the world. Chris looked up at the pink eye sullenly.

“Well. I guess you answered my questions, so. Our government is a business. It didn't used to be, but it is now. I mean, well it was always sort of a business, but it also sorta used to mean more than that,” she stared off in thought.

“Continue.”

She sighed and drummed her fingers on an arm some more. “There used to be more trust in it I think. But it's gotten so inflated, so... off from what it should be that even more 'traditional' thinkers are thinking twice. I guess I'm not helping my people's cause am I?” She asked sadly.

The 4DB leaned in close, keeping their body just inches from crossing the plain. “So that is how you see your leaders. Now Chris, how do they see you?”

She furrowed her brows and chewed her cheek for a moment. Then she shrugged. “Well I work for them, technically. They give me benefits. They keep the lights on. But just like any other business if I were to, for whatever reason, lose that job, I would automatically lose those benefits.”

“Explain further,” coaxed the 4DB curiously.

She liked complaining about the government as much as the next guy but it was just way too much to unravel. Hell, it wasn't like she was an expert. Chris tried, but the 4DB always had just one more question. She'd explain what 'benefits' were and then suddenly the creature wanted to know why benefits were necessary at all.

“So if your government takes your job away your health is no longer provided for?” They scrutinized.

Chris felt like these questions were just digging her in a deeper and deeper ditch. She wanted the encounter to end already. “It's not like that everywhere. Most governments don't treat their people like that.”

“That is for the others to decide,” they said.

“Others?”

They nodded invisibly. “We work to gauge your species around the planet. As a whole. I am not the only one.”

Chris stayed quiet, thinking that over. So maybe she didn't just get the world marked for destruction. Even if she thought her own government was pretty shit most of the time, the other countries around the world would surely help humanity's cause. Maybe, on average, humanity wouldn't look so bad. Maybe the 4DBs would show mercy.

“Your time is up, the workers would like you to leave the chamber. We will talk again soon, Chris.”

She drummed her fingers on her arm and stared at the tall pink square. It gave her weird mixed feelings. Finally she straightened herself and gave a small smile. “Hey, you said my name right. Too bad, you're still Gabriel,” she winked and made for the door.

Though annoyed, Gabriel replied as the door shut: “If you wish.”

Go see chapter 3 (and the rest of the story) on Patreon, otherwise stick around and wait for it to go public :}

[katefiction]

Revolution, Part 1

by katefiction (Maria) / 2014

It was a boiling hot day, the day before. I remember because George’s cheeks were bright red all day long. I’d had to resort to stripping him down to a vest and his nappy to keep him cool. It didn’t help that he’d recently discovered how to run. Every fourth step, he would lose his balance and fall to the floor, but he was so happy using his legs, chasing Lupo around the apartment and screeching as he went.

‘George, come here!’ I shouted, grabbing his arm as he ran past me.

I wiped his face and back down with a cold flannel, and made him sip on some water.

‘Ok, go’ I said, releasing him into the wild again.

The air conditioning had broken down a month back, or been switched off. We didn’t know which, but suspected the latter. We had been strongly advised not to open any windows, it would be “inviting trouble”, they had told us.

We’d had to make do with a few portable fans, but that wasn’t enough to cool down our twenty-room home. We decided instead to use only the rooms we needed and it was beginning to feel like a cage. Of course, I would never say that out loud.

With George occupied by Lupo, I sat myself down on the couch with a glass of iced tea. I never thought I’d be this kind of person. A housewife with nothing better to do than sit at home all day and watch daytime TV. But there I was expertly flicking through the channels, deciding between a DIY makeover show and a chat show. The news channels weren’t an option for me, I was sick to the teeth of the constant discussion; the repetition; the poring over of every detail hour after hour.

It was only when George commanded my attention that I snapped out of my zombie like state.

‘Da!’ he shouted, throwing his blue rhinoceros stuffed toy at my feet.

‘Georgie, don’t throw poor Ronald, that’s not nice’ I grabbed the toy and cuddled it to my chest, prompting George to reach out his little chubby arms.

I handed Ronald back to him and he smiled for a second or two before throwing him down again. ‘Da!?’

Ronald was a gift from William, and had quickly become George’s favourite toy. So much so, that he sat in George’s cot every night, standing guard over him.

‘Da? Da! Da?!’

‘Baby, he’s not home yet’, I scooped him up off the floor for a kiss and a cuddle, but he quickly wriggled out of my grasp.

Much to my annoyance, George had said ‘Da’ before he’d said ‘Mu’, which were his names for us. William had revelled in the fact that it was his first word, taunting me about it with the perseverance of a woodpecker.

Forcing myself off the couch, I decided to start on dinner. When I opened the fridge however, it was all but empty. A few vegetables sat limply in the bottom drawer and milk for George was lined up on the shelves. I sighed and slammed it shut. In the kitchen cupboard were a few cans of soup that we could eat with some bread. It riled me to see our kitchen so barren.

William came home at five, just as I was deciding between tomato and leek and potato for the third time that week.

‘Hey’ he said, leaving the door ajar for a few seconds to let some air in. His face was so tired, with dark patches under his eyes as if a storm cloud were shadowing his face.  

‘Hey, how was it?’

He rubbed his worn face with his hand. ‘They won’t budge’

I sighed and turned away from him, ‘did you ask when our food would be delivered?’

‘I forgot’

For days I regretted how I acted next, wondering if it was that which pushed him over the edge.

‘William, I asked you to do one thing!’

‘I had more important things to think about’, he said, too tired to argue.

‘More important than feeding your son?’

‘Not tonight Kate, please…’

I slammed the can of soup down on the counter and tried to pull the ring pull back, but it wouldn’t move.

‘For God’s sake!’ I muttered under my breath.

William came over to me, his body hot from the searing heat, ‘leave it, we’ll order pizza’

‘We can’t live on takeaway’ I said unreasonably.

‘George’s got puree in the freezer; we can cope with pizza tonight. I’ll sort the groceries tomorrow, I promise’

I leant back into his chest and closed my eyes, ‘I’m sorry’

‘So am I’ he said, pushing his mouth into the top of my head.

‘So, what did they say?’ I asked finally.

‘The decision was final, all my engagements are cancelled, and I’m not to be seen in public until they say so’

‘Didn’t Jamie try and convince them?’

‘He was out-numbered; there was nothing he could do’

Over the last two months, our court had been slowly transformed with letters of resignation coming in every couple of weeks, until there was only Jamie left of our original staff. He was supposed to have all but left, but loyally, he’d stayed on. In place of our trusted advisers had come strangers who were now advising us that we shouldn’t even leave our home.

‘We need to get rid of them, we can do with just Jamie for now’ I said.

‘That would be admitting defeat; we can’t do without a court’

‘Do you trust them?’

‘I don’t know’. He pulled the pizza menu from the letter rack and sat down at the breakfast bar.

That was when I knew we were in trouble. William had always been so sure of the people around him. Like a sniper, he would seek out anyone he couldn’t trust and cast them out. But that night, he was worried and he couldn’t do a thing about it.

*

The history books will tell you that the Revolution began on May 6 2014, when the general election was called a year early. Britain had gone to the dogs with riots flaring up around the country over benefit cuts, energy prices and unemployment to name just a few.

Those of us that lived through it will tell you that it had started years earlier. The recession hit the country hard, and May 6 was the eruption of all those years of struggle. When the Green Party came into power that day, with its promise of a new prosperous Britain, it bought with it republican ideals.

The Republic had campaigned against the monarchy for years, but it wasn’t until that May that the British public stood up and took notice. The first months of 2014 were harsh and aggressive with rains and storms hitting our little island with no mercy. People were being forced out of their homes as the rain water crept in, ominously seeping under the doors and destroying everything it touched. Every penny was being whittled away by fuel and food, and the country had had enough of the government that had failed to protect them. By May, it was at breaking point, and the Republic seized their chance to use it against our family, so warm and dry in our fortified homes.

WE ARE PAYING FOR THE MONARCHY TO FEAST WHILE WE STARVE! They shouted, mounted on the lions of Trafalgar Square.

The protests intensified, with echoes of the 2011 summer riots rising once again. Outside all the palaces in London, masses stood, placards in hand, calling for the abolition of the institution that had served their country almost a thousand years. Little children who had once been so excited to meet us, now chanted along with their mothers and fathers. My little family of three hid behind our four walls, watching from the window as the police attempted to turn them away. But this wasn’t a violent protest; it was controlled, thought out and passive aggressive.

‘What do they think will happen?!’ I appealed to William. ‘We’ll just throw money out of the windows, chuck in some priceless paintings and jewels, and that will solve this country’s problems?!’

‘They want us to disappear’ he said gravely, stepping back from the window. ‘We represent sickening wealth, it doesn’t’ matter that we’re trying to help. Come away from the window before you’re seen’

We continued our engagements as best we could, our police protection bumped up just in case. But this only angered them more. The two princes, once so loved for their ‘normal’ personas and giving natures were now brandished all over the papers as spoilt and useless. No amount of PR could turn them back.

In June the Queen left for her summer holiday early under the cover of darkness. No one, not even William, knew if she was truly in Scotland.

That was when the Revolution hit us. With Her Majesty gone, our staff left one by one. Our engagements were cancelled and we were told to stay inside for our “own safety”.

It was the beginning of the end.

*

Unlike our groceries, the pizzas arrived promptly, Americana for me and Margarita for William. As I laid out the food on the table, I listened to him over the baby monitor putting George to bed.

‘Ok GB, it’s way past your bedtime’, he said, as George drank down his milk. ‘You are a greedy guts, aren’t you? Look how fast you’ve drunk your milk’

George babbled in reply.

William couldn’t wait for the day that he and George could have full blown conversations, and neither could I. I hoped it would stop William giving him a new name every week. There was ‘GB’ or ‘Team GB’, an acronym ‘Giant Baby’ in reference to our baby’s 8lb, 6oz weight at birth and ‘Grumplestiltskin’ was for when he was tired and grumpy.

Then there were the names he gave me. ‘Mum-a-tron’ was his current favourite.

‘Just like Daddy aren’t you, big appetite…now where’s Ronald?’

I heard him stand up, the creak of the rocking chair audible in our state of the art monitors.

‘Ah ha, there he is. Ronald’s going to look after you, isn’t he? He’ll protect you no matter what, I promise’

I heard him kiss George and put him into his cot. He didn’t leave the room right away, and I knew he was standing over the cot looking at his son as he so often did when he had something on his mind.

‘Dinner’s up’ I said when he returned to the kitchen.

We took it over to the couch and William immediately put on the news as he had done most nights for the last couple of months. I sighed inwardly.

‘Shall we put something else on tonight?’ I asked hopefully.

‘I just want to watch this for a bit’, he replied, ignoring me.

‘Will, please, can we just have one night without thinking about all this?’ I pointed to the TV, where a member of the Republic was arguing with the presenter about taxation.

‘This is my only source of information, they aren’t telling me anything’ he said scornfully.

I sat back into the sofa, defeated by William’s stubbornness. He was right, though, because an hour later, a breaking news bulletin flashed up on the screen.

PRINCE CHARLES AND THE DUCHESS OF CORNWALL LEAVE BRITAIN

I jolted up from my slumped state as the presenter read from the auto cue that had evidently just popped up in front of her.

‘Aides to the Prince of Wales have confirmed he has left Britain for an undisclosed period. They have declined to reveal his location but confirm that the Duchess of Cornwall is with him. It comes after the Queen left for her annual holiday two months early allegedly due to increasing pressure from the public and the campaign group Republic. Royal sources this evening have revealed that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George and Prince Harry remain in the UK’

The TV was the loudest sound in the room, but my ears were focussed on William’s breathing next to me. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and wordlessly called his father. I watched as his eyes darkened and his breathing intensified. After a few seconds, he ended the call.

‘What happened?’ I asked cautiously.

He didn’t answer me, and instead called Jamie.

‘Jamie, did you see the news? … I just tried, his phone has been disconnected … did you know? … Should we be worried? … OK, I will, bye’

‘What did he say?’

‘It’s the first he’s heard of it. He hasn’t heard from Papa’. His face was so full of worry, I just wanted to reach over and comfort him. But I knew when William was stressed, he needed time to himself.

‘What now?’

‘We stay inside until they tell us otherwise’

My phone buzzed on the sofa arm. It was my mum calling.

‘Tell her we’re ok, but nothing else’ William said, spotting the caller display, ‘we don’t know if our phones are being watched’

I reluctantly did as he said. I wanted more than anything to leave that place right then and go to stay with my parents. But something in William’s tone told me to leave my family in safety.

William, meanwhile paced around the apartment double checking every window and shutting all the curtains. He locked every door he could too.

 ‘Should we go to the panic room?’ I said anxiously when he returned.

The panic room was a high tech protected zone disguised as a normal room – in our case it was hidden behind our walk in wardrobe.

 Suddenly he softened, coming over to me and taking me in his arms, ‘don’t be silly, you’re perfectly safe’

‘Then why are you locking us in here?’

‘As a precaution. As long as I’m here, you’re protected. The only time you’ll need that room is if I’m not’

I knew he was trying to placate me, and I let him because I didn’t want him to know I was scared. Looking back, I know he was doing the same thing.

We went to bed that night anxious but comforted by each other’s presence. After touching base with Harry, I insisted we bring George into our room for the night and we placed his cot as close to the bed as possible.

‘I’m sure your father’s tried to get in touch’ I began.

‘Tomorrow…we’ll talk about it tomorrow’ he said quietly, consumed by his own thoughts.

Somehow, we managed to fall asleep. It was a sleep so deep that I didn’t hear a footstep or a whisper that night, let alone hear him leave.

*

I woke up to silence. It was 6am and my body clock told me that George would wake up and demand breakfast in half an hour. When I looked to my left and right, neither of my boys were there.

It wasn’t unusual for me to wake up and find William not there. He was a light sleeper, and often he would get up before George so he could be there as soon as he woke, allowing me half an hour extra in bed. Recently, he’d been waking up before the sunrise, unable to stay in bed a moment longer than necessary.

I told myself that they were probably in the living room in front of the TV, watching the news so I lay there for a peaceful fifteen minutes, letting my body get used to being awake.

Eventually, I got up and went straight to the living room, only to find it was empty. The kitchen merely had the empty pizza boxes and menu scattered on the counter. Lupo was asleep in his basket in the corner.

Confused and trying to push down a rising sense of panic, I headed to the bathroom, which was cold and lifeless.

George’s room, I thought resolutely, chastising myself for overreacting. I would sometimes find the two of them playing in there, toys scattered all over the carpet because George only had to point and William would get whatever he wanted down from the shelf. Never mind the twenty cuddly toys already on the floor.

The room was vacant.

It was then that my heart shot into my throat.

‘William?!’ I shouted to no reply. ‘George?!’

I rushed back into the bedroom, looking for a note, checking my phone, anything. William wouldn’t have taken George for a walk without telling me, not in the current situation and certainly not without Lupo.

I felt the bile start to rise to my throat, my body breaking out into a sweat with the panic. Stay calm, I willed myself, taking deep breaths and letting my heart slow down.

I closed my eyes, and organised my thoughts. I would go through every one of our twenty rooms methodically and then and only then would I allow myself to worry. Collecting the keys from the study, I went about unlocking every door that William had locked the night before, switching on the lights to make extra sure as William had drawn all the curtains.

When I finished without finding a thing, I went back to our bedroom and did what a panicked wife and mother would do. I tried ringing him.

His phone went off within seconds, still lying on his bedside table where he always left it. My face popped up on the screen as it rang, smiling brightly into the camera. I wanted to throw it against the wall.

What was I supposed to do next? Who was I supposed to call? My mind blurred with all the things I’d been told in my training for emergencies when I’d married William. He would know what to do, I thought, my frustration momentarily overtaking my fear. I had never felt as alone as I did in that moment, my child missing, and my husband not there to calm me down.  

We hadn’t planned what I’d do without him. ‘As long as I’m here, you’re protected’, he’d said the night before as if it was so simple.

Then, as if from nowhere, and in the most inappropriate of circumstances, a memory flashed through my mind. Every year we would join my family on holiday in the Caribbean. What I loved more than anything was standing in the crystal waters, the sun on my back, waiting for the warm waves to wash over my legs. No matter what was happening in my life – an imminent break up or a tough pregnancy – that moment was like hope rushing in.

Standing in my bedroom that day, sweat dripping down my face, the same sense of hope washed over my body, a force so strong it nearly pushed me backwards.

‘The only time you’ll need that room is if I’m not’

I hurled myself towards our walk in wardrobe. The door was closed and I knew immediately someone had been inside. We never closed that door.

Switching on the light, I hurried to the end of the long narrow room, which was lined top to bottom with shelves and rails of clothes, shoes and accessories. At the back end of the room, William’s suits hung immaculately in a row and I pushed them aside roughly to reveal a small, barely visible panel concealed within the wall.

There was a brass latch along the skirting board, and I struggled to remember where it was, fumbling my fingers along it until after what felt like an age, my finger landed on the piece of cold metal. Pulling it up, I heard the panel click and it jutted out, allowing me to slide it to one side.

Behind it hid a thick, heavy metal door. The last time I’d seen it was when we’d moved in. Security had shown us just how secure it was, the loud clunk of the four door latches filling the room. It did so again as I pushed down the handle, and breathed a sigh of relief as I found that it was unlocked. Pushing it open, I entered the room. The lights were cut out and the darkness engulfed me. My other senses strained to make up for the loss of my sight.

After a few seconds, I heard him, his tiny chest heaving in his slumber.

I stumbled around the tiny square room, running my hands clumsily along the wall until I found the light switch.

George was lying in the middle of the room. I hadn’t noticed when I rushed through the wardrobe, but the bottom draw from the large chest in the closet had been removed. It usually held my knitted jumpers, and now it held my baby.

I almost screamed with relief when I saw him lying there in his makeshift cot. Next to him was Ronald. I pulled him out as gently as I could but couldn’t help but squeeze him tightly.

‘Thank God, thank God’ I whispered, kneeling on the ground. ‘How did you get in here baby?’

George fussed in my arms, displeased to be woken up.

‘Where’s Daddy?’ I said trying to stay calm. ‘Where’s your silly daddy gone?’

Taking the room in, it revealed two phones, a radio transmitter, a box of emergency unperishable food, and a small portable toilet in the corner. But no William.

Taking George with me, I circled the apartment again, looking in every single room again for sign of him. I tried to convince myself that he’d just gone out for an emergency meeting or something, but the cold silence in our home told me different.

Returning to the panic room with a bottle of milk, some food and my phone, I decided we should stay in there until I decided what to do. After all, would it be overreacting to call the office, the protection officers even? He had only been gone a few hours at the most. I took Lupo with us too, who by that time, was just as awake as George, and I hoped that they would keep each other entertained while we waited for word from William.

George now fully alert and drinking his milk happily, climbed back into the drawer. If William were there, I knew he would’ve pushed George around in it, pretending it was a boat or a tank. I knelt beside him and noticed my hands trembling.

It was at that moment that I saw it, just as George joyfully threw Ronald from the drawer. Nestled between my knits; a note written haphazardly on a scrap piece of paper.

Don’t come looking. I’m sorry.

*

Jamie arrived within half an hour of my call; as if he was expecting it. With him were two of our new “advisers”. Steven, a tall lanky man in his early forties with sandy blonde hair and sharp features was calm and controlled. In comparison, the new press secretary, Alec, overweight and balding, had been loud and brash every time we’d had the misfortune to encounter him.

‘Ma’am’, they all said, Steven and Alec bowing their heads reluctantly.

‘What exactly happened Ma’am?’ Jamie said kindly, noticing my obvious distress to which the other two were oblivious.

I explained everything from start to finish, all the essential parts anyway. ‘There’s no reason that he would leave like this, something must’ve happened’ I said calmly as I could.

‘Let’s not go over the top here’ Alec said, his voice booming around the room, ‘there’s probably an explanation – have you tried calling him?’

‘Of course I have! He left his phone here’

‘With all due respect’ Steven said, chiming in, ‘it has only been a few hours, perhaps we should wait before jumping to conclusions’

‘I’m not jumping to anything; he would not leave us like this, not after yesterday’

‘And of course we’ll do our best to help’ Jamie said.

‘But we do have a lot on, you understand, we can’t go on a wild goose chase’ Alec looked pointedly at Jamie. ‘Tell me, where’s the little one?’

‘Asleep in the nursery’ I said cautiously. I didn’t like strangers getting too close to George, and as far as I was concerned, Steven and Alec were just that.

‘I believe the duke has been under a lot of pressure recently’ Steven said coldly, ‘perhaps his leaving has something to do with domestic matters?’

I grew hot with embarrassment and anger, ‘what are you insinuating?’

 ‘Did anything happen last night that might have encouraged him to leave?’

‘We had a tiny disagreement about not having any food in the house, but it was nothing’

‘Sometimes small arguments can cause people to re-evaluate things, especially with the big changes happening of late‘

‘My husband has not left me’ I said with a shaking confidence. ’Something has happened to him, besides he hasn’t taken a single thing with him’

Steven nodded patronisingly. ‘We’ll look into it’

‘Give it a few more days though’ Alec added.

I realised then that they were going to do nothing to help me find William. I looked to Jamie for back up.

‘I’ll be right behind you’ he said to the other two, who were making moves to leave.

‘We can wait’ Steven said, halting on the spot.

Jamie looked right at me, his eyes unwavering. It was as if he were trying to communicate something to me without words. ‘I’m sure he’s just fine, Ma’am’.

* 

The following days were filled with anxious waiting and little to no sleep. It had been seventy two hours since William had disappeared and I hadn’t heard a thing. I had tried countless times to convince Jamie that we should call the police. 

At first he told me that we had to wait twenty four hours before reporting a missing person. When those twenty four hours came and I rushed down to his office to make the call, he was apologetic, telling me we should wait a bit longer.

On the third day, I was back in his office yet again.

‘The problem is Ma’am, he left a note, so he’s not technically missing’ he said, wiping his brow, the heat still searing.

‘He’s been gone three days Jamie. You know as well as I do, something isn’t right’

‘I’m afraid the police won’t see it like that, they’ll agree that he left of his own accord’.

Stephen appeared from the adjoining office after hearing my voice. I had managed to avoid him and Alec for the past three days.

‘Is there anything I can help with?’ he said, his voice sending uncomfortable waves of nausea through me.

‘Nothing’ I said shortly.

I glanced in the direction of his office, finding something to focus on that wasn’t his sharp, sly face. He stepped to one side as if to block the doorway from my view. Our old staff kept their doors open for us, happy for us to know what they were doing and discussing.

‘Where’s the little’un today?’ he asked with an informality that was clearly against every bone in his body.

‘He’s being looked after’

‘By whom may I ask? I didn’t see your mother arrive’

Stephen and Alec had CCTV monitors installed in that office. Ever since the protests outside the palace, the security had been intensified. George’s nanny had been let go too, we couldn’t let her stay with us in potential danger no matter how much George loved her. I wondered whether Stephen and Alec’s concern was not really about who was coming in, but who was going out.

‘George is fine. Thank you’ I said.

‘If you insist. Ma’am’ He nodded curtly and slid back into his office.

I bolted up the stairs the minute I left the office. How could I be so stupid to leave George with someone outside the family?

‘Antonella!’ I yelled when I got into the apartment. ‘Antonella, where are you?’

The comforting smell of tomato and basil wafted from the kitchen, followed by the shuffling feet of our some-time cook and housekeeper. Jamie had finally convinced Steven and Alec to let her return after weeks of her not being allowed “for security reasons”.

‘Yes Ma’am’ she said, her tone one of constant worry nowadays.

‘Where’s George?’ I said irrationally and out of breath.

‘In his cot Ma’am, where you left him’

Clearly, Antonella was confused by my sudden change of attitude. Ten minutes previously, I’d asked her to watch George while he was napping so I could speak to Jamie.

I ran into the nursery to check on him, where he was splayed on his front like a starfish, gentle snores escaping his mouth.

‘You should probably go’, I said to Antonella when I returned to the kitchen.

‘But what about the din-‘

‘I said go!’ I shouted this time, my steady façade gone.

She didn’t hesitate, gathering up her things and scuttling out of the door.

It was only when the door clicked shut that I let myself crumple into a heap on the floor. I gathered my knees to my chest and sobbed into them, great wells of tears that had been bursting at the seams for three days. I had no idea where William was and no hope of finding him. I had been convincing myself that he wouldn’t leave us, but spanning my mind back, my bitchiness over the food and his stress that night made me doubt myself. Maybe he just wanted out.

I picked myself up and tuned off the stove, where Antonella’s pasta sauce was close to burning. I couldn’t bear to eat anything now.

*

That night, I sat on my bedroom window ledge, unable to sleep. Scrolling through William’s phone for the fiftieth time, I flicked through his picture album. Before George was born, I would tease him for only having six pictures stored in his phone, compared to my two hundred. But now, his was as full as mine, with shots of George from the day he was born to just last week when he was trying to climb on top of Lupo.

I looked out into the black night, wondering how he could have left all this. I thought about where he might go to escape.

Scotland, Windsor? Too close.

Kenya? That was his favourite place on earth, after all. But people knew him there now.

William had once told me, ‘I’d love to move somewhere where I could lose my identity, to be small fish in a big pond, a nobody’.

I had just laughed at him and told him he’d have a hard job finding such a place.  

I shook away the thought of him being far from me and focused back on the night he left.

Did he leave through the front entrance, the darkness of Kensington Gardens engulfing him so he wasn’t seen? Or perhaps through the back, scurrying into a car while we were all asleep?

As if knowing which exit he used would help me find him, I chided myself.

I stopped my thoughts in their tracks. There was a way I could know how he left, of course there was.

I wrapped George in a blanket, careful not to wake him and tip toed out of the apartment. It was almost midnight and all the staff had gone home, at least I hoped.

As I unlocked the office door, I silently thanked Jamie for giving me a key when William and I had married. Those days of transparency were long gone now, I knew that much. I headed straight to Steven and Alec’s annexed office, where this morning, Steven had been so unwilling to let me see inside. Mercifully, it was unlocked.

Suspended on the wall was a plasma screen split into twelve, each showing a different entrance of the palace. Now, there was no movement, but I knew if I looked for the tape from the night William left, I may just have something to see. Swopping George to my other arm, I pulled open the heavy drawer of the filing cabinet under the screen and found rows of cds all neatly labelled with dates. William disappeared on the 12th and my heart pace increased and I spotted the July section.

10th, 11th,   13th.

George whined in my arms as if sensing my distress.

‘Shhh baby, shh, Mummy’s here’

I knew there was no point looking for the missing cd, it was gone, most likely destroyed. It only confirmed my belief that I was swimming against the tide. Not only were these new advisers reluctant to help me, they were actively hiding information.

‘Yes it’s getting in the morning edition’ a voice said, coming from nowhere and startling me. ‘Ha! Runaway Prince, I like it’

It was Alec, and by the sound of it, he was out in the corridor.

I panicked, ducking down under Steven’s desk. George didn’t like the sudden movement and let out a cry.

‘Shhhh!’ I said holding his head close to my chest, my heart beating like a drum.

Alec continued. ‘What? Yeh I told them she’s frantic, prissy little bi-‘

George cried, louder this time.

I crouched lower, ‘please baby, be quiet for Mummy’ I whispered desperately.

I heard the outer office door creak and after a long pause, his breathing low and heavy, he finally spoke again.

‘Oh nothing…just a cat outside. Anyway, make sure you get the message to Redfern tomorrow, we don’t want him staging a comeback…’

Alec’s voice trailed off as he shut the door and left. I breathed a sigh of relief, planting kisses all over George’s face for keeping quiet when he really needed to.

*

Back in the apartment, I paced the lushly carpeted floor. Who was Redfern and what did he need to know? I’d never heard of that name, and desperately wanted to call Jamie to ask him. But I now realised the lengths Steven and Alec were prepared to go, and couldn’t risk using my phone.

My eyes were tired, deep bags forming under them, but I couldn’t sleep. Out of desperation and insomnia, I fired up the laptop and typed ‘Redfern’ into Google. The first couple of results were meaningless; a publishing house and a photographer with the name.

But the third caught my eye.

Redfern, Iowa

I clicked on the link.

Redfern is a town is Iowa, United States. The population in the 2010 census was 104.

I looked up from the screen, not daring to believe it, or to let myself hope.

‘I’d love to move somewhere where I could lose my identity, to be small fish in a big pond, a nobody’.

*

The sun had broken by the time I had worked out a way to contact Jamie without using my phone, which William warned me could have been bugged. A niggling feeling warned me to be careful. Maybe I couldn’t trust him either. But he was my only hope of finding William.

I hunted around in my underwear drawer and eventually found what I was looking for. Tucked into one of my socks was my old mobile phone, a Nokia to be exact. It was the very same that had been hacked all those years back. William would’ve been mortified if he knew I still had it, with all those messages still stored on there. But I couldn’t let it go, it was a potent memory of the days when our communication consisted of love yous and miss yous, unlike the last text I sent to him, which simply said Don’t forget to ask about the food.

I prayed that after all these years the old thing would be able to switch on, let alone make a call. By the time the phone had woken up, I had finished packing mine and George’s bags. I had started as soon as I’d decided that Redfern was the place I needed to go. Our bags consisted of a few clothes, as much cash as I could find, toys – Ronald of course – but mainly were filled with food and water.

It was only 5am, and feeling bad for Jamie, I delayed calling him for fifteen minutes by looking at some old text messages from William.

09/05/2006 : I can’t wait to see you baby  

How true that was now. I felt a tinge of fear that maybe I was wrong, maybe Redfern was something totally unrelated to where William had gone. I pushed the doubt aside, it was all I had left to cling on to.

*

The car pulled up quietly at eight am. Jamie had been furtive on the phone, worried about my state of mind. But I insisted and pleaded with him, and something told me he didn’t think my idea was as crazy as he made out.

‘Ok Georgie, time to go’ I said to him as he sat on the kitchen floor rolling a ball into Lupo and then shouting as if he expected him to roll it back.

Distracting myself from the fact that I was leaving my home seemed so easy when I had packing and last minute calls to make. It seemed ironic that the same phone that was infiltrated was now being used to avoid that very situation. I had explained to my family what was happening but declined to tell them where I was going. My mother was frantic.

‘Catherine, you can’t just disappear! How will we know you’re safe?!’

‘I’ll get in touch as soon as I can, I promise mummy’

It broke my heart to hear her so worried and upset, but I reasoned that if would be safer for them to not know where we were. I still didn’t know what I was up against. Harry hadn’t answered his phone but Jamie had promised to let him know where his brother was once we knew for sure.

Lupo sat solemnly on the kitchen floor as if he had heard me ask my mother to take him in. 

‘Ok boy, time to say goodbye’ I nuzzled my face into his fur but he didn’t respond. ‘Say bye bye to Lupo, George’

George waddled over and imitated me by patting him on the head. I forced back the lump in my throat. 

Carrying all three bags and George on my hip, I opened the door and looked around our home for one last time. Lupo trotted up to us and started scratching at my legs.

‘No boy, it’s just me and Georgie this time’ I pushed him down and said goodbye to him and to the life we once lived.

 *

After creeping through the servant’s corridors and out of a side door, George and I bundled into the car that was waiting for us. On the seat next to me was not Jamie as I expected, however.

‘Susannah, what are you doing here? Where’s Jamie?’ I asked, strapping George into his seat.

‘We thought it’d be safer if I came, I pretended I was going out for a morning jog and met the car on a side street’ she said.

Jamie’s wife sat next to me, a worried expression on her face.

‘You think you’re being watched?’ I asked.

‘Jamie thinks so, these ex-military types are suspicious of everyone though’, she let out a wry laugh.

‘I know the feeling’ I said, thinking of William and his intense dislike of Steven and Alec. That time he was right. 

As we set off, I tried to make conversation, ‘how did Jamie organise all this? I thought the whole palace was being watched’

‘Let’s just say there’s still some loyal people working for your family’ she smiled.

We made our way through the streets of London, I had no idea where the plane was that I’d be taking to Iowa or how Jamie managed to get it, but I didn’t ask. I was relieved enough to be away from Kensington. 

Driving around Green Park, Susannah handed me a newspaper she’d been clutching.

‘I don’t know if you’ve seen this Ma’am’

I unfolded the paper and read the headline. Exclusive! Runaway Prince! Prince William walks out on Kate.

I shut it with haste. So this was what Alec was talking about last night.

I said nothing and focused instead on our journey. The drive seemed to be taking us down the Mall and towards Buckingham Palace. As we got closer, a strange noise caught our attention. It was a mass cheering of some sort, but not the type I was used to when standing from that famous balcony. It was more like jeering. 

Getting closer to the palace, my eyes connected to the sound. 

Up on that balcony, which had been used for so many scenes of celebration was a large group of people waving their arms in victory.

Replacing the red and gold trimmed banner so often used on big occasions was something very different hanging from the the balustrade.

Blue, with a shocking pink cross struck through the middle. The Republic.

‘Good God, they’ve taken the palace’ Susannah gasped. 

From the windows of the palace, Republic flags were dotted around, flying proudly. 

On the ground, gone were the uniformed guards in their famous bearskin hats. People stood behind the golden gates cheering and shouting, and on the other side, members of the Republic pulled at the chains to let the masses in. News vans were just arriving to the scene.

We watched as the flag rose from the top of the building, where the royal standard used to fly, signifying their final victory.

‘We have to turn around, go a different route’ I heard Susannah say to the driver in panic ‘if they spot Their Royal Hignesses…’

‘Don’t call us that’ I said blankly.

Susannah looked at me but said nothing.

I kept my eves on the palace even as the driver turned the car around. Although I had only been royal for three years, the pain of watching the palace being seized throbbed through me. It was where we’d spent our first day and night as a married couple, where we’d danced all night on the wave of love and affection of the country. And now they celebrated, and no-one; no police, not even Her Majesty’s Armed Forces were there to stop them. 

‘It’s over, isn’t it?’ I whispered to no-one in particular.

George let out a long yawn, snapping me out of my daze. I turned to smile at him, he was looking out of the window, with not a care in the world. He was the spitting image of his father. It was then that I finally allowed to let myself think the unthinkable – what if we never found William, what if he was gone.

I held George’s hand, enclosing his chubby fingers in my palm as we escaped from the city.

It was just the two of us now, we were going to have to do this alone. 

‘Come on then’ I said, leaning in to him, ‘let’s go find your daddy’.

[universaltantra]

Nice Jewish Girl Runs Away From Home, Becomes Tantric Lama

Alexandra David-Neél was a Franco-Belgian singer, explorer, author and Tibetan Mystic who became a Tantric Lama.  She was the first westerner to visit the forbidden city of Lhasa in the year 1916. Long before Heinrich Harrar spent his 7 years in Tibet making nice with the Dalai Lama, Alexandra had been there, done that, and why her life has never been immortalized on film remains a mystery that only the Hollywood patriarchy can answer. She wrote over 30 books covering the subjects of Buddhism, Tibetan Tantra and Esotericism and that’s just for starters.She was also a much accomplished and sought after translator, being fluent in French, English, Sanskrit and Tibetan. Sadly, only two of her books are still in print today: “My Journey To Lhasa” and “Magic and Mystery in Tibet”. Alexandra lived to the age of 101 and to this day remains the most authoritative source for Tibetan Tantric Buddhism.

Alexandra was born in Paris, October 24, 1868 to an anarchist father who nearly escaped execution by firing squad after the failed revolt of the Paris Commune and a mother who was a deeply religious, conservative heiress. This social incompatibility led to many arguments between the parents during Alexandra’s formative years. No doubt this created a pattern in her life of wanting to runaway from conflict and instilled a desire to find balance through travel.  Her earliest attempt to runaway was at the 5, she only got as far as the local park before the Gendarmes found her and promptly returned her home. This was the first of many attempts to runaway until she reached adulthood and was able to claim her inheritance; allowing her to satisfy her wanderlust. I myself being a product of a dysfunctional upbringing, related to many of her situations, which made her story to be particularly compelling on a very personal level.

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she would find the opportunities to escape her bourgeois  surroundings in search of adventure: While vacationing with her parents Belgium, she ran away to the Netherlands, was found and returned home. Later that same year, she embarked on a bicycle trip from Paris to Spain, “forgetting” to tell her parents, naturally. But perhaps her most ambitious and successful attempt to fly the coup was at age 17, when she boarded a train from Brussels to Switzerland, hiked across the Alps where she wound up in Lake Maggiore, on the Italian side of the Alps. This last escapade was certainly a primer for her future adventures in the Himalayas. As she loved to say about herself: “I learned to run before I could walk”.

When she turned 21, she moved out on her own and set herself up in Paris, where she enrolled in the Paris Conservatory of Music while at the same time began to study esoteric traditions with the well known mystic of her times, Madame Blavatsky. She also discovered Paris’ venerable museum to Asian art and culture: Le Musée Guimet; which still exists today. It was here that she fed her hunger for exotic cultures, traditions and converted to Buddhism.  Right around this time Alexandra received her inheritance and she flew the coup once again, this time to India. She traveled through India, studying Sanskrit, visiting temples until she ran out of money and returned to Paris.

Upon her return to Paris, she sadly discovered that her desire to share the experiences of her visit was met with antipathy. Since women did not do those things and studies of other cultures were done from an observers point of view. Not as Alexandra had done, as a participant. Needing to find gainful employment, she fell back on her earlier training in voice to pursue a career as an opera singer. As a singer she achieved a fairly acceptable amount of success, traveling the world and finally landing a permanent residency at the Saigon Opera. She even found the time to compose an Opera herself! She continued traveling the world and while performing a gig in Tunisia, she met the man who was to become her husband and would be the facilitator of some of her greatest adventures. Philippe Neel was a civil engineer who worked for the government of France and like Alexandra was extensively well traveled as a result of his job. Together they had an unconventional marriage by the norms of the times. It could be called an “open marriage” but open only in the sense it was Philippe’s support of her travels that facilitated some of Alexandra’s greatest adventures. But let’s not confuse Philippe for a pushover, because underneath all the generosity was an ulterior motive: Philippe also had a mistress and  dispatching his wife off to yet another globe trotting mission kept her out of the way. All evidence suggests that Alexandra was ok with this and chose to look the other way.

The Ultimate Late Bloomer:

On August 9, 1911, with her husband’s blessing, Alexandra  returned to India. She told her husband she would return in a few months. She would be gone for 14 years. But during all this time Philippe was supportive both emotionally and financially. The letter between them prove this. Even though there was little physical connection between them, their correspondence reveals a strong intellectual connection and more importantly, a heart connection.

Upon arriving in India she travelled north to the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim where she was a guest of Maharaja. Here she met the Dalai Lama, whose only advice for her was “Learn Tibetan!” and a great Buddhist mystic named Lachen Gomshen Rinpoche (more about him later). In one of the monasteries she met a teenager named Lama Yuphur Yongden who would become her lifelong companion and whom she would eventually adopt as her son. The proximity of Sikkim to the Tibetan border sparked Alexandra’s desire to visit the forbidden city of Lhasa, which was closed to Westerners. But with no success; she did cross the border illegally a few times but was turned away.

During her mentorship with Gomshen, she lived in an anchorite cave. Essentially as a hermit, practicing yoga, Tibetan Tantra and the study of Buddhist Scriptures. So accomplished did she become in her studies that she was awarded the title of “Lamani” (female Lama) and “Kadoma” a reincarnated female spirit. As a result of this she was allowed to wear the sacred red and white vestments of a Lama as depicted in the pictures here.

On July 18, 1916, she once again attempted to illegally enter Tibet, hoping to make it to Lhasa. She did manage to visit a few important monasteries and struck up a friendship with the Panchan Lama and his mother. She was given an honorary Doctorate in Tibetan Buddhism by the Panchan Lama, who wanted her to stay on as his guest. But Alexandra refused, wanting to return to Sikkim. This was to prove to be a great error on her part. Once she returned to Sikkim, she learned that her actions had sparked the ire of the British Colonial Authorities. Remember ant this point in time, Sikkim, India and the rest of the kingdoms of the subcontinent were under British colonial rule and travel to Tibet was forbidden. So consequently poor Alexandra was kicked out of the country.

This began Alexandra’s Iliad through the countries of Asia. Since WW1 was raging throughout Europe, it was too dangerous to go back. Instead she headed east, visiting China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia with the faithful Yongden at her side. Determined to return to Lhasa, she and Yongden devised a plan where they would attempt to enter Tibet by traveling from Mongolia, via the northern deserts through the shared border of China and Tibet. In order to make her entrance with as little fanfare as possible (it’s obvious by now that Alexandra had a flare for the obvious) she darkened her skin with soot, dressed in rags and passed herself off as Yongden’s mother. A foreshadowing of things to come. This time her journey was a success, by now it was 1924 Alexandra had now been wandering the face of the earth for almost 14 years. Even though she had achieved a personal Nirvana, Alexandra felt the need to return home. So she packed up and returned to France with her companion Yongden in tow and returned to France

Inner Iliad/Outer Odyssey:

Upon her arrival in France, Alexandra discovered that she had attained something of a celebrity status in France, due to her writings, translations of Buddhists manuscripts and reports of her adventures in popular magazines. She wound up settling down in the village of Digne-les-Bains in the region of Provence. She earned a reputation as a Buddhist scholar of record. The accounts of her adventures were published in many of the major newspapers and magazines of the day.  It was here that she wrote her book “Magic and Mystery of Tibet”. She worked on expanding the property and by all accounts created the first Tibetan Tantric temple in the western hemisphere.

During this period of her life from 1925 to 1937 that she began what I like to call her “Inner Odyssey”. Alexandra had clocked in more travel miles than most of her contemporaries an amazing feat for anyone back then, in particular a woman. The origins of her wanderlust began as a way of escaping from her dysfunctional past. As she progressed on her outer journey to forbidden lands, she also began a journey of inner exploration in a quest to find balance. Through the study of ancient and sacred texts, she was able to shed her outer shell to realize to achieve a personal nirvana and become a “Lamani”.

In her book, “Magic and Mystery in Tibet” she recounts many unexplainable phenomena which may appear to be inconceivable to the average Westerner. Some of which are explained here:

Tummo: The ability to control the temperature of your body. This technique came in handy for Alexandra and her companions as they hiked through the Himalayas. Since they often traveled by foot or by horse and on a shoe string budget, learning to control your body’s temperature for personal warmth or to start a campfire would become a mainstay survival technique throughout her travels.

Tulpa: This is not to be confused with the western concept of an Egregore or a Golem. A Tulpa is the creation of a physical being through one’s own thought process. In order to survive under dangerous conditions while trekking through the Himalayas, Alexandra recalls creating Tulpas to serve as her guides and to endeavor protection. Apparently none of these emanations survived for more than a few days according to her.

Bardo Thödel: A death and rebirth ritual in which the Lamas have the ability to die, and in doing so their spirits would leave their physical body and then return at will. This was accomplished by the insertion of a thin bamboo reed or straw into the fontanelle of the skull. This straw or reed would serve as a conduit for Spirit to exit and enter the body, once the magical words had been uttered. These magical words (which I will not disclose here) were also uttered when a Lama would be midwifing a transition of a human from this existence to the next Bardo. In other words, serving as a guide for them at the time of death.

Flying Yogis/Levitating Yogis: In her book “Magic and Mystery in Tibet”, she describes seeing yogis with the ability to levitate or even fly through the air to get from point A to point B. There has been much speculation about this phenomena in particular especially since many Indian Fakirs have been discredited when it was discovered that they were creating the illusion of levitation by relying on a specially rigged chair disguised with cloaks. But what Alexandra describes in her book is nothing of the sort; She witnessed grown men flying across open fields with out any visible means of support.

To the average westerner, these anecdotes may border on the delusional or ridiculous. And yes they sometimes they are a bit difficult to believe. But keep in mind of the environment and culture that produced these assertions: They were produced in the rarified air of Himalayan Kingdoms that are free of are western distractions such as internet, cell phones, televisions, traffic, unhealthy foods. These “modern conveniences” that are more of an addiction than a convenience. There the mind is free of distractions and free to manifest at will. To paraphrase Alexandra: Our thoughts manifest our reality, and the mind that is free of distractions can manifest anything. So there is no doubt in my mind that she used these techniques not only to expand her knowledge of to also heal from her fractured past, make herself whole and to impart healing to others.

Her Relevance Today’s World:

So again, to the Western mind these recollections would seem improbable, but I am here too say that one needs to take themselves out our linear Occidental mindset and learn how to appreciate how these techniques can be applied to our own urban enlightenment. The Tantric Yogis may have had the capacity to fly through the air  but they would probably shrink in horror at the thought of us climbing into a big metal bird that flies through the sky. We may laugh at yogis inserting straws into their skulls in order to experience life and rebirth, but how about her modern medical traditions that keep people alive through organ transplants or defibrillation when in some cases the patient may be way past their time to transition?

Our society today is fractured, some say way beyond repair. But I refuse to subscribe to that opinion. Because if these teaching that have existed for thousands of years before our current western traditions, then they will still continue to flourish long after our ministries have been reduced to dust. Today there are advanced thinkers who would have mediation taught in schools not as any part of a religious agenda but as a way of calming a child’s hyperactive mind. As a former art instructor, I can confirm that teaching some simple breath works prior to art class can open a student’s mind so that they can experience a great creative awakening.So imagine, if we can plant a small seed of awareness, what amazing children we will create. Alexandra would have been proud. In fact there are many Tantric techniques that couples can practice in order to bring an enlightened child into this world. But this will be the topic of another blog later on.

Le Troisième Etape:

In 1937 Alexandra was now 69 years old, most people would be entering the third stage of their life, but not Alexandra; She had spent a good 12 years in Digne-les-Bagnes, making improvements on her home, expanding a portion of the structure to which she named the “Samtem Dzong” or “Fortress of Meditation”. The purpose of this structure was for the teaching of mediation making it the first Lamaist Temple in the west and it would later become part of her museum.

At this point in her life she was ready to return to her beloved Tibet and to travel through China in order to study Taoism which is the Chinese form of Tantra. This time she decided to take the Trans Siberian Express so she could enter Tibet through the Northern route. But as the fates would have it, for the second time in her life, she was caught once again in the midst of a worldwide conflict: The war between China and Japan. This event was to be a precursor to World War II and it’s ironic to think that Alexandra who many considered to be a warrior for peace,  was now compelled to witness the horrible atrocities that were committed by both sides. But always wanting to make herself useful, she actually worked as a medic and a healer for both sides of the conflict.

Finally in 1938, after a year of navigating the conflicts of WW2, she was able to at last enter Tibet, where she visited monasteries, studied sacred scriptures and settled down in the village of Kangdin for what was to become five years retreat of solitary meditation. It was at the end of these five years when she learned that her husband had passed away. It was now 1946, she had been wandering through China and Tibet for 9 years. It was time to return to France in order to tend to the estate of her deceased husband. So she left Tibet via India this time, departing on a new invention called the jet plane which flew her back to Paris.

Now back in France, Alexandra settled her husband’s affairs. She stayed in at Digne-le-Bains where the accolades began to pour in as a result her accomplishments. The French government named her a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. She was awarded the Gold Medal by Geographical Society of France. There were streets and schools named after her. Alexandra David-Neel became the foremost authority on Tibetan Tantric Buddhism.

But fate was to give Alexandra one final cruel blow, in 1955 Yongden, her beloved travel companion and now adopted son, died suddenly of kidney failure. The years of hardship traveling under impossible conditions took its toll on his fragile body. Alexandra was heartbroken, but after cremating his remains, vowed that they would once again return to Tibet. She was now 87 years old. Even though her body was showing signs of wear and tear, there were many who said she looked younger due to her lifestyle of yoga and meditation. She continued writing, translating, teaching and became known as the “Wise Lady of Digne”. Buddhist scholars from all over the world made the pilgrimage to her house in Provence to sit at her feet and drink from her well of wisdom.

Finally, at the age of 100, she felt the need to return to Tibet and so went about filing the papers to obtain her travel visa. On September 8, 1969, she transitioned to the next Bardo a month shy of her 101st birthday and just as her travel visa was approved by the Chinese government. Her body was cremated and her ashes, along with those of Yongden, were taken by her followers to Varanasi India so they could be thrown into the Ganges River.

I would like to think that her ashes traveled the Shakti trajectory of the Ganges to the Himalayas, where her Spirit roams the sacred mountain passes as the Lamani, Kadoma, Flying Sky Dakini, always everywhere and nowhere.

Did you enjoy this Blog? For more information, please visit my website: universaltantra.org or you can contact me by email: info@universaltantra.org or by phone: +1 (832) 743-8148 

[wotnahq]

Zuri Sedaway • 24 • Female (she/her) • Metahuman • Electrokinesis • Civilian

BIOGRAPHY

Zuri was born to Tobias and Lyonna Sedaway in Detroit, Michigan. She was the second child, her sister Breanna being born 3 years earlier. Her father worked home most days, allowing Zuri to form a close relationship with him and her sister, and her mother would spend the evenings with them. Her elementary school years came and went, with Zuri showing a knack for her English and Science skills, but already demonstrating her need to protect - she was put in detention multiple times for fighting with a group of bullies who would threaten and harass the younger kids.

Altercations with this group were the reason Zuri’s powers emerged so suddenly. A particularly nasty incident, in which one of the younger children almost was left with a broken arm, flared up Zuri’s anger to a new point, and she decided to get payback on the bully. For the first time in her life, her electrokinesis kicked in - her powers both strengthened and electrified the blow, and she knocked the bully out in one shot to the jaw. Zuri narrowly avoided getting caught by the teachers, but she couldn’t wait to tell her parents, only to be told that she had to keep it secret. They believed she was the only one of her kind and they wanted to prevent the authorities from trying to do anything with her, whether it was publicity or experimentation. Zuri was admittedly disappointed at their initial response, but she loved her parents and respected them, and so kept her mouth shut.

It was only mere months later that her family heard the news of the first discovered metahuman on the streets of Pansaw, California. Slowly, over the years, more and more metahumans began emerging all over the country, then the world, and it not only comforted Zuri but gave her hope that she wasn’t the freak she’d thought she was. Her thirteenth birthday had passed only a month earlier, and the government announced the Collection and Rehabilitation of Metahumans Agency, known as C.A.R.M.A. Zuri knew she’d have to hide her powers, she knew her electrokinesis would have to stay hidden forever, even if it meant suppressing a piece of who she was.

Years passed, and she’d transitioned to high school and returned to the lifestyle she’d held before her discovery, living life among the ordinary humans, but with strict limits - her parents feared that, if her emotions should flare badly enough or if she was hurt, it put her at risk of exposing herself. So Zuri began focusing her efforts on Mathematics and Sciences in school, specifically Physics and Biology, in the hopes of discovering a way to deactivate her abilities permanently. If she could do so, there’d no more risk, no more hiding, for anybody. She could be a normal girl.

After she graduated high school, Zuri aimed to attend Pansaw University in California. Hoping to keep pursuing her goal, she moved there in mid July, 2039, to start a Bachelor of Biological Sciences. But this meant that she was living there during the virus that wiped through the city in May the next year. Falling extremely ill, and dealing with her formerly suppressed powers that were now wildly out of control, Zuri only just managed to avoid being captured by C.A.R.M.A., remaining in her apartment for the duration until things calmed down. But as luck would have it, Axel Winchester’s snowstorm struck the state in December, and was the prompt for Congress to introduce the Meta Registration Bill. She couldn’t believe it. Years of hiding, of effort, all wasted.

After obtaining her mark, Zuri attempted to spend the next years as distant from her abilities as possible. When the week-long surge of powers hit and Zuri caused immense damage to her own apartment while hiding, she considered leaving Pansaw, returning home to her family who had been urging her to come back ever since they’d heard she’d now been registered. But nevertheless she stayed, if only to continue her degree.

Six months later, Pansaw proved to be the centre of attention once more, as the Nephilim attacked the city. Deaths racking up rapidly and the city falling apart, Zuri was urged to evacuate, and she wanted to. She wanted to see her family again, to hug them and let them know she was safe, but looking out of her apartment window and seeing the bodies left in the street, she knew she couldn’t. So she joined in the fight to defend Pansaw: weaker than nearly every other Metahuman from her constant ability suppression, she had very little idea how to use her powers, but a combination of her studies and hands-on experience proved useful. Somehow she survived, and the city’s defenders finally took out the Nephilim.

Zuri promptly returned home to her family in Detroit, deciding against remaining in the city to allow it time to recover and rebuild. The months that followed introduced the Meta Equality and New Registration Act, allowing her to finally have the coded tattoo removed from her wrist. Realising the good her powers had done for the city of Pansaw, she began practicing her skills in her parent’s basement in a training room her father set up for her, in case she should ever need to use them again. She excelled and grew talented with them, learning to control them better, but is still unskilled when it comes to preventing the influence her emotions have on them.

It’s now 2045. It’s been over 3 years since the Nephilim’s attack on Pansaw, and Zuri decided to return to the city to finish her Bachelor degree, though no longer to shut her powers down. She wants to study them - she wants to learn what makes her her. Once again moving to an apartment near Pansaw University, she’s hoping to become part of the next generation: the one to help humans and Metahumans live in peace for many years to come.

POWERS

ELECTROKINESIS: Zuri can create, shape and manipulate electricity, a form of energy resulting from the movement of charged particles (such as electrons or protons), allowing control over electric fields, all charge carriers (ions, electrons, protons, and positrons), electronics, and electromagnetic forces.

WEAKNESSES

Users of Electrical Immunity are not affected. Weak against Electricity Negation. Reflection Manipulation could cause a problem since it’s unclear if users are immune or not. Distance, force, precision, etc. of all powers depend upon the strength, energy, and concentration levels of Zuri, and her power’s natural limits. Electricity needs a conductor like metal or water to move through, therefore electricity can neither exist in nor move through a vacuum (such as outer space) and may be insulated by non-conductive matter, such as air and rubber. May become useless if confronted with electrical resistant material, such as rubber, silicate, etc. Electricity may be redirected by certain materials. A strong enough magnetic force/source may be beneficial or a hindrance. May be short-circuited under certain conditions (contact with water, a magnet, the opposite polarity, etc.).

PERSONALITY

+ Fair + Protective + Sociable

– Naïve – Envious – Stubborn

[missbrightsky]

I didn’t know where else to go

Fics Masterlist

Previous Chapter

Chapter 3: Feyre

The first thing that came back to me was pain. Dull, throbbing pain everywhere. Deep in my muscles and throughout my head. I couldn’t tell if it was the possible mild concussion or the hangover that made opening my eyes so hard.

A hangover.

I forced my eyes all the way open, wincing back from the bright light that forced its way through the curtains. My movement had me pressing into something warm and large that tightened its grip on me.

That thing was Rhysand fucking Noc.

I slept with Rhysand fucking Noc. The crime boss I was currently trying to put behind bars for life.

And it was the best sex of my life.

  Fuck.

He mumbled something in his sleepy state, somehow pulling me even closer when there was already no space between us. His breath fanned over my neck, sending shivers that traveled down my body into my core. Shivers that woke him up just barely.

“Good morning, darling, did you sleep well?” he managed to get out, voice rough from last night activities.

I froze, my brain unable to make me move or think or breathe.

He felt me go still and shifted so that he was leaning over me, balancing on his forearms. The pressure he exerted on me finally went away, my bruises sang and protested at the lack of contact. I finally returned to my body, air whooshing out of my lungs.

If I had morning breath, he showed no sign of noticing it, and that was enough to set me off.

How dare he look so damn good in the morning?

How dare he take care of me in my injured state?

How dare he.

Even though you were the one to show up on his doorstep last night.

To shove that thought away, I took it out on him. My self-defense training took over, wrapping one leg to hook behind his knee.

His eyes sparked with violet fire, leaning down in response to what he thought was me trying to pull him closer.

In actuality, I was about to flip him on his ass.

Just before his lips met mine, I placed my hands on his shoulders and bucked my hips up, throwing his balance to the left so that I was able to land him flat on his back with me holding him down. He might have had several inches on me, but I had years of training against guys twice my size. It was almost too easy to keep him pinned down; bewildered eyes boring into mine.

The words “I’m leaving” were on the tip of my tongue and promptly died there when I realized that we were both completely naked. A flush burned its way across my face and down my neck when I felt him twitch under me. At least he had the decency to look mildly embarrassed at their compromised conditions.

Not trusting myself to stay on task, I climbed off of him and turned my back, searching the room for my clothes. When I felt a hand graze my neck, I launched myself on the edge and practically sprinted to the bathroom, grabbing clothes as I went.

The door slammed shut behind me, I twisted the lock for a good measure and held my breath. There was no sound of movement from the other side, I slowly released it and dropped my clothes on the counter, assessing what I had managed to grab.

It was not a pretty or comforting sight; my underwear and bloodied shirt was all that was in the room. Which means that I had been drunk enough last night to strip elsewhere until we made it to the bed.

Lucien was going to have this carved onto my gravestone when I died of my captain skinning me over this. I’ve had my fair share of awkward morning afters but this one really took the cake.

“Feyre? Can we just talk?” came his voice. It sounded distressed but I tried not to read into it too much.

“I left some clean clothes on the bed that I think will fit, I’ll be downstairs.”

I waited until I heard his footsteps retreat and thump down the stairs. I released the breath I had been holding. I needed to stop before I passed out and bring on a whole other mess.

Forcing myself to breathe evenly through my nose, I cracked the door open and peeked out the make sure he had truly gone.

He had laid a soft old t-shirt and sweats, both being too big for me but it was better than walking around half-naked while collecting the rest of my clothing.

I tied the sweats as tightly as possible to stop them from slipping and began to creep down the hallway and stairs. If he was distracted and if I was careful enough, I could get past him and from there I would be home free.

He was in the kitchen facing away from me, messing with something by the stove, the smell of coffee, bacon, and toast made my stomach growl, my own body giving my position away.

My mind ran through every curse word I knew, none of them strong enough for the situation.

Rhys had at least thrown on pants but neglected to put on a shirt. Tattoos that I had somehow forgotten about flowed up and over his shoulders. Delicate red lines crisscrossed his back, the spacing exactly matching my fingers.

I fucking scratched him. 

What the fuck is wrong with me.

 I need to get out of here now.

I started to turn towards the living room, hoping there was still a chance to make a clean getaway when his voice washed over me.

“I’m not who you think I am, Feyre.”

It sounded tired, exhausted, world-weary. Like he had seen too much and never got the rest he deserved.

I turned back to him, analyzing his posture. He stayed facing away from me, hands braced on the counter, head bowed as if a great weight rested on his shoulders. Like a fallen angel that you saw painted on church ceilings.

“What do you know about me?” he continued.

I hesitated, caught between wanting to know what he meant and getting out of there. Curiosity took over, driving my feet forward to the kitchen.

“Rhysand Noc. Thirty-two. Head of the Veritas Crime Syndicate. Street name: Lord of the Night.” I had repeated this information every time at countless briefings, his profile was burned into my memory. His frustratingly blank profile.

“Your second in command is Amren Monsea, followed by Morrigan Solis. Cassian Noc and Azriel Noc are your adopted brothers, they train your men and generally do your dirty work.” And that was the end of what I knew, it was impossible to get information out of anyone, what they had came to them by common knowledge and pure luck. His men were ridiculously tight-lipped and loyal, making us ask what the fuck they were so loyal to.

“And why do you think I’m a criminal? Why do you think I do what I do?”

The words were hard to admit, “I don’t know.”

He released a sigh of his own, finally turning towards me. I forced my eyes to stay on his face, trying to read the emotions in it and not get distracted by how the tattoos continued down his chest. I knew I would never be able to get them out of my head until I painted or at least sketched them. Another piece of cannon fodder for Lucien.

“All of that is right, except that Amren and Mor are family too, Cas and Az are the only on paper ones.”

“Oh,” was all I could say. He handed me a cup of coffee and gestured to the cream and sugar that was on the counter next to me. Once I had fixed it to my liking, I took a seat at one of the barstools by the sink, putting a counter between us. It was easier to distance myself from him so that I wouldn’t get too caught up in his story.

“I’m not from Velaris, if my accent wasn’t any indication. Me and my family come from a small country across the world,” then quietly, “it doesn’t exist anymore.

“My parents were very private people, wealthy enough that my brothers and I never had to worry about anything. Mor is my cousin on my fathers’ side, Amren is some distant aunt but she’s always been around. Every childhood has its problems, but for the most part, I was happy. We were all… happy.” The sadness in his voice twisted my heart, making me dread what was coming next.

“It all started out very small, random attacks in towns on the border. We knew we were surrounded by warring countries, but they rarely bothered us. But then people started getting sick, a disease that none of our doctors had ever heard of. It killed so many so fast, our government worked to keep it from the outside world, afraid that the other countries would take advantage of our weakness but also afraid of it spreading across the globe. Through harsh military force, we sealed our borders and tried to let the disease run its course.

“Our researchers did their best to find a cure or vaccine, but it was just too devastating of a disease.”

A deep breath racked his chest.

“One night, my parents rushed into my room, demanding me to pack only the necessities. My mother went to my brothers’ rooms, asking the same of them. My father stayed behind, and as he helped me pack, he explained what was really going on in the country.

“Even though he was not involved in politics, he had several friends that were. They were all saying that the attacks were not random and that the disease was a bioweapon. A high ranking official named Amarantha from a warring country had set her sights on ours.

“She was determined to bring us to our knees and then annex our country into hers. It was some bullshit vendetta passed down in her family. She was cutthroat, bloodthirsty, driven almost to madness by her mission. She staged a coup within our government so that she could easily swoop in to take over.

“It was that night that the coup was happening, there was bloodshed in the streets and fires breaking out, it was chaos. My father said that Amren was taking me, my brothers and Mor out of the country, to somewhere safe. I didn’t understand why he and my mother weren’t coming with us, I still don’t to this day.

“The last time I saw them was through a darkened car window as we drove toward the border, away from my collapsing country. I was 15.”

Tears burned in the back of my eyes, but I was determined to not let them fall. His tragic backstory did not absolve him of the crimes that he committed in my city.

The story wasn’t over yet. “Somehow, Amarantha managed to keep the whole ordeal quiet to the world news, only a few statements saying that they had peacefully absorbed my country into hers due to unstable economic conditions. Everyone forgot about it and moved onto the next piece of gossip.

“Me and my surviving family never forgot. Mor’s parents and mine managed to transfer the majority of their wealth to outside shell companies so that we would be able to continue to live in ease. Amren had all of our names legally changed so that no one would come hunting us from escaping Amarantha’s wrath. That’s why you can’t find any official records on us, they’re either all buried back in my home country or you don’t know the name that you’re looking for.”

A twinge of frustration plucked at my nerves, of course a crime boss wouldn’t use their real name.

“This still doesn’t explain why you’ve been kidnapping people and raiding warehouses,” I accused, trying to stay in my detective mindset.

“A year ago, I got word that she was in Velaris, that she had set her sights on taking this city and then the country. That’s when my family and I decided that we would come here and fight back. We knew that the police and government wouldn’t believe a small group of rich people, especially when they came out of nowhere from a country that no longer exists. History had forgotten us, but we haven’t forgotten what she did.

“Our money made it easy to establish a foothold in the underworld and gain supply lines there. We want to try and avoid all-out bloodshed but we’re preparing for the worst. The people that we have taken are researchers in immunology, disease control, and drug development, all top in their field. They are being cared for in a safe facility, they aren’t too happy about it but some of them were quite excited by the challenge of a new disease.” A small chuckle broke through his serious demeanor. “We have them trying to find a cure and/or a vaccine but it’s slow going right now.”

“The warehouses we were raiding was us looking for any supplies we thought she was shipping in for preparation. We did manage to find some crates of weapons but nothing that indicated she was preparing for a bioattack, and that’s somehow more troubling.

“The past few months you’ve been after us have made it hard to move around, so I’ll give you that. You’re a good detective by the way.”

“Thanks, but it seems I’ve somehow been doing a shitty job of it.”

“Don’t get yourself too down, you were good enough to get the whole story in the past few minutes, I’d say that’s pretty impressive.”

“Yeah by showing up bloody and then sleeping with you,” I blurted. Whoops.

He flushed at the reminder, looking away. “Well I hope it wasn’t completely insufferable for you to do your civic duty then,” he muttered, almost sounding upset at the thought that he got used for information.

Fuck, “It was far from the worst night of my life, I’ll give you that,” I admitted. His earnest retelling somehow made me too honest for my own liking. I needed to get out of his radius before I did something stupid again.

He gave a faint smile at my statement, looking slightly redeemed.

“Anytime, darling,” he teased, trying to shake off the awkward silence that was settling around us like a heavy blanket.

I let out a small, exasperated sigh at the nickname, looks like it wasn’t going away anytime soon. I stayed silent, absorbing the new information while he turned back to the stove, putting on more bacon to fry.

I wasn’t about to stick around to have morning after breakfast with my enemy who was maybe no longer my enemy, I’ll have to figure that out soon before it drove me insane.

Spotting my pants draped over the coffee table (ugh), I padded over to pick them up in which revealed my bra (shit) and then, in turn, revealed my phone (fuck). It thankfully still had some battery in it, the screen flashing with 12 text messages and 3 missed calls from Lucien.

Running late today, huh?

Captain’s not here yet so you might get away with it.

Never mind he just showed up.

Hey if you’re getting coffee, grab me a white mocha?

Feyre? You ok?

Missed call.

Are you sick today? I know you stayed late at the office.

The desk sergeant said you only an hour after me, where did you go?

Missed call.

Oooooo captain is getting angry, hurry your ass up, I don’t want to deal with him.

Seriously tho, where did you go last night?

Oh some hot date you want to surprise me with?

Missed call.

If you don’t call me back in the next 10 minutes, I’m putting an APB out on you.

That last one was from 9 minutes ago. I pressed the call button, he answered on the second ring.

“There you are! Where the fuck are you?”

“Hey Luc, it’s been a rough night. I’ll explain to you when I get to the precinct.”

“Uh-huh, ok, well you don’t have to tell me.”

“I’m serious, I’ll be there in less than an hour, I need to go home, shower and change.”

“So you DID have a hot date last night, knew it.”

I cringed, looking over to where Rhys was trying very hard to look like he was not listening.

“Something like that, look I gotta go, I’ll deal with the captain when I get back.”

“Whatever you say, see you soon.”

He ended the call and the screen went black, there went the rest of the battery.

“I need to leave.”

“Ok, you can borrow the shirt, unless you want to take the subway in the bloody one,” he teased.

I narrowed my eyes at him, not really in the mood to be poked at when I was already in so much trouble.

“Sure, thank you.”

I gathered up my belongings to go change. When I came back down, he had wrapped some bacon and toast in foil so I can eat it along the way. Considerate motherfucker.

“So, are you going to help me?”

I paused, shocked at his question.

“What,” I whispered.

“Are you going to help me stop Amarantha?”

I took him in, looking for any hint of anything other the sincerity, and found none. Every logical part of my brain said no, to not believe what he had told me and to haul him in over the confession. He had given me enough to hold him on until I had a warrant to search his place. I know that some of those guns on the wall weren’t legal in Prythian.

But I couldn’t say no. The threat of her was too great, even if he was making it all up. If I stayed close to him, I could gather evidence to arrest him if he was lying. I was smart enough to stay safe, as long as I didn’t get drunk and sleep with him again.

“Yes. I’ll help you take down Amarantha.”

Next Chapter

[socialjusticeartshare]

THE TRUMP CHILD ABUSE SCANDAL

IT’S BEEN TWO years since the peak of public outcry over the Trump administration’s decision to begin separating the children of unauthorized migrant families from their parents at the Mexican border, yet the massive crisis that policy spawned remains arguably the darkest chapter in Donald Trump’s very dark presidency.

MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff has been back and forth from the border and Central America covering the family separation saga since it began, a story he chronicles in his new book “Separated”.

Jacob Soboroff: I think it’s a slow-motion, ongoing, decades-long American tragedy.

[Musical interlude.]

Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed, I’m Mehdi Hasan. 

Whatever happened to all those kids who were stolen from their parents at the border? Why did we just forget about perhaps the biggest scandal, the worst crime, of the Trump presidency?

JS: It was not thought through. There was no plan. And today, we’re still picking up the pieces in the aftermath.

MH: That’s my guest today Jacob Soboroff, NBC News and MSNBC correspondent, and author of the new book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.” He’s been covering this crisis, this scandal, at the border from the very beginning. 

So, on today’s show, the war on migrants and, especially, the theft of migrant children from their parents: How and why did it happen, and is it even truly over?

Do you remember this?

[Audio clip from ProPublica of children crying at the border.]

MH: That was a recording of 10 Central American children, sobbing desperately after being separated from their parents in June of 2018, here in the United States. That was a recording obtained by ProPublica and which promptly went viral and grabbed newsheadlines — it was even played in the White House briefing room. 

That recording helped make ordinary Americans aware of the abuses that were being perpetrated at their southern border, in their name, by the federal government, by the Trump administration — specifically, and shamefully, the deliberate, systematic separation of thousands of brown-skinned migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border on the orders of President Donald J. Trump. 

And, for a few months in 2018, what was called “child separation” was the biggest story in America, if not the world:

Newscaster: Families are being torn apart. Thousands of them. 

Anderson Cooper: Kids taken hundreds, even thousands, of miles away from their parents. Young children — toddlers, even — housed in so-called “tender-age facilities.”

Jeff Sessions: If you don’t want your child to be separated, then don’t bring him across the border illegally. 

Prime Minister Theresa May: The pictures of children being held in what appeared to be cages are deeply disturbing. 

Newscaster: The Pope labelling it “immoral.”

MH: Two years later, though, we have kinda moved on, as a media industry, and as a nation. To be fair, so many other Trump scandals have sucked up so much oxygen since — whether it was the government shutdown, the Mueller inquiry, Ukraine and the whole impeachment saga, the attacks on protesters in recent weeks, and, of course, the ongoing catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus crisis. There’s so much to keep track of — and to keep us outraged.

Still, for me personally, it stands as the biggest, most outrageous, most shocking, most inexcusable scandal of the Trump presidency so far. What’s blandly called “child separation�� was, in fact, racism, kidnapping, and child abuse all rolled into one. 

In fact, Physicians for Human Rights in a report earlier this year said the Trump family separation policy constituted “torture.” Torture! On American soil. The torture of kids. Kids!

It is difficult to overstate the sheer inhumanity of it all: children were forcibly removed from the arms of their parents; babies were ripped from the breasts of their mothers. And the border agents who did all this somehow went home to their families, to their own kids, and slept fine at night. 

Meanwhile, the people in Washington who gave them those orders, who made the cruel and inhumane policies, they’re either still in government, having never faced any real consequences for their part in these crimes; or, in the case of former Trump Chief-of-Staff General John Kelly, or former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, they’re making money in the private sector. In fact, Kelly is on the board of a company called Caliburn International which operates shelters for migrant children! You cannot make this shit up.

These people are vile. They have no shame. Many current and former members of this administration — including the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions — claim to be evangelical Christians. And, yet, they have defended — excused — the torture and abuse of not just refugees but refugee children. They’re not following in the footsteps of Christ; they’re a moral disgrace.

Since the summer of 2017, the Trump administration is believed to have taken at least 5,500 kids from their parents at the border — although the real number could be even higher than that. No one knows for sure. In February of this year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said, “it is unclear the extent to which Border Patrol has accurate records of separated [families] in its data system.” And as reporter Jacob Soboroff writes in his new book, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy”: “There are families who were quickly put back together, and children who were, as predicted, permanently orphaned.”

As I pointed out on this show back in 2018, that was not a side effect of having a tough immigration policy; that was their tough immigration policy. That was the goal, the prime objective — of an administration filled with white nationalists and apologists for white nationalists; an administration whose immigration policies are drawn up by a man, Stephen Miller, who late last year was revealed to have sent white nationalist literature and racist stories about immigrants in internal emails. No discussion, in fact, about the immigration policies of this administration can be complete without mentioning the racism, and white nationalism, and just pure cruelty that motivates and drives those policies. 

So yes, this administration has used kids, targeted kids, migrant kids, refugee kids, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, the most powerless of the powerless, to achieve their policy goals at the border: to crack down on immigration, to placate their far right base, and keep brown people out of the U.S. by any means necessary.

And here’s what’s so important to remember as we sit here, overwhelmed by news and scandal, in the crazy, chaotic summer of 2020 — it never really ended. Hundreds of migrant children continued to be detained in facilities across the country this year, even as the coronavirus spread inside of those facilities, and infected guards and detainees alike. 

Last month, a federal judge in LA ordered the release of those kids by the middle of this month. And guess how the Trump administration responded on Tuesday? By telling the court that if they’re forced to release the kids, they won’t release any of the parents who they might be detained with. Got that? Family separation, all over again. 

Imagine being the parents of those kids. Keep your kids with you and risk the coronavirus, or have them taken from you and sent out into the world, and who knows if you’ll ever see them again? 

What’s called “child separation” is still with us, is still a policy dream of the Trump administration, and yet a total nightmare for the thousands of refugees and asylum seeker families who arrive in this country from Central America every year, seeking protection from war, from violence, from rape. 

[Musical interlude.]

MH: My guest today is one of the tenacious, and I should add, deeply compassionate journalists who helped uncover the Trump administration’s vile policy of child torture at the border back in 2018, and who not only contextualized the story for us on our TV screens, but also humanized it. 

Jacob Soboroff, of NBC News and MSNBC, was, in fact, one of the first reporters to gain access to the notorious child detention facilities in Brownsville and McAllen, Texas. Here he is, reporting live on MSNBC from outside one of them in the summer of 2018, and not holding back:

JS: There’s a big mess going on right now, and even the Border Patrol inside this building says they’re overstaffed, they don’t have enough resources; the system is just getting stressed out because the Trump administration decided to put this into place, and the consequences really haven’t been worked out, and the biggest consequence of all is thousands of young children, in a way that has never been done before, taken from their parents. And when you hear the Trump administration saying: This has been done before, this is Democrat policy, this is not unusual — that’s B.S., frankly.

MH: Jacob’s reporting earned him the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism.

Now he’s written a powerful and, at times, heartbreaking new book about the entire saga, called “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy” — and he joins me now from Yuma, Arizona, just yards from the southern border with Mexico.

Jacob, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.

JS: Thanks, Mehdi.

MH: You’ve written this new book, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy,” having covered the 2018 crisis at the border with those kids in cages, with those children taken from their parents, almost exactly two years ago. Is this book, Jacob, about a chapter in recent American history? Or is this a book about what’s still happening right now — ongoing American tragedy?

JS: I think it’s a slow motion ongoing, decades-long American tragedy, Mehdi, and this is the first time I’ve ever done a podcast sitting 20 to 30 yards away from a 30-foot tall border wall installed by President Trump, which is exactly where I’m sitting right now, in Yuma, as I wait for him to arrive here. 

You know, the wall, and Donald Trump, have become a symbol of United States immigration policy. This is an immigration policy, however, that has, as I said, spanned decades, and Democratic, and Republican administrations. And since an official Border Patrol doctrine in 1994, called “Prevention Through Deterrence,” the goal of which was to deter migrants from coming to the United States to make them go on a dangerous and deadly journey, where they very well could die trying to get into the United States. Deterrence, pain, and suffering has been a part of U.S. immigration policy and family separations, which I had the misfortune of seeing with my own eyes, was Donald Trump’s extreme extension of that policy.

MH: Yes, the extreme extension, as you say. You’re right to say that this started on previous presidents’ watches — you know, Bill Clinton in the 90s, George Bush, Barack Obama, “the Deporter-in-Chief,” and then you have Trump escalating in this grotesque way. A total of around 4,300 children I believe, “separated from their parents at the border.” This all came to a head in May/June 2018. 

So a question that I think a lot of listeners will want to know the answer to — I know I do — do we know for sure, Jacob, if all of those children were eventually reunited with their families?

JS: We don’t. And if it weren’t for the ACLU and a federal judge in San Diego, the vast majority of them may never have been. It was a negligent, dangerous approach at putting this policy into place — sloppy. And the mechanism by which the separations were tracked, I think it actually would be even generous to call it a mechanism: It was not thought through, there was no plan. And today, we’re still picking up the pieces in the aftermath. 

And you mentioned a number in the 4,000 range. I think the most recent number according to the ACLU, and this is a constantly evolving number, is over 5,000 children, including children separated after the policy had nominally ended, when Donald Trump signed the executive order on June 20, 2018, ending a policy that days earlier, he said, didn’t even exist.

MH: Yes. First it didn’t exist, and then when they stopped it, it still carried on, as you point out, even after the judicial and executive order fallout. 

Um, let me ask you this: One thing that bothers me, and I don’t want to knock the title of your excellent book, because I know how hard it is to come up with a title, and I know that separated is the word that’s been used by everyone — even by me, on occasion, as shorthand — to describe this zero-tolerance policy at the border, and what the Trump administration did to migrant families back in 2018. 

But, for me, “separated” always feels like an understatement. It feels too clinical, an empty word. Because what happened was child theft; it was child kidnapping. It was, in many ways, child abuse by the U.S. government. And I worry sometimes that our journalistic shorthand often ends up underplaying how bad things are on the ground; they sanitize things too much. Am I being unfair?

JS: No, I think your point is well taken. And the reason I chose “separated,” as well, is that for me, it doesn’t just describe torture, frankly. And that’s the word that Physicians for Human Rights, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization has used subsequently to describe what these children went through: It meant the clinical definition of torture. But it also described most Americans’ mental separation from how we got to this point; inability to understand and comprehend —

MH: Yeah. Good point. 

JS: — how the government did this to children and, in some cases, babies. And that also includes me! I was covering the border even before Donald Trump became president, when Barack Obama was president and was dubbed the “Deporter-in-Chief,” as you mentioned, by immigration activists. I, you know, I was on what I thought was the front lines of immigration reporting, and frankly, I completely missed it myself until it slapped me in the face. 

And that’s what I wanted to make clear in the book, is that separated is not just the physical act of what happened to these parents and children, but it really also is a mental state of most Americans about the way that we deal with immigration in this country. So, you know, again, your point is well taken. I think that it’s much more vile what happened to these children than the simple word or simple act of being taken from their parents, but I think that the word also applies to many of us in our everyday lives.

MH: No, that’s a very fair point. And I would urge everyone to read Jacob’s book. It’s an excellent book. You tell the story of José in the book, a young boy from Northern Guatemala, that story is a central thread throughout your book. He fled with his father Juan to the United States in order to escape drug traffickers who were threatening his family. Can you tell us a little bit more about José? Why did you choose his story?

JS: Well, the truth of the matter is, and this is a bit of a spoiler, but I ultimately met his father Juan, and Juan and José are pseudonyms that they picked themselves to protect their own identity and the identity of their family that they left behind in Guatemala. But they come from the northern state of Petén. And Petén, which is actually a place I haven’t been to, and they asked me not to go to — I’ve been to Guatemala on several occasions, but I didn’t go to their home because they were worried about what might happen to their wife they left behind. 

They were threatened with violence. Juan was the owner of a small convenience store, and basically got into trouble after a vehicle that he sold was sold to someone else, and fell into the hands of what he tells me, and told the United States government in his asylum application, were narco traffickers, he suspected. And until he would turn over the rights, the documentation, which he no longer had to his car, they were going to put a threat on his life. 

And so he decided to pick up and leave with José, come to the United States, go to Arizona, where he had crossed twice successfully before to come and work earlier in his life when his son was was younger, but, for the first time, decided to pick up and leave with his boy to protect him.

MH: Yeah.

JS: And once they got to the United States, to the place where they thought represented safety and security, I’m actually sitting probably 10 miles away from that exact spot right now — and the president will visit almost that exact spot, as I speak to you today, as we record this — they were taken from each other in a way that nobody could have ever anticipated, even though it was going on by the time they left Guatemala and started their journey to the United States in May of 2018.

MH: So, it’s interesting, you mentioned in the context of Juan, that he had crossed twice before, for work, this time he came to protect his child. We have this great debate, of course, as you know better than me, about are these people refugees and asylum seekers or are they all economic migrants coming to work? In your anecdotal experience, having interviewed so many of these people, having covered their stories, what were they? Especially back in 2018, when it kind of hit the headlines in that huge way, when everyone in the country is talking about: Why have they brought children with them, etc, etc? 

How many people you were talking to, were, in your, you know, the story you just tell of Juan, that sounds like a genuine asylum application?

JS: And I have no reason to doubt them. 

MH: Yeah. 

JS: You know, and I think the vast majority of people I came into contact with were coming to the United States from Central America — from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador — in order to seek asylum. 

You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. And when I was writing the book, I was thinking a lot about this, that nobody’s perfect. And actually, when I heard the Reverend Al Sharpton deliver the eulogy for George Floyd and use the biblical example of a rejected stone becoming the cornerstone, you know, in our conversation about race, and about police brutality, and violence, it made me think of covering immigration at the border. 

Nobody is perfect. Nobody comes here with a sparkling clean record or the perfect story that you want to hold up and make an example to change the entire country’s imagination on immigration. 

MH: Yes.

JS: He had come here before, twice, illegally. He freely admitted it to me. And he laughed and smiled when he said: They didn’t catch me previously. And I think it’s not mutually exclusive; you can be an economic migrant and also, later in your life, become a refugee from violence. And I think, too often, we boil it down to: it’s one or the other. 

MH: Yes. 

JS: But these stories often intersect. And I think we do a disservice, or the general public does a disservice, when we try to distill it to one or another because, oftentimes, that really isn’t the case. 

MH: And it’s not just Latin American families that we’re talking about, of course. You describe a Congolese mother and her daughter who was separated trying to enter the U.S.; you say “the mother was taken to an adult immigration jail in San Diego, and her daughter was sent to a shelter in Chicago.” You also say that when she was told her daughter was in Chicago, she did not know what the word meant. 

How do people like that woman and her daughter a) end up at the southern border? And how is their story different to some of the more familiar Latin American stories that you tell in your reporting?

JS: Well, I think that the southern border has become an entry point for people from around the world looking to seek refuge in the United States and seek asylum. And if it wasn’t for that Congolese woman and her daughter, who later became known as Ms. L., none of these 5,000-plus families would have been reunited, because she became the plaintiff, the original plaintiff, in the ACLU case — 

MH: Yes. 

JS: — against the government. And so what happened to her, and her story, was slightly different. She presented legally at the San Ysidro port of entry in between San Diego and Tijuana, where you can legally walk up and declare asylum as part of an internationally recognized legal process. And the United States government told her they didn’t believe her, took her away from her daughter, and not until a DNA test confirmed it, were they placed back together. But that wasn’t soon enough to stop the thousands of separations, you know, from happening. 

And that’s another example, Mehdi, of it’s never a perfect story. You know, she thought she was doing it the right way, but the United States government challenged her on that, and it set off, you know, this whole chain of events. 

MH: I think we’ve learned over the last four years that, for this administration, there is no right way of claiming asylum or coming into the country.

JS: Sure. That’s right. That’s right.

MH: They just don’t want people coming into the country.

You describe in the book the moment in June 2018, when then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen infamously tweeted, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.” 

You say, in the book: “My eyes widened when I saw it. You’ve got to be kidding, I thought. Come on.” 

Where were you at that moment? And why did that tweet from her so stun you?

JS: Because earlier that week, I was inside the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center — they call it Ursula in the Border Patrol, and that’s in McAllen, South Texas, where they let us in. 

Katie Waldman, who later became Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, and now the Vice President’s communications director, was, at the time, a spokesperson for Kirstjen Nielsen. She invited me and another group of journalists into that center to see with our own eyes what family separations look like, because I think they believed that with outrage from the general public based on media attention, Congress would do what the Trump administration wanted, which was pass more restrictive order regulations. Of course, that backfired. 

And the reason that I was was so flabbergasted by what Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted is that days earlier, if not hours earlier, I had been inside the center where I saw, with my own eyes, separated children sitting on concrete floors, covered by those silver blankets, under a security contractor in a watchtower. It makes me sick every time I talk about it. It gives me the chills every time I talk about it, as — then — the father of a two-year-old boy. 

It was — and I don’t know —I really don’t know another way to describe it other than disgusting, to see social workers standing around Border Patrol agents, not allowed to touch the children, all because of official government policy when many of the families in there didn’t know what they were about to experience themselves, you know, to this day leaves me speechless. And to hear the Secretary of Homeland Security, who I didn’t know at the time, but I now know in writing the book, had signed the policy into place — it is just wrong. There’s no other way to say it.

MH: I mean, this is an administration that says openly: Don’t believe the evidence in front of your eyes, don’t believe what you see with your own eyes, and don’t believe what you hear with your own ears. It’s the gaslighters-in-chief. 

You say, early in the book, you sum things up this way, you say: “What I have now unequivocally learned is that the Trump administration’s family separation policy was an avoidable catastrophe, made worse by people who could have made it better at multiple inflection points.”

In what sense, Jacob, was it avoidable, given that we already had a president clearly bent on implementing harsh border policies? Who or what around him could have stopped it?

JS: Well, in particular, you know, Scott Lloyd, who was the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, was warned on multiple occasions about the damage — the long-lasting trauma — that family separations would do to children. And, ostensibly, this was the man who was the custodian of the thousands of migrant children in the custody of the United States government. And, in particular, Jonathan White, commander in the U.S. Public Health Commissioned Corps, under Health and Human Services, has testified publicly to this — that he warned Scott Lloyd about the long-lasting damage that separations would do to these children. (Scott Lloyd, of course, is the same official who tried to ban abortions in HHS custody for young migrant girls.)

And the bottom line is when you look at the actions of Scott Lloyd, he did anything but stop family separations from happening. One official later told me that he believed that this was the greatest human rights catastrophe of his lifetime, in seeing this take place under the leadership of Scott Lloyd. And had the career officials in HHS, child welfare professionals, whose motto is not only to do no harm, like in the medical profession, but to put the best interest of the clients first — and that’s the children — this never would have happened. The best interests of the children were very obviously not put first here. 

MH: Yeah. 

JS: The officials of HHS and the professionals were certainly pushing for that all along.

MH: And there were a lot of people involved in this process, none of whom resigned on principle, none of whom came out and became a whistleblower at that time, which says a lot about how certain people’s morals are corrupted working in this administration. 

Just to go back to an earlier point you made about this being a decades-long tragedy, a lot of Trump officials and Trump supporters — and some on the left — say it’s unfair to pin what you call “an American tragedy” wholly on Trump, because it was the Obama administration that built many of the cages that were used in 2018; it was the Obama administration that put unaccompanied minors from Central America in detention. There was a big overlap between a lot of their policies and practices at the southern border, between those two administrations. What do you say to them?

JS: Well, in some measure, they’re right. I mean, the Obama administration did build the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center where I saw the children in cages. Those cages were built by the Obama administration. And they believe that that was the best option at the time. Certainly activists and immigration rights lawyers and such didn’t believe that, and were extremely vocal in voicing their opposition at the time.

The Trump administration had the opportunity to go in a different direction. They never signaled that that was their intention. In fact, they always signaled a harsher immigration policy than the Obama administration. But they didn’t have to institute the family separation policy; the Obama administration considered implementing the family separation policy. Some of the same officials within the Department of Homeland Security brought it up. And in the book I talk about how on Valentine’s Day, 2017, less than a month into the Trump administration, some of the officials that overlapped from the Obama administration into the Trump administration, basically revived — resuscitated — a policy, a rejected, discarded policy, that even the Obama administration, which was was not beloved by immigration activists, put the side. 

MH: Yes. 

JS: And this was a conscious, deliberate decision by the Trump administration to move forward with something that they knew all along was a deterrence policy, that was so bad, it would try to scare people away from coming to the United States. And John Kelly, when he was the secretary of homeland security in March of 2017, admitted freely on CNN.

MH: So, just to be clear, what Trump did in 2018 at the border with these “separations” is much worse than anything Obama, or, for that matter, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton did at the border; that is fair to say based on your own reporting and research in this book?

JS: Well, the reason I say that this was unprecedented was that it was “systematic child abuse,” in the words of Physicians for Human Rights or American Academy [of] Pediatrics, at the hands of the Trump administration — deliberate, systematic child abuse or torture. 

The Obama administration, the Clinton administration, the Bush administration all had their own very harsh deterrence policies; I’m sitting in Arizona now where hundreds of people have died trying to cross in the desert because of border infrastructure walls, like the ones I’m looking at in front of my face as I talk to you. But never was the policy directed specifically at children for the purpose of hurting parents and children. And therein is the difference.

MH: Good point.

JS: I mean, that’s where the Trump administration took it to a level that had never been seen before. It doesn’t mean that, for a long time, there haven’t been cruel, harsh, and deadly immigration policies.

MH: But, in this case, it was a stated policy to cause harm in order to stop people from coming.

JS: That’s for sure. And they would never admit that, that the purpose was to hurt children. But when you say deterrence, you have to be deterred by something — and the something, here, was trauma.

MH: So, you paint a picture in the book of a president who — shock! horror! — is, you know, over his head. You know, he’s out of control, but he also doesn’t know what he’s doing. There’s a huge culture of fear around him, you say, in the White House. You talk about the chaos surrounding this policy; obviously, we know very much about the Trump administration’s incompetence when it comes to any area of public policy. 

But in my view, there’s also not enough discussion in our industry, Jacob, in the ‘liberal media,’ about the ideology that drives a lot of Trump’s immigration policy. This is not just them trying to look tough or messing up. You have a White House that openly plays footsie with white nationalists. 

JS: Mhmm. 

MH: And a top Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, who leads on this issue, and who is at best, an apologist for white nationalism, at worst, a card carrying white nationalist himself; this is a guy who the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC, has thoroughly documented by his own leaked emails, has promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories, obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols. And yet, we just don’t talk about it as much as we should. It’s like we’re too polite to mention the open white nationalism from this White House when we talk about immigration and border controls.

JS: Another way to put it is that the target of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies are more often than not brown people —

MH: Yes. 

JS: — who come to the southern border where the majority of people who enter this country illegally, or ultimately stay in this country illegally, come via airplane from countries other than Central America or Latin America by overstaying visas. 

And the Trump administration has not — or did not, at that time — target visa overstays as their primary concern, when that was, by definition, by numbers, where most people who were in the United States ‘illegally’ were coming from. The policy has always been, the ire has always been targeting people with a different skin color coming from the southern border, and not at the majority of people who are entering the country and staying in the country illegally. 

And, you said it. I mean, that’s why this policy is, or was — I guess you could still say is, family separations are still happening — racist. I mean, this is not a policy that is being targeted at people who are flying here and staying here after going to school or getting a job or some other form of immigration to the United States. He’s targeting people who come through the southern border, period.

MH: Just to clarify for our listeners, you say family separation is still happening. Just briefly, how is it still happening?

JS: Well, the Trump administration is giving families an option: either separate, or be deported, or held indefinitely in family detention. That’s called binary choice. It’s the type of policy that’s being put forward. 

You won’t be surprised to learn, Mehdi, that nobody is selecting family separation as an option when they’re presented with it. 

MH: Yeah. 

JS: But it is still an option that the Trump administration is giving migrants in custody. It’s a catch-22 situation, you know? Either get kicked out of the country and your child stays here, and be in indefinite family detention with your child, or separate from your child, let your child go free, but you won’t see your child, because you’ll, you know, you’ll continue to be detained. It’s just family separation with a different mechanism.

MH: The ‘family separation crisis of 2018,’ I think we would agree, Jacob, was one of the biggest crises, one of the most horrifying episodes of the Trump presidency. And given how many big crises and horrific episodes there have been over the past four years, that’s a pretty high bar that it met. And even by the standard of awful Trump scandals, this one stood out.

And yet he survived. The people around him survived. A lot of people just forgot about it. Washington, the media, largely moved on. If we hadn’t moved on, if there had been consequences — for the lies, the law-breaking, the racism, the child abuse — do you think we might have avoided or even been better prepared for many of the other Trump crises that have since followed it?

JS: It’s such a good question. I would like to think so, but that goes back to the separation from the American public about what’s happening and why. 

And so often, I find, that too many of us are disconnected from the reality of what’s going on in our country. It’s too easy to look around in our own neighborhood —

MH: Yep. 

JS: — to talk about our own concerns versus what’s happening at the border. 

I’ll give you one example. I went to Tornillo, where they had that tent city in the wake of the separation crisis and all the migrant boys housed there. And I write about this in the book, I asked a local farmer growing pomegranates what his main concern was, and he said the production of food. And this was a man that was a stone’s throw away from thousands of kids being locked up in a tent in 100-degree heat in the middle of the South Texas desert. 

And, you know —

MH: Wow. 

JS: — I’ll never forget that. Because, you know, if, if he’s gonna forget about it, or if it’s not going to be top of mind for him, it isn’t going to be for people in suburban America either. And which is why, I think, you know, just it was so important to me to write this book, not just to remind people of this, but to answer those questions for myself: How could this possibly have happened? How could we possibly have moved on? You know, and what is it gonna take for this to not happen again?

MH: Well, I’m so glad you wrote the book and one of the issues that really bothers me is that there’s been very little accountability for the main players in this saga. 

Former Trump Chief-of-Staff, former DHS Secretary General John Kelly went off to work in the private sector. He even joined the board of Caliburn International, a company that operates the largest shelter for unaccompanied migrant children —oh, the irony. His successor as DHS secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, was invited as recently as October last year to speak at Fortune Magazine’s Most Powerful Women’s Summit in Washington, D.C.. There doesn’t seem to have been much accountability.

JS: Not just no accountability, many but some of these people have been put in charge of the response or at least on the team to the coronavirus outbreak that’s killed over 100,000 people in this country. In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, I remember sitting at home on lockdown like everybody else, watching, up on the podium, Chad Wolf, now the acting secretary of homeland security — then, a top deputy to Kirstjen Nielsen — who, as my colleague Julia Ainsley first reported, was involved in the drafting of the initial family separation policy to be presented to her. 

Katie Waldman, as I mentioned, was the spokeswoman for Kirstjen Nielsen and is now the spokeswoman for the Vice President of the United States. It seems as though the people that were involved in the family separation policy have not been disciplined, or reprimanded, or faced accountability; on the contrary, they’ve been elevated to new positions. And you mentioned John Kelly, who’s started working with Caliburn, this company that is profiting off of the detention of child migrants in multiple facilities now, along the southwest border. 

I would say that it’s baffling and stupefying, but, again, it’s just like you said — it’s another one of these consequence-less actions of the Trump administration that, you know, they seem to benefit from when, you know, common sense would say they should be punished.

MH: By the way, at that Fortune summit, my good friend Amna Nawaz of PBS News asked Kirstjen Nielsen if he regretted the so-called family separation policy.

Amna Nawaz: I’m asking you if you regret making that decision. 

Kirstjen Nielsen: I don’t regret enforcing the law, because I took an oath to do that, as did everybody at the Department of Homeland Security. We don’t make the laws; we asked Congress to change the law, Congress reviewed the law in 2006 and decided to continue to make it illegal to cross in that manner.

MH: When you hear Nielsen saying that, Jacob, what’s your reaction?

JS: The same bewilderment that I felt when I saw her tweet that: “There is no family separation policy. Period.” I thought that that interview, by the way, was spectacular. 

MH: Yeah. 

JS: And the line of questioning was perfect, because Kirstjen Nielsen is an expert in slipping away from questions about the family separation policy. If anyone should face accountability for the policy, it is her. 

She had to sign, and I outline it in the book, a decision memo that sat on her desk with three options to implement the end of what was known as catch-and-release: the idea that migrants who come to the southern border would be released to the interior, with their families, until their immigration case would be adjudicated in the courts, until they had to show up for court. And by the way, many migrants — most migrants — do show up for that process, because they want to attain asylum in this country. 

She chose of the three options, the most severe, the most punitive of family separations. It was a deliberate and clear decision by her; she had to sign her name — literally on the dotted line — for the policy. And the idea that she doesn’t face any responsibility for this, that it wasn’t something that she ultimately would come to regret, I just don’t believe it. I don’t — knowing what I know about her, having sat face-to-face with her at the start of this policy — I do not believe that that is truly the way that she feels. And I know, certainly, that she knows the responsibility that she bears for it.

JS: And like every ex-Trump official, especially once he leaves office, everyone’s going to be spinning how they were actually resisting inside the administration — they were the good guys pushing back against awful policies from the top. 

And we focus a lot on Trump, and we should focus also on these ex-Trump officials who are trying to rehabilitate themselves; they should really be shunned by polite society. But sadly, we know Washington, D.C.: they won’t be, they aren’t being shunned. And that’s depressing. 

One last question for you, Jacob. Given what you saw with your own eyes, what you heard in terms of testimony from some of these parents and children — the trauma of it, as you put it — how hard a book was this for you to write.

JS: Well, certainly not as hard as being separated from your child, indefinitely, in the minds of a lot of these parents. It was — it was difficult to revisit. But covering family separations is something that will have changed me, forever, for my entire life. I think there’s a lot of people out there who, having watched the story — not just from my coverage, but from the wonderful journalism that was done, you know, during and after this policy — you know, it’s changed a lot of people. 

And, for me, this was something that I wanted to do to answer questions that I didn’t know the answer to in real time. And it’s also something that I wanted to do for Juan and José, because the reason that they decided to participate in this story with me was so that it never happens again. And I really mean that. You know, I don’t know if it’s kosher to say that as a journalist, that covering this, and writing this book, you know, for me has a specific and — what I hope — is a positive outcome. But that’s really what this was about for me. 

And to revisit it was, was difficult. But it’s nothing compared to what Juan and José and 5,000 other children went through. 

MH: Jacob, congratulations on an important book. Thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed. 

JS: Thank you, Mehdi. Appreciate it.

[Musical interlude.]

MH: That was Jacob Soboroff, author of the new book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.”

And that’s our show! And we’re going to be on a little bit of a summer break, here on Deconstructed. The show will be back in August. Hope you’re all able to have a break too. Stay safe while we’re gone!

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice: iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

See you next month.

Article Source

[whimsically-ominously-auspice]

Uncle Donald gave her $800 in the 1980s

She let him invest it for her up until now

And she has now $45B

I hope you enjoyed your game as there are more to come but with more people as it enters TV for free of course on Channel Fox.

As always enjoy life and what it brings with the most care you can afford.

Don't let the economy, crumble, Uncle Donald, i hit up JP for some cash since Jesse stole mine from United Business Bank located in Oregon, Washington, and New Mexico.

I own Chase, bought it with Donald and sold to the US Government for a mint. Jesse could got in on this deal but he wanted to challenge me instead.

So I asked Uncle Donald for a cash loan, how much he could afford and what was in his wallet. $4000 roughly. So we split it between his 4 kids (the 4th being me) and I gave him back $200 for the rest of the day.

And we returned to the bank and I asked him how to deposit the money into Chase Manhattan because Denise had bought me clothes but I wanted to be a fashion designer and had altered them So she threw them all away in a rage of jealousy and heat.

Of course i started to cry so we went back across the street to McDonald's and we talked. He said "i have a surprise for you, lets get to the bank"

So we walked alllllll around the building, up and down and he talked to a man and got us inside all the back rooms. He said "i wanna buy it!" And he turned to me and asked "would you like to invest your $800 into my bank as an investor?"

I said "what about my clothes! She said i had to return the money or else i get none!"

"But who did she spend the money on?"

"Me and my brothers and and her!"

"Well don't you think Its time to invest in you and your fashion?" He asked for my $800 i had to pull from 4 different pockets and my sock as he taught me to split to beat pick pocketers. And handed it all. He handed me back $200 and I handed it back then he handed me a $5 from his breast pocket and t told me to keep it.

And began to walk to the counter to buy the bank.

I chased after him and put it in his left cost pocket and told him, 'well you know you bought me lunch so you keep it"

I pulled it from his pocket to produce proof I had already given it and he couldn't give it back and then stuffed it back in deep, all the way i nearly ripped his shoulder off for which I promptly apologized, jumped on the counter and rubbed his soreness off and jumped down.

And he started to cry a little bashful at first then a full sob. And I tried to console him and Robby appeared with a trailing line of toilet paper so his silk hanky wouldn't be soiled with snot.

He thanked him and became startled and asked if he wanted in on the investment.

Robby said, "i might but i need to talk to you, I belong to this boarding school ran by this might be soon white bigger as he calls himself, inspired by her and taken completely out of context"

"Michael Jackson" interjected our new found Uncle Donald. "Come let's sit"

We moved to the side of the spacious lobby to a small table accompanied by two plus club chairs.

He and i talked about how neat it would be to have chaise chairs in Chase bank.

"Well, her mom is abusive, mostly about money so i would like to take control of her stock with her permission"

"Yes! I do! And i will wanna get married!" I jumped with my fist in the air and pushed against the chair like a standing push up and stood

....

"Her sit. First I would like to talk to you as an investor. I am run by the boarding house and they teach us things like to steal and bring back to get 'rewards' much often things less than they are worth like a stick of gum for $2 when I can get a whole pack for 20 cents. Uh oh, here he comes"

"Im about to invest into this bank with these two kids you got something you wanna say to me?" Instead of waiting for a reply, uncle Donald got up and briskly walked to the counter, asking to return to a different room, promptly and away from Mr Jackson whom was still solidly black (he doesn't have vitaligo its just bleached).

And we entered a nearly empty office and he turned fiercely, angry even, "this will be your office where you will WORK"

...

"Its okay! We are still friends!" I climbed into the chair then up onto the desk "this is where I will sit"

"Well close your legs and sit like a lady, like this hand me your foot, no don't take off your shoe"

"Well I didn't want to ruin you! Your suit is NICE!!"

And he moved my foot and crossed my ankles and patted my knee and said "or you cross at here"

I took my ankle to my knee "no not like that, that's like a man. Knee to knee"

"Oh like this?" I squeezed my knees together

Robby laughed and Uncle Donald looked flustered

"Oh i know I know cross at my knees, you need to explain better!" I patted his shoulder. In the 80s it was okay to touch, at least for a child.

"I said that first!"

"Oh! I interrupt!"

"No apologize" Robby groaned

"I apologize for interrupting"

"For?" Asked Donald "you can't tell her that Because ---"

"No he could I get misinformation that way"

"Except when I'm being scolded and she knows the truth" said Robby.

Tune in next week for another Miss Adventure of one Wild Single Mom's Childhood!

I had 48 cents. Robby had put in 2500 front Hayes then 1500 each from Mark and Mike Andrews which he had not signed and they got rejected. Yet Jesse notified me of this, restricted my remote deposit privileges and now i am to notify the Sheriff of Hays County, Austin, Texas that the money is kept hidden in the tax and revenue accounts of his great county. And to open an investigation which he will pretend he did and then not. So i get his hush money as well as the other two and the $15B JP Dejoria stupidly just paid me because i Told Jesse to tell his father in law that Jesse is a stupid piece of shit which he didn't.

And of course I will invest in schools across the nation, installing playgrounds at any schools that do not have them, including intermediate, Jr high, middle, High and etc.. And may be finally lockers at least were I'm centrally located and/or where i want to be, namely at high schools at least.

Because that is what I want to do. Make people happy in the funniest ways possible.

And if there is any left I want to reinvest at the parks i originally invested in, initially, to make them better snd brighter, starting at the older to the newer.

I want the world to seem happier and brighter and in the case of schools at least around here once they hit 7th grade (middle school) they change schools to those that no longer have lockers or desks to put things in, 7 or more teachers to please instead of one or two they spend all day with, like a parent who gives love and kindness and retribution, they go through puberty which in itself is a chore. Then the kids riot. I've seen it in small schools and i know it happens in big ones. 20 in one week at the beginning of school less than a mile from my house where i can hear the school bell.

And so they need a place to sleep their weary heads like the shoulder of an old friend instead of weeping a soul they can no longer call their own.

The secrets i have included here broke my heart to where it actually stopped over and over.

Instead of asking what was wrong, Mr Moneybags Jesse sent me to the doctor alone. -.-

He could have provided me with what i needed like I provided and protected him from Ms Dejoria and Mark Hindberg, Afghanistan and Iraq, which I will no longer do.

He is the one that encouraged Michael Jackson to pickpocket the slaves he had created.

Yes Michael Jackson is Wacko, is Him and is burning in Hell because I killed him with my own pistol Jesse had stolen from a cop, altered and resold to himself at a cheaper price than the way over inflated price he created to create a deficit in his company to receive a refund from the US government's IRS Department in the amount of $8,000 instead of paying the $1M he owed.

I plead guilty before a judge and Uncle Donald, Mrs Katherine Jackson, the Anne my 4 year old daughter that Michael Jackson attempted to rape in front of me, as well as Robby, my true love and of course Sunny and Jesse James himself whom gave me the gun.

Then, before then President Barack Obama, i was exonerated and pardoned completely without the possibility of parole or any other misconceptions that would be included with self defense manslaughter.

This week total I have arrested a total of 19 men and women thanks to the CIA as an unpaid civilian.

That would guarantee me Presidentship of one really great country, now, wouldn't it?

Thanks. And not to be repeated: No more games. Only truth.

Until next time my fair weather friends!

Now! Let's grab the bookie!!! Snag! You're in jail. What did ya know, Mike Andrews, I knew all along that Mark Hindberg was FBI. Why didn't you think that?

Moving along, hi JP. How are you? No one cares. Good thing you trusted into your rapist daughter who was married to a true hero whom puts up with my shit even after we name him Mr Vomit cause I make him so scared he actually vomits like I did tonight (that's included. No more scare, only truth)

Oh yes, JP, you have already been arrested and so you know -- you have no guns with you, right? Alexis Dejoria is no rapist, she's actually an excellent FBI agent whom hates her dad and is included in any exonerations I may have to hand out butbat my leisurely pace, because she actually didn't rape anybody!

Also the US government will pay your wages as you did file a lawsuit this very week by signing up with Namus.gov like we all did.

She like me, was an unpaid civilian whom ran into luck. While she's smart, she's not smart like me. Thus she's the FBI vs me who is CIA and can work against the world in a millisecond as i usually do and have in Afghanistan and Iraq where i protected many NHRA members during their tours in the US Military while they served with Jesse James and my little brother and were even kidnapped thanks to Matt Hagan's temper tantrum and Jesse James refusal to listen to command. Eventually I saved them from that too in a day and 6 hours after leaving base. They were involuntary bound and gagged and beaten within 20 minutes of their capture. Within the next 20 when I was finally told of their status they were rescued by Tony Schumacher and his team.

And now i have saved the NHRA from being beaten and raped and tortured. My time to continue here at home is not wasted,

I love you all and thank you very much for listening...

And now i have something to say about Jesse since i made him puke from a lie via email Because he made me mad for being a Dick douchebag and not caring enough about me, not wrecking his motorcycle and then lying to make me feel bad and stupider than ever although I saw the wreck and my being a girl, up and President running, couldn't stop to rescue or assist a man on his feet whom had already picked up his bike after a wipe out and the trailer passed me up to show me he would assist because forgive those trespassers as we trespass ourselves and i care that he could really been hurt. That may be a fault of mine but it is called Grace and not salvation which is being my daughter reincarnated into a goat in Iraq to keep everyone safe because Jesse is a dumb dumb sometimes and Matt Hagan prefers truth over himself, sometimes. Like being in love with a goat of my daughter's soul, in Iraq. (I bet he fucked her, too. Bestiality freak. Not my business tho, nor yours. But still, let's laugh instead of poking fun at his misadventures. It is funny, yo!)

Jesse cared about the goat so much he listened to her over every one, even me. Because he believed she was closer to God where he needed to be..

I changed his life once in Alabama and several times then, over and over, any time that need be.

But finally for this one time he trusted somebody else and learned to love as much as he could, the soul inside of him.

So God bless to all of the two headed creatures we will see wandering around the backs of people at the NHRA in the future to come. Including even on me.

I'm Mrs Cougar cause of my fingernails and my desire to be with someone young to keep me fresh and Alive -- not by his blood byt by the life he gives me. And he will be Mr Snake the one who slithers up beside me only for love while I labor in the grass kicking myself for what i might have done but not for what i might have missed out on because I was there the whole time thinking and feeling and frolicking through the grass, same as me.

And of course my tattoo will be scary cause the world as I know it, very much can be.

And you can thank me for the past or you can think about the future and beyond!!!

[lowcarbnutrients]

How to Design Your Ideal Diet

Choosing a diet regimen for on your own can be enjoyable, yet also overwhelming. There more than 100 various nutritional theories out there today, as well as it can be hard for us to choose which one is the excellent diet plan for us and our families.

Last year when I started culinary nourishment college, my initial project was to develop my very own written food ideology. Since I had my own wellness training practice for 5 years, I currently had a fairly strong understanding of my food philosophy or where I stood when it pertains to food. But I desired to dig much deeper and also actually discover what that suggested for me as well as my family.

Finding My Ideal Diet

Over the training course of my recovery journey, my food philosophy has actually evolved. I struggled with weight problems, high cholesterol, allergic reactions, autoimmune disease and regular illnesses. In the start, I was concentrated on dropping weight and also sensation better - having more energy.

I eliminated very processed as well as packaged foods having high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils and also preservatives. In the 1980's and also 1990's, I ate a whole lot of fat-free and health foods. I promptly tossed those foods out and changed them with full-fat versions. I started including even more vegetables as well.

As I began to reduce weight as well as obtain more power, I discovered myself in the kitchen extra and also started to enjoy the procedure of cooking and also creating brand-new recipes for my family. Quickly, I began seeing farmer's markets and also started finding out about neighborhood farming techniques. I made brand-new buddies with farmers and also manufacturers and also truly began to comprehend the intricacies of sustainable farming methods. This is when I actually began to move my idea system. I developed connections with farmers, market suppliers, beekeepers, herbalists, kombucha manufacturers, as well as generate farmers. These new relationships strengthened my understanding of our food economy, just how the federal government is so associated with our food and also how we absolutely can produce change with our getting behaviors. Supporting these folks came to be a lifestyle. I recognized my food, the individuals that grew it as well as exactly how it was being processed.

Currently, all of my meat, eggs, raw honey, herbal medicinal teas and also create originated from local ranches. I do supplement some fruit, veggies and snack foods from a neighborhood grocery shop though. These connections allowed my youngsters to have a better understanding of where our food comes from. These see the delighted cows, skip about with the piglets, and chase after chickens on the ranch near our residence. It produces an enjoyable, family outing.

Why is this important to do? I personally feel as a society we have actually relocated so much past a connection with our food. We're consuming supper at the drive-thru, snacks that come in plans and boxes rather than whole foods and also we turn a blind eye to the wrongs of traditional animal feeding operations.

Some might believe that I may be or must be a vegetarian provided what I recognize, however my body hungers for meat - not a lot, but some. So, I select to source locally-raised, pastured animals fed their natural diet of grass (and bugs for the chickens). I believe that everyone is different as well as we each have specific organic dietary needs. We must each establish a suitable diet that works for our individual bodies. Nonetheless, I do think that every person might gain from consuming entire, unrefined foods, small amounts of grass-fed meats if essential, natural fruit and vegetables and assistance local farming while doing so.

How To Design Your Ideal Diet

With every one of the nutritional concepts to choose from, do not really feel urged to pick one and proclaim to the globe how you eat. That's your business and also no one else's. You can determine if you really feel good eating meat or fish or if a vegan diet regimen is ideal for you. Or, maybe you intend to mix it up, like I do, and eat vegetarian one day and also fish the next - I call that the "flexitarian diet regimen."

But just how do we actually place this into method? Right here are some points to think about when you start to create your optimal diet.

1. Establish your own Food Philosophy

This important initial step overviews your choice making when it involves food. Here's mine:

My Personal Food Philosophy: Consume S. L. O. W.( Lasting. Regional. Organic. Wild.) My motto for the last 5 years has actually been to pick foods that are sourced ethically as well as sustainably. I attempt to choose regional whenever I can and also sustain my farmer close friends that live nearby. I choose Organic as long as feasible to avoid the "refined" things as well as often go "Wild" - for instance, I will certainly forage for wild herbs and also plants as well as pick wild over farmed seafood. And also, it's simply a suggestion to "consume gradually," or mindfully, which is terrific for digestion.

In addition to what I have actually reviewed above, a few of things you might intend to consider in your ideology are:

What you like to eat

Where your food comes from

What you 'd want a person to prepare you for dinner

How you make food decisions at the supermarket or market

What's your dream meal?

2. Consider what is locally available

We all enjoy avocados and bananas, however, for a number of us worldwide these foods aren't local. I'm not claiming you need to never ever consume them - nonetheless, it's vital to likewise consider what foods are plentiful in your location, as well as likewise what's in period. Neighborhood foods contain even more nutrients than those that were chosen weeks back and delivered throughout the country.

In an excellent world, your perfect diet plan would concentrate on what you have accessibility to. This allows us to support regional organisations and farms, minimize our environmental influence and consume food that is best - which is mosting likely to be wonderful for our health!

3. What are your activity levels?

Consider exactly how active you are. If you're educating on a daily basis, your nutrient demands are mosting likely to be greater than a person that has a desk task and isn't working out numerous times a week. On days when you're a lot more energetic, you might need a lot more healthy protein to fuel your muscular tissues as well as on days when you're operating at a desk you might require to eat a simpler dish like a salad with a healthy fat to keep your brain operating ideally. You may require extra protein, water and electrolytes if you're exercising consistently.

4. What is your health situation?

If you're suffering from an autoimmune illness, an inflammatory problem or fighting an illness, your diet plan will certainly require to reflect these problems. Those with autoimmune condition need to stay clear of inflammatory foods, like gluten, dairy products, sugar as well as possibly nightshades (you can grab a total Anti-Inflammatory Diet plan + Way Of Life Guide right here).

Conversely, if you have a household history of disease and also wish to stop disease, you need a diet regimen high in superfoods, anti-oxidants, fermented foods and plant-rich meals.

5. Market Factors (age, gender, etc.)

Typically, males need more healthy protein as well as facility carbohydrates than women. They also have various micronutrient requirements. Ladies and also men need particular nutrients at each stage of life, so take into account where you remain in life and also what your micronutrient requirements are at this time around and as you age.

Children will additionally require diverse nutrients at various phases of development to guarantee their mind and bodies prepare to grow and learn.

6. Your Lifestyle

One of the biggest aspects is just how your ideal diet regimen will certainly fit in with your way of living. If you're balancing a permanent career, domesticity, spiritual or school functions and pastimes that keep you hectic night and day, then you need to identify how to carry over your food viewpoint into your lifestyle.

Perhaps you don't appreciate food preparation or don't have much time to invest in the cooking area. You might need to study very easy supper hacks, begin a cooking cooperative or locate food shipment companies that align with your food choices to assist you meet your goals. You might have to shift your priorities to straighten with your new way of life. For instance, if I recognize I have an active week in advance, I meal strategy, shop and also batch prep a few dishes on the weekend break when I have a lot more time.

7. Dietary Preferences

You'll also wish to consider in your allergic reactions, sensitivities as well as general foods that you do not like. Some people do well on carbs as well as others do not. Take down just how you feel and start to make the link between food, your mood and also power levels after you eat.

8. The Research

Nutrition research is among those locations that will certainly never ever, ever before be settled. We're discovering more and also a lot more about nourishment scientific research each day. But you need to take care where that science is originating from and that is paying for the studies. Many medical professionals make use of "prejudice" to make their factors - meaning they will cherry-pick analytical information to prove their point. You'll find thousands of researches stating that veganism is ideal or Paleo is the method to go, or everybody needs to be consuming a raw food diet plan. Research your diet plan extensively from various sources to obtain an all-around factor of view.

9. Trial and Error

Don' t be terrified to make mistakes along the method. I once tried to eat raw foods for a week as well as had such stomach troubles that I was miserable. Be open to attempting new foods as well as diet plans, yet keep in mind to be in tune with your body and just how you feel.

Choosing a suitable diet plan is an evolving procedure, yet it's a pleasurable one too. Remember, if your perfect diet isn't sustainable - implying something you can do for the remainder of your life - after that it will not function for you. Attempt to create a plan or method of consuming that benefits your body as well as your lifestyle.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 20, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

The news today remains Trump’s unprecedented attempt to steal an election in which voters chose his opponents, Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, by close to 6 million votes, so far. A close second to that news is that the leadership of the Republican Party is not standing up to the president, but is instead seemingly willing to let him burn down the country to stay in office.

Never before in our history has a president who has lost by such a convincing amount tried to claw out a win by gaming the system. Biden has not only won the popular vote by more than any challenger of an incumbent since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s win in 1932, but also has won crucial states by large margins. He is ahead by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, almost 160,000 votes in Michigan, and between 11,000 and 34,000 each in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.

And yet, only two Senate Republicans—Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Ben Sasse (R-NE)-- have called Trump out for refusing to accept the results of the election. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has simply said he is willing to let the process play out. In the House, only two Republicans have said they oppose Trump’s attempt to steal the election. Kay Granger (R-TX) and Fred Upton (R-MI) said there is no evidence of fraud and it is time to move on.

State leaders, though, have refused to do Trump’s bidding. Today, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, certified Georgia’s vote for Biden. Also today, two top Republicans in the Michigan legislature, whom Trump had invited to the White House apparently to enlist their help in overturning the vote in their state, issued a statement about what happened in their meeting with the president.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Michigan Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield said they used their time with the president to press him for more money to help Michigan fight the coronavirus, which continues to rage across the country.

As for the election, they said “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors…. Michigan’s certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and intimidation. Allegations of fraudulent behavior should be taken seriously, thoroughly investigated, and if proven, prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And the candidates who win the most votes win elections and Michigan’s electoral votes.”

Central to Trump’s argument is that Democrats have cheated, even though his own former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Christopher Krebs, said the election was “the most secure in American history,” and “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Krebs was the first director of CISA, an independent agency established within the Department of Homeland Security in 2018, and he worked hard to protect the election from foreign intervention despite the fact the president appeared to be angling for just such intervention.

Krebs’s defense of the security of our elections led to Trump firing him—by tweet—with Trump falsely asserting: “[t]he recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud - including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more.”

Trump’s attempt to throw out Democratic votes and lay claim to victory in an election that he lost by quite a lot is the culmination of a generation of Republican rhetoric claiming that Democratic votes are illegitimate.

Beginning in 1986, Republican operatives began to talk about cutting down Black voting under a “ballot integrity” initiative in hopes that would depress Democratic votes. They bitterly opposed the Democrats’ expansion of voter registration in 1993 under the “Motor Voter” law, which permitted voter registration at certain state offices. By 1994, losing Republican candidates insisted that their Democratic opponents had won only through “voter fraud,” although voter fraud remains so exceedingly rare as to be virtually non-existent. They fought for voter ID laws that tended to disfranchise Democrats, and immediately after the landmark 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision in which the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Republican state officials introduced voter ID laws and bills restricting voter registration.

In addition to suppressing Democratic votes, recent Republican leaders also took the manipulative system of gerrymandering to new extremes in order to make sure Democrats could not win power. In 2010, party operatives raised money from corporate donors to make sure that state legislatures would be controlled by Republicans that year, as states redistricted for the following decade. After 2010, Republican controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and won a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. But Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Gerrymandering meant that Republicans did not have to attract moderate voters. Instead, Republican candidates had to worry about challenges from further right. Over time, they became more and more extreme. At the same time, without competition, they fielded increasingly weak candidates, who doubled down on inflammatory rhetoric rather than advancing viable policies.

Increasingly, Republicans insisted that Democrats were anti-American “socialists,” a theme Trump picked up and ran with in his 2020 construction of his opponents as “radical left” extremists who would destroy the country. Trump said "I'm not just running against Biden — Sleepy Joe — I'm running against the corrupt media, the big tech giants, the Washington swamp. And the Democrat Party is a part of all of them — every single one of them. They flood your communities with criminal aliens, drugs and crime, while they live behind beautiful gated compounds." When the Democrats won, Trump promptly insisted that Democrats had cheated.

Aside from the outcome of this particular election, this attempt of Republican leaders to delegitimize the Democratic Party is an assault on our democracy. Here’s why:

Democracy requires at least two healthy political parties, so there is always an organized opposition to the party in power. Having a party that stands in opposition to those in power does two things: it enables people to disagree with current leadership while staying loyal to the nation, and it provides a means for oversight of the people running the government.

Until the early 1700s, in Europe, the monarch was the state. Either you were loyal to the king, or you were a traitor. Gradually, though, the British political thinkers from whom Americans drew their inspiration began to object to the policies of the British monarchy while remaining loyal to the government. They developed the idea of a loyal opposition. This was an important development in political thought, because it meant that a person could be loyal to the country (and keep his head firmly on his shoulders) while criticizing government policies.

It also meant that the people in power would have oversight to keep them on the straight and narrow. There’s nothing like opponents watching you for any potential scandal to keep corruption to a minimum.

During the establishment of the early American republic, the Framers of the Constitution briefly imagined that since the colonists had thrown off the king they would no longer need an opposition. But almost immediately—as early as President George Washington’s administration—men who disagreed with Washington’s policies organized their own party under Thomas Jefferson to oppose those in power. Jeffersonians offered to voters an alternative set of policies, and a way to put them into practice without overthrowing the government itself. This recognition of a loyal opposition was key to more than 200 years of peaceful transfers of power.…

until now.

Trump is rejecting the idea that Democrats can legally win an election. As this crisis drags on, more and more of his followers are echoing his insistence that the Democrats could not possibly win except by cheating. There is no evidence to support this claim. Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly admitted as much in court. It is rather a rejection of the possibility that Democrats can legitimately govern.

Our democracy depends on our ability both to criticize our government and to believe that we can legitimately elect a different set of leaders to advance different policies. If we lose the concept of a loyal opposition, we must all declare allegiance to the king.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sapphicscholar]

Pride Month Prompts Day 7: Underground (SuperLane)

From this Pride Month Prompts post! I’m taking the opportunity to write some short fics for a variety of pairings that I haven’t written for as much, maybe at all. They won’t be going on AO3, so I’ll be sure to tag them all with #pride month prompts so you can find them later if you want. 

Day 7: Underground

Pairing: SuperLane (Kara/Lucy) - another new one! (Set after Manhunter)

Perhaps taking off the helmets had been a bad idea. Scratch that: it was definitely a bad idea. But Kara had wanted to see Alex, had wanted Alex to know that she would always come for her, even if it meant stealing DEO property, shooting down a truck owned by the U.S. government, and freeing two supposed criminals being hauled away for treason. And seeing Alex’s reaction when she realized that Lucy had switched sides for them was pretty great too.

For a while, it seemed as if everything had gone fine. J’onn and Alex took off on the bikes, Kara flew Lucy back to the base, and they both acted surprised by the news of the escape (and were genuinely surprised by the news of Lucy’s promotion).

Neither of them took into account the fact that a vehicle headed for Cadmus would likely be equipped with multiple cameras sending live feed footage back to the military.

The following morning, a heavily armed squad showed up to arrest them both, and it was only Kara’s super hearing that gave her the extra few seconds she needed to swoop Lucy up in her arms and fly them both far away from the DEO and the military officials toting guns loaded with kryptonite-laced bullets.

Within a day, they’d gone completely underground. Kara was opposed to stealing, but she’d swept through stores faster than anyone could see, throwing money onto the counter in her wake. That was how they’d acquired a stockpile of food, new clothing, wigs for going out, and two burner phones that were being saved for an emergency. She’d also grabbed a few bottles of wine for Lucy, who had only recently reconciled herself to the idea of breaking the law and was looking a bit pale as the realization that she was a now a wanted fugitive with her own father hot on her heels sunk in.

On day 5, Kara finally got up the courage to apologize. “If I hadn’t...I should’ve made sure that we stayed covered, checked for any cameras.”

“It’s Cadmus, Kara. I’m sure they were livestreaming the footage.”

“Still. I could have kept them from knowing you were the person under the other helmet.”

But Lucy shook her head, rubbing at her temples before draining the rest of her plastic cup of wine. “Long term, this is the decision I’m proud of. I’ve pushed down a lot over the years, but I don’t think even a lifetime of practice at repressing shit would have been enough to keep away the guilt if I’d sent your sister and J’onn off to be tortured at Cadmus.”  She refilled her cup, frowning when the rest of the bottle only brought it up to two-thirds full. “So really, I’m the one that should be apologizing. You just pulled my head out of my ass long enough to see that I wasn’t living the kind of life I could be proud of.”

“Hey, no, I’m sure you’ve done some amazing things.”

Lucy snorted, something dark flashing across her features as her face twisted in disgust. “Like what? Break my ex’s heart because I’d rather hurt her...hurt us both, than risk a dishonorable discharge? Side with my father even as he got more and more bigoted just because every so often he’d pat me on the shoulder and tell me I made him proud? Come flying across the country to restart things with a guy only to break up with him all over again?”

“We’ve all done things we regretted. I’m pretty sure the whole world saw some of my worst choices splashed across newspapers and broadcast internationally just a few weeks ago.” She really wished wine did anything for her; it’d be nice to have something to dull the pain of the too fresh memories. “I also know a little bit about not wanting to believe that a parent could be so wrong about something, about waiting too late to realize there are two sides to every story.” She swallowed the tears that threatened to fall. “But Lucy? You’ve done a lot of things to be proud of.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s hard to believe it these days.”

In a split second, Kara decided to start listing things, as many as she could think of, anything to make that look of sadness, of self-loathing disappear. “You’re a freakin’ major in the Army, which means, like, a lot of people have recognized what a badass you are. And you have grad degrees from Harvard. And you’re super great at Taboo and Charades and Pictionary. And you were willing to put everything on the line once you’d realized you’d made a mistake, which is almost better than just never making mistakes. Because you care, you cared enough to fix it.” She took a deep breath in. “Also you offer great legal advice. And those cookies you made for game night were so good; I ate half of them when you weren’t looking. And you won over Cat Grant in, like, two seconds flat, which, let me tell you, isn’t easy! And you always smell really nice, even at the end of the day, and you’ve got such great hair, like seriously great hair.”

Lucy looked over at her, some emotion swirling in her eyes that Kara didn’t recognize. “You know that the things you did while drugged don’t magically undo all the good you’ve done for the world, right?”

“Oh please, weren’t you the one saying Supergirl didn’t exactly measure up to expectations?”

Lucy ducked her head. “Might have had a bit more to do with jealousy than anything else.”

Kara’s eyebrows shot up at that. “Jealousy?” Lucy had the guy and the job and Cat’s attention. What could she have been jealous of?

“Seriously? You have superpowers, Kara. And a sister who would do anything for you, and this whole group of friends who adore you. Even when James was talking about finding apartments with me to really make things work, he couldn’t keep his eyes off of you. And, to make it all worse, I couldn’t even blame him because you’re fucking gorgeous!” With a huff of bitter laughter, Lucy pulled herself to her feet, swaying slightly—the first sign that the bottle of wine might have affected her. “I should… Night, Kara.”

---

After that night, things seemed easier between them. The guilt and apologies and bad memories had been excised, leaving room for something new to grow between them. Slowly but surely, they began opening up, sharing stories of growing up and years in school and awkward dates. Kara talked about the things she’d had the hardest time getting used to on Earth, and Lucy admitted that she hadn’t thought about how difficult it must be for aliens. She’d moved a lot as an Army brat, having to switch schools constantly, but even during the awkwardness of middle school, at least she’d always known how to speak the language, had a vague sense of what social life would be like, knew what would be taught in her classes and the kinds of clubs that would be offered.

One night, after a glass or two of wine, Lucy opened up to Kara about coming out, not that she’d had too many people in her life she’d been able to tell. Kara admitted that she hadn’t realized it was such a big deal on Earth until she’d asked Alex if she was courting her best friend Vicki and been swiftly and promptly kicked out of their shared bedroom for hours, not let back in until Eliza had demanded that Alex unlock the door for bedtime.

---

On day 18, they woke up to news that all of National City’s residents had been turned into automatons with the exception of Max Lord, who’d published statements about alien threats and how proud he was to be a human who had prepared for this, who had known from the beginning not to trust them, and Cat Grant, who’d posted a very public call for Supergirl to return from hiding and a plea that the government grant her amnesty.

“You’re going, aren’t you?” Lucy asked.

“I have to. National City...no matter what happened or how many people have decided I belong in prison, it’s still my city. They’re still the people I’ve sworn to protect.”

“Be safe.”

“I will.”

“I mean it. I”—Lucy swallowed heavily as she reached out a hand, grabbing one of Kara’s and holding it tight enough for her to feel it—“I want you to come back to me alive.”

And there it was again, that frisson of something that had been crackling between them for so many days now. Only this time Kara didn’t mumble a quick “goodnight” and speed off to her corner of the decrepit old cabin they’d moved into after the first week. Instead, she held Lucy’s gaze and raised a hand to Lucy’s face, sweeping her thumb across Lucy’s cheekbone. “I promise.”

Lucy was the one to lean forward, but Kara wasn’t sure who it was that actually started the kiss. All she knew was that there were soft, warm lips pressed against her own, and if she’d thought she wanted to date Lucy before because she smelled amazing, well, now she knew she wanted to date Lucy and for so many more reasons. But eventually, the reality of everything happening in National City, the hurried phone calls to J’onn and Alex, the continued broadcasts being sent out by Cat, all caught up to them.

“If you can find a way for me to come back within city limits, you’ll call?” Lucy gestured at their one safe burner phone left, and Kara nodded.

A few moments later, they heard the soft thud outside the door that signalled J’onn and Alex’s arrival.

“I should be fighting by your side,” Alex was already arguing as she and J’onn made their way inside.

“I won’t be able to stay focused if I’m shielding your mind.”

“I swear, if we can get into the DEO and get our hands on your prototypes, we’ll be back in an instant, okay?” Kara promised.

“Fine. In the meantime, I’m trying to see if I can’t bypass some DEO security protocols while everyone there is out of commission. I can only imagine that Non is going to want some of our prisoners back, so I’ll try to secure the system from external interference.”

While J’onn was busy talking to Alex, Lucy squeezed Kara’s hand again. “Come back, alright? We’ve got a kiss to finish.”

Kara grinned. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

[boycottphil]

Omg if you're writing usuk can you please do something involving the Beatles/Beatlemania or the British Invasion in general? Theres so much good material there but no one really writes about it. I will love you forever

For context, I am taking fanfic requests!

This was a lot of fun to write! I wasn’t too sure if this is what you meant, anon, but if it’s not, feel free to send another ask! I’d be happy to write more. Anyway, enjoy!

Pairing: UsUk Rating: T Warnings: Strong language, mentions of blood, smoking (cigarettes)  Word count: 2026  

Imagine hundreds of thousands of people screaming your name. Imagine hundreds of thousands of people obsessing over your every step, word, move… Imagine loving every second of the intrusive behaviour displayed by fans.

Arthur, the lead singer of the “best band in history,” lived off of such things. Fame… It brought him joy, joy which he previously thought was impossible for him to feel. He was surrounded by security, yet his favourite moments were those when a fan managed to get to him, and looked at him with amazement in their eyes…

Looked at him as if he were a god.

[[MORE]]

Now, one could say that such thoughts and such behaviour was perhaps a bit… unhealthy. And one would be right. Arthur was sick; getting off on his own fame, and as he gathered more and more fans all over the world with each tour, he felt better. And better.

His band was good, not the best band in the world, per say, but definitely good. Their music was largely enjoyed by a female audience. Girls loved to imagine the songs being sung to them personally. They were written to be perceived that way. No names of girls were mentioned… no hints at any particular gender were given either.

Now, there were rumours, as there always are surrounding any band as huge as Arthur’s. Rumours like selling their souls to the devil, rumours like being robots invested by the government. Rumours like… being gay.

Arthur could only benefit from rumours that claimed he was an alien. It added more mystery to his character, more reasons for people to check out his music, come to his concerts. However…

Rumours that claimed he was gay could destroy his career. The thing is… he is gay. He does not fancy women at all. He couldn’t care less when girls form whole crowds and take off their shirts and bras. He didn’t care about his bandmate’s groupies offering threesomes or foursomes or ogies. He’d rather bang his bandmates if he didn’t despise them all.

He came quite close to having his career ruined, though.

One day, while touring the United States, they stopped in middle-of-nowhere-town of some State that Arthur thought was made up by the Americans to make it to 50 states in the first place. He was still convinced there aren’t 50 of them, but 10 divided into five parts each. But he would not express that opinion. Lest someone shot him for even mentioning the USA in any context that doesn’t presents it as the best country on the planet.

It was a town they were merely passing through, but they had to stop for fuel and food and for the drivers to rest a bit as well. Arthur wore his sunglasses and had clothes on that he wasn’t known for wearing, and decided to walk around town a bit. They had a few hours, and he wasn’t about to pass the opportunity to stretch his legs and turn off his brain a bit. Touring meant little walking and too much work, so moments such as those were few and far between.

He had purchased a box of cigarettes, which he planned to get through before he had to be locked in a fast moving vehicle again; in which he wasn’t allowed to smoke. With a fag already lit and dangling off his lips, he walked out onto the pavement, ready to resume his walk just when��

He was bumped into by some 5 foot 6 tall boy. He groaned as his cigarette fell into a puddle, together with his sunglasses. He grumbled and hurried to retrieve his glasses but, well… the kid already saw.

“Arthur Kirkland?! No way!!” He yelled too loudly, his voice far too deep for what Arthur assumed was a 13 year old boy.

“Shh!” Arthur shushed and then wrapped an arm around the other’s head and covered his mouth so he couldn’t make more noise. He felt screaming behind his hand and the boy seemed to be losing his mind just from being touched. Arthur did love attention… but not in some hick town when he was looking for a quiet place to smoke and meditate until he had to leave again.

He dragged the other into an alley- not a suspicious thing to do at all- and shushed him until the other stopped freaking out. He rambled about being touched and carried by Arthur, all of which was technically true, but it sounded so much more dramatic coming out of the kid’s mouth.

“Okay, listen here, kid-” he started, but was promptly interrupted.

“Kid? I’m 19!” He argued.

Arthur looked annoyed, but slightly less on-edge about dragging him into a dark alley. “Whatever, mate. Just stop screaming like a bloody schoolgirl. I don’t want this whole town to know we’re here. The paparazzi would hound us for hundreds of miles, like they did in the last town this happened in.” He explained as he lit his second cigarette- he was mourning the first.

“So you really are Arthur Kirkland?” The other asked, already taking off the backpack he had on and reaching for the first paper and pen he had. “Would you please sign this?” He asked, his bright blue eyes shining in anticipation.

Arthur frowned, but he took the pen and, without really looking or even thinking about it, produced a perfect loopy signature.

“Whoaa… That’s so cool! My name’s Alfred so could you…”

Arthur added, ‘for Alfred, stay cute’ at the bottom, as he does for all signatures, merely replacing the name.

“You think I’m cute?! Wow, Arthur Kirkland thinks I’m cute!!” Alfred said, his voice so high pitched in excitement that Arthur almost really did think he was cute.

“No, mate- I write that for everyone. Most of my fans are girls, you see and-” once again, he was interrupted.

“But you do think I’m cute! I can tell. You keep looking at me,” Alfred insisted, perhaps a bit cheekily. Arthur blinked, trying not to seem too taken  aback.

“I, uh… I don’t… What?” He was usually never speechless. He always had a way to make a fan swoon over him with smooth comebacks and flirty lines that made girls go absolutely mad. But this was a boy. A boy who had called him out on his obvious interest in him, and a boy who, while excited to see him, clearly didn’t think he was a god.

Weird. He was supposed to always be seen as a god. What else could he be seen as?

“So… if you could keep this meeting to yourself for the next 24 hours, that would be bloody fantastic. Now, if you excuse me…” he mumbled and started walking away. He thought Alfred would be satisfied enough with that; he got an autograph and a hug- sort of. But no…

“So where are you headed now?” Came the American voice of the 19 year old who just decided to tag along.

Arthur felt his blood beginning to boil just a bit. “That is literally none of your business. Literally.” He sighed, exasperated.

Alfred fell into step beside him, keeping up easily even as the Brit tried to speed up. “Aw, come on! I won’t tell. I know how to keep secrets! I’m great at it. This one time, my cousin Austin, he told me that he and his aunt on his mum’s side-”

Arthur stopped abruptly. “How the fuck are you good at keeping secrets?”

“Well… I… You don’t know my cousin Austin, do you?”

Arthur groaned and kept walking, now deciding to ignore Alfred entirely. The teen though; he decided that he would ignore Arthur ignoring him. The Brit continued walking and smoking his cigarette as if Alfred wasn’t right there, and talking his ears off about dinosaurs and spaceships and how much he loved boys and how he knew Arthur could relate and-

Wait.

They had at that point reached a park, which was perhaps the size of two average backyards. There was no one around, and Arthur really appreciated it.

“What do you mean?” Arthur asked, his blood really getting to a simmer.

“Well, you know… You’ve never been seen with a girl, you never touch girls, you don’t talk about girls, you don’t even seem interested to all the girls we just passed while getting here. At all. You’re gay, and I can tell,” Alfred claimed.

“I have absolutely no idea where you get those ideas from. How would you know what I do in my free time?” He crossed his arms, perhaps a bit defensively.

“You look at my lips and arms so much, and you’ve looked at my ass too. I’m not dumb, you know! There’s no shame in being gay, Arthur. It’s all just-”

Arthur was angry at that point. He threw his half finished cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, then turned to face Alfred. “I don’t know who you think you are, but if you’re gay and you think making up lies is going to turn me gay, then forget about it. All right? I don’t even mess with groupies in the first place. Would you kindly leave me the fuck alone now?” He said loudly, keeping his composure enough not to yell at this kid.

“You’re just mean and in denial because you think if you come out that girls will stop obsessing over you. That’s okay. If you don’t want a groupie because all of them are girls, that’s understandable. But I mean… I’m free. I ran away from home a week ago. I have nowhere to be so… I could come with you. Warm your bed at night. Maybe do a few more other things too. Like ride you while you-”

Arthur punched him. He got too heated, too angry, amd he just… threw the punch. His knuckles ached after, and Alfred was holding onto his bleeding nose. It didn’t seem broken, but knowing the consequences of literally punching someone, Arthur began briskly walking away.

He should have expected to see the American again, before he even managed to walk down half a block. How he could cradle a bloody nose and run after him was a miracle.

“That was so rude!! I did not deserve to be fucking punched, man! I was just teasing you, dude! It’s literally not my fault that you are hiding your repressed homosexuality-”

“Stop. Calling. Me. Gay.” He growled, taking one step closer to the teen with each word uttered.

Alfred was practically pinned to a wall just then, looking up at the Brit with wide blue eyes. He was tall and handsome and…

And he kissed Alfred before he could get socked again. Instead of being pushed away and hit, as Alfred expected he would, he was pulled closer and kissed intensely enough to have all the air sucked out of his lungs.

Arthur pulled away seconds later, practically pushing himself off Alfred. Even behind his sunglasses, his eyes looked wide and shocked at what he had done. He looked around, then took Alfred’s hand and ran toward the bus.

He fucked up. He fucked up big time. But that’s okay… No one saw. And if he just kept Alfred with him on tour at all times… No one would find out that he was gay. At all.

“Is everything you need in that backpack?” He asked Alfred, out of breath from running, once they arrived at the bus.

“Yeah, why?” He asked and took off his backpack so he could take some tissues out and clean the blood off his face.

“Good. You’ll be coming with us on tour,” Arthur stated bluntly, not even bothering to listen for a yes or a no. Alfred grinned like a kid and hopped into the bus behind Arthur, already reaching out to cop a feel of his favourite singer’s ass.

Needless to say, Arthur did get himself a groupie. Involuntarily. And now every day became a series of “I almost outed myself to my millions of crazy fans.” It could be worse. At least he sleeps with a cute and annoying twink every night.

[brazil-also-loves-rwby]

To move on 6 - RWBY FANFIC

Hello everyone. This is my fanfic Para Seguir Em Frente. I translated it because I received many visits from countries with English language. MY ENGLISH IS BAD AND YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Please comment.

PS: This fanfic should be just an Oneshot, so it’s slowly developing in my mind. Please be patient. Suggestions are always welcome. Originaly posted here https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13256016/1/To-move-on

- Ruby ?! - Oscar exclaimed, not believing his eyes. Ruby populated his thoughts and suddenly she was there, in the flesh.

- Um, hi Oscar, I know it's late but ... Can I come in? - She lowered her eyes, her face red. Oscar noticed that he was in fact with his bare chest exposed before her. He stumbled backward, making way for her to enter.

- Yes of course! Feel free! Just ... Give me a minute, I'll be right back.

She went in and went to sit in front of the fireplace, rubbing her hands together. Oscar sprinted up stairs and came back fully dressed and with two cups of tea in record time. He sat down on the soft rug beside Ruby and handed her a cup.

- Sorry for the delay. Drink it, you're blue with cold. - He said.

- Thanks. - She took a long drink and sighed with satisfaction. She finished the tea with three more long sips.

-I thought you were still at Anima. - he started softly without warning, probing why Ruby was there. - When we spoke last week you were in the middle of a subjugation.

- Yes, but things got ... complicated. - The lack of Ruby's eternal joy and contagious energy was beginning to cause Oscar to panic. It was not often that he had seen her friend like that.

- Tell me what happened, Ruby. Whatever it is, I'll help you sort it out. - He said, taking her small hands and nestling them between his. Her eyes filled with tears.

- It's a baby Oscar! A baby! - She cried, freeing her hands from his to cover her face. - I do not know what to do!

Oscar's mind went completely blank. Gods, Ozpin would not know what to think at a time like this! Was Ruby pregnant?! When did this happen?! Who...?! Questions stacked chaotically in Oscar's mind and he needed all his willpower to dig them out.

- The father...? - He started, trying to form a coherent question in shock.

- There is nobody. The grimms ... - She choked on a sob.

She was pregnant and she had lost the child's father to the grimms?! Oscar did not know what to do other than pull her into a tight hug. She hugged him back, wetting his shoulder with warm tears. They stood for a long moment like this, with Oscar cradling her in his arms as they reassembled. When Ruby's tears finally broke, Oscar spoke softly.

- Do you want to keep this child? - She sniffed.

- I would if I could, but I'm a huntress, Oscar. I could not take care of her and work at the same time. - He swallowed hard.

- I could help you ... - He took a deep breath, taking courage to say what he intended. - I'll never replaced her father, but ... I could help raise her.

- I knew you'd say that. - Ruby laughed softly, moving away to meet his eyes. - But the baby is not the only Oscar. We found dozens of children.

- What? Did you find it? Are not you pregnant?! - Ruby's eyes widened, as confused as he.

- What? Not! Why did you think that?!

- You come to my house out of nowhere, asking for help and crying over a baby! What did you expect me to think?!

- Well I...! I...!

They stared at each other in amazement. Ruby's lips quivered, coming dangerously close to a smile.

- Ruby Rose, don't you dare laugh at it. - She let out a small, strangled chuckle at his anger. - That's not funny! You almost gave me a heart attack- oh great.

He gave up rebuking her as she burst out laughing. He tried to look angry, but the cheerful sound took a weight off his chest. As long as Ruby could laugh like that, everything would be all right. He waited for her laughter to die before continuing.

- Now that you've finished laughing at me, tell me: What's the problem? - She took a deep breath, losing some of the laughter in her eyes.

- In recent months we have visited several villages destroyed in the war and escorted the refugees to the capitals. However, most of these refugees were children, Oscar. Adults and even teenagers were left behind to protect the younger ones and died. - She twisted her hands. It was difficult to explain to another child, again and again, that her parents would not come back.

- Oh Ruby...

- And that was not just in Anima. All other kingdoms are suffering the same fate. And now, orphanages have no more room for new children. On my last mission, I came back with a baby in my arms and the principal told me she could not keep it. If they put a child beyond their capacity, the government could close the place for irregularity. - Her voice trembled. - So I brought her to Vale, but the orphanage here is close to the same problem. I did not know what to do to resolve this, but I thought maybe you could.

- I?

- Yes, Oscar! I understand battles and grimms, but you know how the world works! Please tell me you can help us. - She begged, grabbing him by the sleeves of his pajama shirt.

Oscar stopped to think about it. This was a serious government problem. All kingdoms were weakened after the war. All investments were focused on rebuilding cities and farms. Homeless people arriving from shattered villages were immediately hired for labor. So they could pay for their own food and housing, avoiding beggars piling up on the streets. However, this could not be done with children. They were a non-return expense whose governments could not cope with. And from what Ruby said, there were many of them. Oscar sighed, rubbing his temples to ward off a headache.

- Yes, Ruby, I think I can help. - Ruby smiled broadly, but he promptly rebuked her. - But it will not be easy. I'll have to deal with something that Ozpin fled like the plague.

- What do we have to do, Oscar? - She asked apprehensively.

- We'll have to deal with politicians.

And Oscar did it as soon as he woke up the next morning. He came in contact with all his acquaintances who had some influence. He got favors. He analyzed everything he could from the situation in which the kingdoms were, discovered what they needed, and analyzed what he could offer. Oscar put all the cards he could in his sleeves and set up a meeting.

Politics itself was a battlefield like any other and entering it uninvited was like a war. He needed to gain the confidence of mayors, be introduced to senators, show his potential to the county itself, before they were willing to listen to his ideas. All this would have been impossible, but he did it in little more than a month, thanks to his magic and prestige.

- Are you telling us to cut part of the budget for agriculture and civil construction for social assistance?! - One of the faunus of Vacuo exclaimed. - If we do that, the economy will break!

- That will not happen if we reduce spending in these sectors considerably. - Oscar explained calmly. Regardless of his fame, the young man was having difficulty gaining the confidence of men and women twice his age.

- And how do you suggest we do that? - One of the councilmen of Atlas questioned skeptically.

- Our society has become extremely dependent on machines. They are expensive, consuming money in their construction, maintenance and fuel. The amount of Dust that a simple tractor consumes to plow one acre of land is already a waste per se. This reflects on the value at which the product will be sold in the market and the lives of the people in the city who consume it. So if we replace the machines with man labor, we will be saving hundreds of thousands of liens.

- But a person can not possibly do the work of a machine. - Another Atlasian said, laughing at Oscar's foolishness. - The cost to employ the number of people needed to replace a single machine would already be similar and they would never do the service at the same speed the mechanism.

- That would be true in the old world. Today we have magic. - Oscar said simply. - Many began to notice on their own, but a single person can command the land to plow itself in half of the time of a tractor. More than that, it is possible to force the shoots to grow in hours, rather than days, creating flowers and fruits in the middle of winter, if necessary. With some training, a bricklayer can build a house like building blocks. You know this is possible. Glinda Goodwitch herself did, before she even received the gift of magic. Now anyone is capable of the same, if taught so.

- And this is a knowledge you're willing to share... - One of Vale's councilmen asked cautiously. - At a price, I suppose.

- But any of us can develop these techniques without his help. - A Mistral's councilwoman disdained.

- Yes, but there are advantages to accepting my help. Oscar countered. - Following my instructions will save you all accurate months of searching, trial and error. And all I want in return is for the children to be properly cared for. Imagine the source of despair they are at the moment. All terrified, mourning the loss of their families, piled in tight houses, without any structure to keep them happy and healthy. They are a beacon to any grimm in miles. Ensuring their happiness will improve citizens' morale, create respect for government, and keep society whole. And I believe that we all want to avoid the utmost to deal with even more destruction when we not even finished rebuilding our cities.

The councilors argued among themselves. One by one, they voted. And one by one the realms agreed to the terms of Oscar.

There was a great explosion of progress. Oscar took a month to educate a team of instructors and it took them another month to form their first class of wizard farmers and builders. After that, the world exploded in motion. Ruined streets were repaved in days. Walls erected in just minutes. People stopped to admire the builders working, seeing houses rise in a matter of hours.

And the councils took Oscar's warning about keeping the population's happiness a priority. Public squares were founded, with playgrounds full of toys. Entertainment venues, such as theaters, cinemas and museums, were prioritized in the restoration queue.

But above all this, the first project of all kingdoms was the reform of their governmental orphanages. Oscar made it a point to watch, with Ruby, the reconstruction of Vale's orphanage. Oscar recognized Ms. Poppins, whom he had seen months ago, along with the little blond girl who had approached him on the street. He even tricked them out of the orphanage, announcing that the government had financed a tour of the city's new amusement park, and had put them all inside a bus. At the end of the day, when everyone returned, the orphanage was completely different. The building now was twice the size, completely remodeled, and stocked with new sectors like a library, infirmary, and a large playground outside.

While the children rushed in, being followed by their caretakers, Miss Poppins followed directly to Oscar. He and Ruby said goodbye to the workers and appreciated the happiness they brought the children. Poppins carried Amber in her lap, the little girl Ruby had brought from Anima.

- I have no words to thank you for what you have done for us. - The woman said to Ruby, her voice startling melodious, even on the verge of tears. - When you said you were going to do something to help us, I would not have imagined anything like that.

- Nah, I did nothing but ask for Oscar's help. - Ruby dismissed the thank-you, suddenly terrified of her attention, as was typical of her. - He had all the trouble dealing with the county.

- Thank you, Master Oscar. - Poppins whispered, a single tear trickling down her pretty face. - We will never forget your goodness.

They left feeling light and even when Ruby left again the next day, Oscar did not suffer as much as the first time. He had the feeling that she would return again, with or without a request for help, as reliable as the arrival of spring after winter. All he had to do was wait.

What he did not expect, however, was to answer the door a week later to find Miss Poppins waiting for him where Ruby was once before.

- Good morning, Master Oscar. - She greeted him with the sweetest of her smiles. - Could you spare me one minute of your time?

[umichenginabroad]

A Dark Day in New Zealand

March 20th, 2019

Disclaimer: this post will cover sensitive events in Christchurch and I will be sharing my thoughts and experience regarding the event

This week I will be not be talking about any exciting or interesting things I have been doing but will instead be focusing on a very serious and sad event that happened in Christchurch recently. As it has been worldwide news, I assume most people reading this know what I am talking about. For those who may not, this past Friday afternoon (March 15th) a gunman opened fire on worshipers during Friday prayer, the prayer with highest attendance, at two separate mosques in Christchurch. The attack was carried out by a white supremacist who was intent on harming as many as he could. During these attacks 50 people were killed, even more injured, and a countless number affected. This is the first mass shooting that New Zealand has experienced since 1990 and is the first terror attack to take place on New Zealand soil. 

For those who may be wondering, I am doing fine and consider myself to be extremely lucky to be one of those who was rather unaffected considering the situation. Friday was also the day that both of my parents arrived in Christchurch for the beginning of their 10 day visit. They arrived into the Christchurch airport in the morning around 11 am and we met up shortly after to grab lunch at a mall which ended up being just blocks away from one of the mosques. Thankfully, we did not head downtown and instead went back to the University because I had a class starting at 2 pm. It was only shortly into the class that I was notified that the whole school was on lockdown because a shooting had happened at a nearby mosque around 1:40 pm. One of the scariest parts of this whole experience for me was that my first thought was, “Oh, it’s just another shooting.” Of course I had no idea of the magnitude at the time, however it is still sad to think back on just how desensitized I have become to shootings. I even talked to my professor during class and it was clear that the news was affecting him more than it was affecting me. Coming from a country where hearing about another shooting is commonplace definitely altered my immediate response to the situation. 

My professor promptly cancelled class and let us all know that we were free to leave if we so wished. I left class and made my way back home to my apartment which is only a quarter mile from the university. Walking across the campus was one of the most memorable experiences of the whole day for me because of how silent it was in the middle of the day with nobody around except for a few security officers. As it turns out, I left the building just before they raised the lockdown level to where students were not allowed to leave the building. I went home and sat down in front of the TV with my roommates that were home. It was nearly impossible to understand that what we were seeing on the TV was just down the road from us. Later, a friend came downstairs and was scared to go back outside because it had not been released yet as to whether or not the shooter had been apprehended and could be anywhere. At the same time my parents were safely at their hotel which was a few blocks closer to the mosque than where I was. They were told to stay in their room for the time being until more was known about the situation. 

Eventually, the situation seemed to be under control and people began to move about the city in the late evening. This helped to at least partially lift the blanket of silence that had spread across the city. It was around this time that the number of deceased was released and that was when the magnitude of the situation really struck me. It was terrifying to know that such a horrific thing had happened in a place that I had ran past many times.

The New Zealand government and police handled the situation with the utmost concern and respect for those affected. The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Arden, gave many heartening and reassuring speeches that addressed the situation perfectly. During the following days much was done to help and respect those who suffered losses in the shooting. This past Monday, the University of Canterbury held a vigil which all students could attend during the day. This was one of the most beautiful and emotional events I have ever been to. Members of the muslim student association of UC spoke as well as the president of the students’ association. One of the things that really touched me was when some students performed a traditional Māori haka to honor those who had passed and then embraced the members of the muslim student association.

“Kia Kaha Be Strong”

Later that day, I went downtown to the Christchurch Botanic Gardens where people had been leaving flowers in memory of those who were killed and supporting the muslim community. It was both heartbreaking and heartwarming to see all of the messages of love and compassion coming from those who never knew any of the victims. There were many letters there that were addressed to specific victims from their friends and families that made me tear up when reading them. It was beautiful to see a community coming together to support each other in a time of need.

Just a portion of the flowers and messages left near the botanic gardens

Nobody should ever have to experience such a horrific event and my heart goes out to the muslim community and those who lost family and friends during this absolutely heartless event. However, there is nowhere I would rather be right now than where I am right now. New Zealand has been an incredibly welcoming country to me and hope to be able to give back in a time of need. One of the most inspiring things that was said at the UC vigil was that this shooting was not who were are. New Zealand is not a country where racism and xenophobia such as this will prevail. That being said, we must work towards a time where we can say to the world, “This is us.”

Wes Fermanich

Materials Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

University of Canterbury 2019, Christchurch, New Zealand