By Karlyle Tomms ~ "10-year-old calls 911 while trapped with Uvalde shooter as law enforcement stands outside..." Watching things unfold...

By Karlyle Tomms It seems like this has been a season of tragedy, both for the country and in our personal lives because many of us have also lost loved ones to natural causes. However, nothing can compare to the grief that comes when a life is cut short unnecessarily, especially the life of a child in whom we saw such hope and promise. When it came to the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, I was doing okay with it until I saw footage of parents being blocked from entering the school

A Commentary on Sex, Sexual Abuse, Society, Spirituality and Sexual Orientation PREFACE: I wrote this after having some communication with an old friend who had been sexually abused as a child and who was having confusion about his sexual feelings, the source of his feelings, and was judging his feelings as well as himself for having his feelings. I have titled it “Everything Under the Rainbow” because of the old saying that great variety is “everything under the sun”. The va

Okay, Gillette does a commercial which chastises men for bad behavior, a shadow of the “#MeToo” movement. Some men react, “I don’t need Gillette to lecture me on masculinity.” Many men are not used to being called to task. They are used to being dominant and in control, not necessarily of themselves. Call them on their stuff, and it pisses them off because no one is supposed to call them on their stuff, not even another man. The term “Toxic Masculinity” gets tossed around, bu

I labored over whether to write this for a couple of months. I wasn’t quite sure exactly what I wanted to say, or in the final edit, that I have said everything that I needed to say. Some of the things I have said reveal more of me than even some of my closest personal friends have known. I struggled over whether to write this at all. I struggled over how much I might reveal, and how I have felt about revealing these things, at this point, to everyone. However, like many, I a

WHITE FEAR I first wrote this in 2017, this is an updated version of the previous blog post. I was raised in the 1960s on a farm about ten miles out of a north Arkansas town, and the town was less than two thousand in population. Any town larger was about 40 minutes away, and that town had a population of about six to eight thousand at the time. The region was rural, scrub farmland with more trees and rocks than pasture, and it was almost totally white in

By Karlyle Tomms She eloped across the county line at fourteen, lied about her age, and married a man almost twice her age. He probably...

I grew up with guns. My grandpa had rifles and shotguns hanging on the walls. They were propped on ten penny nails driven just far enough...

(NOTE: I have been surprised by the number of people (All white people so far) who have completely missed the point of this essay. This...

When I think of the events occurring on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson Missouri, I am struck by the realization that it only takes a single spark to ignite a firestorm. Yet, it is impossible for such a storm to be ignited without the proper conditions for it to occur. If the forest catches fire it is first likely that it has become dry and tender. A spark upon a moist and nourished landscape is likely to affect little. Lightening can strike the nourished land, and still not igni