By Karlyle Tomms ~ "10-year-old calls 911 while trapped with Uvalde shooter as law enforcement stands outside..." Watching things unfold in Uvalde, Texas, watching politicians scramble to exploit the event for political gain, and realizing the horrific grief and human suffering, that results from “man’s inhumanity to man”, I find myself wondering if anyone is remembering to have compassion for the families who went through the unbearable grief of losing a child, a br

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 had 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 with how much I might reveal and how I have felt about revealing these things to everyone at this point. However, like many, I am gi

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 had a population of less than two thousand. Any town larger than about 40 minutes away, and that town had a population of about six to eight thousand at the time. The region was rural, scrubland with more trees and rocks than pasture, and it was almost entirely white. As

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 would have been arrested in today's world, but in 1923, it was a different world for women and children, at least slightly different. She came back and told her Pa, “I ran off and got married. What do you think of that?” He said, “I think you have made your bed, and you are gonna lie in it.” It was not an easy bed to lie in. No sooner had

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 into the paneling to support the weapon, and keep it out of the reach of a small child. Every year rural schools actually let the boys off a day for deer season. They were likely to skip school to go hunting anyway. In the late 1960’s, the girls protested that they got no day off. So the schools gave the girls a day closer to Christmas for

(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 is not a justification for using the word, especially in the context of demeaning people. A white person singing the lyrics of a rap song that contains the word "nigger" may or may not be using the word with prejudice. There are other contexts in which someone who is not black can use the word with absolutely no prejudice intended. The point

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