Now Reading: This is What America Looks Like - My Journey From Refugee to Congresswoman - Excerpt!

 As a refugee who fled civil war as a child, I am still trying to figure out where I fit in—which is perhaps why the most important note I found sticking to the wall outside my office had only three words. 

“You belong here.”

Even though there are many politicians who interest me, this one woman, who happened to write a book, has drawn me since she was first taunted over and over and over by white congressmen.

What power did she have to achieve so soon a prejudicial spirit from the republican party? For surely she had no past experience that they could consider--at least I didn't think so. Yet, there she was being a target right from the point she had been elected...

Why?

Obviously I decided to buy her memoir.

But immediately I realized that this book may later be a political story. But first, we learned about her early life that was so completely different from those who grew up in America, that I was startled...

And then empathy flowed as I continued to read...

Perhaps, I thought, if I shared an early chapter, there would be many United States women, and perhaps, even some men, who would also find, if not empathy, at least some type of sympathy???

But, frankly, after the last decade and, especially, during the last several years, I have lost any trust that men who have been so indoctrinated by various groups, that, if we allow it, women will be "placed" back into the kitchen/house, never to be allowed to even leave that building...

Am I wrong? I hope so. There are many women who have known the lack of a love such as Jesus (And who was clearly NOT White)

taught--to love wives as Christ loved the Church... I recognize that my faith is falling--not in God--but in how those who claim to be Christian have turned against the majority of All God's Children!

Because they are not White

But, merely, like Jesus and many other leaders

The Irony of this turn for so many is sadly incomprehensible to most... 

Prologue “Thank you for helping to uplift so many girls from all over! Love from Seattle.” “Salaam sister—from the West Side in Senegal to Detroit #13 strong. You continue to amplify us.” I don’t remember when they first appeared on the wall outside my office in the Capitol Building: the Post-it notes with words of admiration and encouragement left by people from as far as Duluth and Delhi. “Congresswoman, traveled from Oregon and HAD to see you! Thank you for being BRAVE, BOLD, AND OUTSPOKEN. If UR ever in Eugene, I can show you around.” “Thank you so much for all you’re doing to protect our courts!” “Keep fighting for immigrants.” I do know when they started to become a problem for Facilities. It was a few months after I became the first Somali American Muslim woman elected to Congress in 2018—right after President Donald Trump began his Twitter attacks against me. “Ilhan is an American hero!” “No matter what they say, we’ll always have your back!” Overnight, a large mosaic of multicolored squares grew up around the American flag and plaque bearing my name and the name of the state I represent, Minnesota. Maintenance asked us to remove them, so my staff took the Post-its down and put them back up on a wall inside my office. But visitors to the congressional office building, open to the public Monday to Friday, 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M., continued to put them up. “Thank you so much for being a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves.” “You are a soldier of the people for peace & justice for all.” They just kept coming, so Facilities gave up. Now the patch of little neon notes is a permanent bright spot on the otherwise austere white walls of a municipal hallway. What I am most proud of is not the visible expression of support for my work as a legislator, fighting for all my constituents’ ability to participate in our democracy. Nor is it the high praise or the depth of emotion—although these sentiments have gotten me through some tough times. What I am most moved by is the incredible diversity of the message writers. They come from different places and perspectives. There are Post-its from teenage girls, who dot their exclamation marks with little hearts, and from Senate staffers, who took a moment from their long days in a cynical city to jot down a positive word. A blue heart-shaped sticky note with “Republican women support you” was stuck beside a regular yellow Post-it that read, “From one black immigrant to another, please know that I love you.” I learned the Hebrew letters on a light blue note, מיר וועלן זיי עיבערלעבן, were actually Yiddish for “We will outlive them,” which Hasidic Jews in 1939 had turned into a song of resistance in the face of a Nazi commander. That all these people and more would choose to stand behind me—a Muslim immigrant who had arrived in this country from Africa speaking only two words of English—is proof enough that there are stronger bonds than identity. As a refugee who fled civil war as a child, I am still trying to figure out where I fit in—which is perhaps why the most important note I found sticking to the wall outside my office had only three words. “You belong here.”

Named a Best Political Book of the Year by The Atlantic

“This Is What America Looks Like is the origin story of a leader who,

 finding no set path that would take a person like her to the

places she wanted to go, was forced, and free, to chart her own.” 

–The New York Times Book Review

1 Fighter 1982–1988

Mogadishu, Somalia The teacher quickly put a student in charge of my third-grade class before she stepped out of the room. This was not unusual in my elementary school, where students stayed in the same classroom while our teachers for different subjects rotated in and out. When transitioning between periods, teachers usually designated one child to keep the rest from getting too rowdy. Like all kids, we were prone to abusing this position. Today, though, the boy in charge really let his newfound power go to his head. Almost immediately, he ordered another, smaller boy up to the chalkboard to write an assignment. “I beg you,” said the boy being ordered to the board, “leave me alone.” But the tall boy in charge was determined to humiliate his classmate, who was a minority in every sense. Poor, small, and an orphan, he didn’t have the crisp white shirts, ironed uniform trousers, and shiny school shoes of the middle class that the large boy and I both came from. The big boy continued to taunt his victim, escalating his threats when his classmate wouldn’t rise from his seat, until finally he shouted, “Hooyadawus!” which means “Go fuck your mother” in Somali. I burned in my seat. I always hate it when people use vulgar language, but I get really angry when it involves mothers, who I knew from the beginning were sacred—even if I didn’t have one. I mean, everybody was always talking about how important mothers are. In Islam, my native country’s main religion, we learned that “Paradise is under the feet of mothers.” You were supposed to bow to your mother, abide by her every wish, not debase her. There were also deeper forces at play than my seven-year-old brain could recognize in the moment. Although thanks to my older sisters and many loving aunties I didn’t lack for mothering, my mother, my hooyo, had died when I was a preschooler. I don’t have a single memory of her, even though I remember other things from that age—like family members fighting over whether or not I should start school. Some of my aunties and uncles thought I was too young, because technically you were supposed to wait at least until you lost your first two teeth. “She’ll lose her books,” someone said. “She won’t know where to go,” another argued, “and the other kids will steal from her.” But I didn’t stop complaining until they let me go. And, no, I didn’t lose my books or get robbed, even with all my baby teeth intact. I remember all of that clearly, but my hooyo? What she looked like, something she said, even what she died of? Nothing. As an adult, I went to a hypnotist to see if he could help evoke something, anything—a voice, a touch—but nothing emerged. I still find it so odd. Whether it was an early commitment to my religion’s teachings or the fact that an absence can loom larger than any reality, mothers were a big deal to me—and I didn’t like anybody to disrespect them. “He’s not going to get up,” I said to the bully. “You’re supposed to make sure nobody gets out of their seat, not give us assignments. So you’re just going to sit and shut up, and we’re going to wait for Teacher.” The boy, at least two heads taller than me, was not impressed. “If you don’t shut up, you’ll be sorry,” he said menacingly. I was a particularly tiny child, so anyone who didn’t know me assumed I was a coward. The runt who always got bullied at school. But I wasn’t afraid of fighting. I felt like I was bigger and stronger than everyone else—even if I knew that wasn’t really the case. “I’ll meet you in the rear courtyard after school,” I said. That was the place where all the kids went to fight. Right before the next teacher entered the room, the boy who I had stood up for whispered to me, “After school, I’m going to run, because after they beat you, they’re going to beat me.” “If you don’t want them messing with you every day,” I replied, “you’ve got to stand up for yourself.” He might have been a wimp, but he was no liar. When school let out, he kept his word and ran. With a crowd of kids screaming around us, the bully and I began fighting. I was small but a good fighter. I pulled the boy down and rubbed his face in the sand. When my brother, Malaaq, who was in the eighth grade, arrived to watch the fight and saw me grinding the boy into the ground, he shouted, “Ilhan! What the hell?” My brother wasn’t actually surprised to see me at the center of a fight, just annoyed. There was always a slew of parents coming to our house to complain that I had hurt their children. My dad would just laugh. “The only child nobody should be coming here to complain about is my smallest baby.” YES, I WAS THE BABY OF A LARGE FAMILY, AND YES, I WAS SMALL. But that had nothing to do with the sticks growing in the bushes by the gate outside our house, which were perfect for beating back any kid who chased me home from school. I had the independent mindset of an only child. I didn’t feel young, in no small part because I was never treated like a child. No one was patronized in my brilliant, loud family. In our Mogadishu compound—filled with African art, books of history and Somali poetry, and music—the disagreements were constant. We were a multigenerational family—aunties, uncles, cousins, and siblings from my maternal side, all living together. We were unlike a traditional hierarchical Somali family, where when the father or mother spoke no one else dared utter a word. Instead, everyone, even the youngest child, me, was brought into every decision. Sometimes I wished Baba, my grandfather, and my aabe, my father, would take on more authoritarian roles. They were annoyingly accommodating to each person’s opinion and patient during the ensuing arguments. Everybody was always screaming about what we should do, even when it came to what we were going to eat for dinner. The constant conflict made us at once close and distant from one another. Despite our differing points of view, we all were accustomed to disputes—we had that in common. There was nothing typical about my family. To this day, I don’t know a family quite like ours. But in Somalia, where members of an extended family living together are almost always patrilineal, we especially stood out, since my aabe had moved in with my mother and her family after they were married. Sons usually assumed responsibility for supporting their parents as they aged. Hooyo, however, wouldn’t agree to marry Aabe unless she could stay with her family. My father didn’t have a full appreciation of what he was getting into when he decided to leave everything he knew by the wayside for love. Although I would perceive different conflicts in him when I grew older, as a child, the greatest one I noticed had to do with his diet. Aabe, who won’t touch seafood, married into a family where fish was the primary source of protein. Furthermore, although he ostensibly fit into my mother’s world, as is often the case, he could never completely forget the ways he was born into. My father, an educator, came from a traditional patriarchal Somali family where the boys, the primary beneficiaries of educational investment, were raised to become the leaders of their future families. Meanwhile, when my grandfather welcomed his firstborn child, my mother, he promised himself that she would be treated the same as, if not better than, any male firstborn. Custom dictated that only the birth of a boy was a moment for pride. But Baba, who had a huge presence, was nevertheless very proud. He was opinionated and sure of himself, but not without reason. He had one of the sharpest memories of anyone I ever met. Well-read, he had the knowledge of so many books at his fingertips. When he wasn’t working at his government job, helping to run the country’s network of lighthouses, he liked to fish and play cards. Baba was also a great cook. He was a purist when it came to the ingredients he used to prepare dishes of his specialty, Italian cuisine. His minestrone was my favorite food. Just as he wouldn’t compromise on the quality of the tomatoes in his soup, Baba didn’t waver in his convictions. He stayed true to his vow to raise his daughter as an equal to his sons. When Hooyo met Aabe, she was in her twenties, which was very rare at the time, since women predominantly married in their late teens. Not only that, but she was also gainfully employed as a secretary for a government minister. I don’t know that my grandfather needed her financial support, but my mother had a sense of duty about living up to the responsibility and unusual privileges she had been afforded by her father. Everyone knew that if you ever needed Baba to sign on to something or calm him down about a dispute, you needed to talk to his daughter. She was my grandfather’s true confidante. I wasn’t surprised by the stories I heard time and again about how while she was alive, whatever Hooyo said, went. That’s because Baba continued to invest a lot of time and energy in the girls of the family (more than he did with the boys, according to my uncles). He was extremely close to us and did not adopt the traditional patriarchal role of the protector that Somali men usually fall into with the opposite sex. He treated us as equals. It’s always hard to say why a person goes against cultural norms. My grandfather’s freethinking partly stemmed, perhaps, from the fact that he didn’t come from one of the country’s formalized clans. The maternal side of my family was Benadiri, a Somali ethnic minority who trace their lineage to Persians, Indians, and Bantu peoples from West Africa and Arab Yemenis. Successful traders credited with helping spread Islam to Somalia, they settled in port cities like the country’s capital Mogadishu, where my grandfather was born and raised. I think Baba embraced the idea that if you don’t fit in anyway, you might as well do what you want. THE ONLY PLACE WHERE I COMPLETELY FIT IN AS A CHILD WAS within the walls of my family’s compound. Otherwise, I wasn’t quite enough of any one thing. Although officially I belonged to my aabe’s clan—one of the most powerful in the country—I wasn’t fully Somali because of who my mother was. Not that anyone, other than our neighbors, really was aware of this, since we weren’t stereotypical Benadiri, known for their light skin and passive natures. Many of my aunties and uncles, as well as my grandfather, had darker skin like me. And no one in our family was remotely passive. As the youngest, I was spoiled, but then again I really wasn’t. Our family of civil servants and teachers was well off enough to have a guarded compound and driver. But I didn’t like the attention I received from the other kids for the in-your-face privilege of our white Toyota Corolla and our driver, Farah—nor the constraints. I hated being driven back home after school and usually tried to walk, which meant trouble for Aabe, since that’s when the fights with other children took place. I also wasn’t enough of a girl, at least in the traditional sense. None of the women in my family were expected to cook and clean—like most Somali women. We certainly had just as many, if not more, opinions than the men in the house. But I also did what boys did outside the house. I played soccer. I climbed trees. I snuck into the movie theater. No other girls I knew did any of that. My tomboy ways only fueled the talk among the neighborhood women about “poor Ilhan,” a girl growing up without a mother. Never mind that I had all the love and attention of a crowd of caring adults, they reasoned, I must have been deprived of a mother’s affection and guidance. There were so many assumptions about who and what I was supposed to be, and none of them fit the description I had of myself. But I wasn’t burdened by the discrepancy. Indeed, I never bothered to answer for it. Instead, I followed Baba’s example. If there wasn’t a world out there to fully embrace me for who I was, I didn’t have to worry about appeasing anyone.

I was eight years old when civil war broke out in Somalia. One day everything was okay, and the next, there were bullets piercing not only buildings but also people.

In the reality of war, sometimes running for shelter somewhere else makes you feel safer—even if it isn’t so. On the way to my great-grandmother’s home, I saw bodies piled up on the street. We stepped over them. The adults didn’t know what was happening, even though I felt they should. Instead, I kept hearing them say the same thing over and over: “I don’t understand how everything just turned.”

~~~~

My background is German on both sides of my family. Reminding me again that when I asked my mother about my background, she immediately pointed out that I was an American. Today, as we are faced with the extreme turn of one political party against the known principles of democracy, we are also in a position wondering how everything just turned... But, when you stop and think about your own life, you will soon realize that in every society, every culture, there are individuals who act as bullies from their early lives and sometimes carry those predatory emotions into their adult lives. Others will choose, as Ilhan might have, coming from an actual democratically run home with sufficient financial support to be able to strive for what each would choose for their lives...

But as in the Prologue, we see that even with a unique family dynamic, this congresswomen chose to work with others to attempt to make life better for all... She was where she needed to be...

Yet, right from the beginning, it was the president himself who set the tone of prejudice against her, so that many have followed in his footsteps on bigotry... Yet she continues to fight!

What Ilhan Omar symbolized when she was attacked — and why it drives Trump crazy

The administration’s policies are about making women compliant again.

https://www.ms.now/opinion/ilhan-omar-assault-trump-american-women-femininity

Rep. Ilhan Omar: Trump is weaponizing fear against me and other immigrants

ICE activity in Minnesota is state-sanctioned racial profiling used as a tool of political intimidation.

https://www.ms.now/opinion/ilhan-omar-trump-slurs-somali-minnesota-ice

Trump not only dismissed Ilhan Omar — he disrespected his own role as president

Abraham Lincoln warned us about this momen

https://www.ms.now/opinion/ilhan-omar-attack-trump-response

Disclaimer

I am sure all of my readers are aware that I do not support, in any way, the republican party. 

For one reason. We all know that the president lies, and the party follows what he says. I really have no choice. As long as I cannot trust anything stated by the republican representatives, I cannot in good conscience use any "alternative facts" from that group.

I have no desire to debate between parties. Politics, in my opinion, is backing 99% of the actions now being made by our government. None of it is legal. None of it is in in support of the majority of the needs of our citizens. None of it is supported by the constitution.

GABixlerReviews

Reuniting with Brother Manny Monolyn Moreno - Elder - Poet - Author - Painter - Friend

We Are ALL God's Children!

 

Who cares anymore?

I feel like I'm wasting my time trying to preserve what I've been taught by elders, and others, and have learned over a lifetime, through my books now. My commitments and dedication. But then I remember why I must.

I didn't dedicate and sacrifice myself to do the painstaking works to be liked or admired. I've looked, listened, learned, and produced to share and pass on, our stories, of our time, of our ancestors, and our struggles.

I'm at the age where I should be pacing myself. Taking it easy. Giving back. But it's turned out to be impossible. So I cope with it. No one is to blame. Not bitter.

Anyway, may Grandfather have pity on me, and us all.

( me and Elder Lee, RIP )

Books I've written :

The Bridge is Gone / poems
The Elder / A Tribute
Longview Road / poems
Santa Nella Blues / poems
Scared - The Healing / memoir
revised and edited.

Scared- The Healing 243 pgs. has been completed and in process to get published hopefully soon with help.

https://cash.app/$mrmonolin

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/monolin

Manny reads from his latest award-winning book

Santa Nella Blues

https://www.facebook.com/YAQUIME

Folks, like me, Manny has suffered through having his Facebook site lost, along with work that he had shared over many years. He now uses Manny Anthony Moreno on Facebook, adjusting, just as I did, to whatever "problems" that seem to occur much too often without explanation, in my opinion. In fact, I had lost touch with Manny for so long I began to track him down... I don't want to allow that to happen again. And, I hope you will choose to follow Manny, and me, GA Bixler, on Facebook since we both lost our "history" on this site... Both of us had many contacts which are not easily able to be rebuilt... 

It was reported this morning on MSNOW that the supposed removal of the 700 ICE members from Minneapolis, might actually be moving into the areas of where indigenous tribes are located in the same state!

It is quite clear that ICE is being used as a private army by this president working to respond to his DEI program which he announced immediately, to remove any individuals who are not, essentially, white males... Please consider that these people have already had to fight for some amount of dedicated land even though they were here on the north america continent before WE WERE!

Accountability.

To hold yourself to account for your actions. Not to shift blame on others.
Trying to hide the misguided crap you do to make yourself look righteous, when others know the truth, hurts only you.
That's foolish.
Growth comes from being honest about and with yourself, for what you've done, and working on change. But that takes self-honesty and courage.
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time".
Be true to yourself. And maybe healing will take place. Why mask the shame to look righteous?
Today feeling ill all day and now, I recieved some very productive calls from people excited about the talking circle, women and men. Even from a deported veteran who would like to have one on zoom.
Seeds are being planted and hopefully people will come together to find some healing.
Thank you all who called. I'm inspired by you.
My heart feels your hope.
May our prayers guide us and bring it to fruition.

A'ho 

You'll be seeing more from our friend, Manny, moving forward!

God Bless

Gabby

Announcement from Harold Michael Harvey, J.D. - Seeking Background Information for New Book! While Sharing Excerpt from Latest--Watch Night!

 

I have been commissioned to write the biography of Professor W. J. Fluker who spent 40 years on the history faculty at Tuskegee University. If you took one of Fluker’s history classes and are willing to share your experience and how Fluker impacted your life and career, please inbox/contact me, preferably on LinkedIn.

Also, kindly share this post with your local alumni association so we can get maximum support. BATAC Tuskegee Alumni , Houston Tuskegee Alumni Association, Tuskegee Univ. Athletic Hall of Fame, THE GREATER CINCINNATI CHAPTER OF TUSKEGEE AIRMEN, @tuskegee

Hi Michael

When I saw this notice, I immediately thought of a book I once read... and reviewed... I was working with Branden Books at that time, so format was much more formal then, LOL But I did want to refer you to this book for possible background reference...

See Review

Chapter 1

Our Souls Cried Out for Freedom

The history of Bethel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church dates from 1863, 160 years ago, as of this writing. According to the 1860 Census, Macon had a population of 8,247; of that number, 2,851 were Black enslaved people. When the Civil War started, the business leaders of Macon were quick to pick up the cause of the confederacy to protect the legalization of slavery. The economy of Macon and Middle Georgia depended on cotton and enslaved people who planted, cropped, and picked it.

Two years after the shooting started, President Lincoln issued his proclamation of emancipation on
September 22, 1862, to becomeeffective January 1, 1863.

Lincoln’s proclamation commenced during the third year of a bloody civil war between northern and southern states. The Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people in states liberated by Union military forces under the federal government’s command. It did not free enslaved people in free states who were not in rebellion against the federal government.

The Emancipation Proclamation was important to enslaved people in Macon and Bibb County, Georgia. As the fall of 1862 gave way to winter, enslaved people in Middle Georgia greeted the coming New Year with great anticipation and fear.

For blacks working and living on the Dunlap and other plantations in Macon, Georgia, in 1863, Lincoln’s “Hail Mary” pass to save the Union did not bring immediate freedom. Freedom would only come when Union troops arrived to liberate the enslaved children of God from bondage in America.

At the time of founding the Watch Night service, which would be the beginning of Bethel Methodist Church, the Confederate States of America controlled the State of Georgia. Georgia had dissolved its contract with the United States of America on January 19, 1861, thereby retaking possession of all the rights of sovereignty it had relinquished when it joined the Union as one of the original thirteen colonies. Georgia was the fifth state of thirteen to secede from the union, following South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama.

Freedom seemed so far away on January 1, 1863, when a band of farsighted Christians, some following the Methodist doctrine and others adhering to the Baptist order, seeking a place of worship, gathered under the leadership of Rev. John Zorn, an ordained Methodist preacher, in a two-room house.

They prayed and sang all night until the sun broke, announcing a new day and a new year. It did not seem like anything had changed. At least they were alive, and their freedom was no more restricted than before Lincoln uttered his proclamation.

Freedom did not come until December 1864 when the Macon city fathers released Union General George Stoneman to General William T. Sherman.

Stoneman had been captured outside of Gray, Georgia, on July 31, 1864, by a militia of Macon residents, near the house where the black Methodists and Baptists worshiped; General Stoneman received his freedom in exchange for a Confederate prisoner of war and General Sherman’s agreement not to torch Macon as he had done to Atlanta and would eventually do to Savannah.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation brought this group together at midnight in 1863, even as they feared retribution from plantation owners as freedom
dawned on New Year 1863. The worshippers had a reasonable suspicion that Middle Georgia planters did not want to lose them to freedom. Shortly after the war, the number of Blacks in Macon rapidly increased from 2,851 to 5,946 by January 1867, and Whites were alarmed that soon there would be more Blacks in the city than Whites.

Business leaders pushed the federal government to remove Black troops from Macon, and in 1868, General Grant permitted Black troops stationed in Macon to be reassigned. Instead, the Black regiment was disbanded.

Almost from the beginning of Negro freedom, Blacks in Macon were ignored by Whites. Few Whites welcomed Blacks into the brotherhood of Americanism. Black people were left to figure freedom out for themselves. Poverty abounded in the Black community. Military units were used to drive Blacks from their homes rather than protect them. Martha Ayers describes the abject poverty in Macon’s Black community two years after the war ended in a letter to her friend George Whipple:

“A freed woman, Sally Franklin, she is starving—the day is cold, but she is without covering, in an open building, without windows. A baby is wailing at her side, and the mother’s bosom is bare, though her last conscious act had been an effort to nurse her child.”

According to the Macon Telegraph, October 15, 1865:

“Six months after the war Mayor Stephen Collins reported that ‘the city had buried thirty negroes in a one week period, and that of that number nine or ten were picked up dead in the streets and alleys of the city.’”

C. Mildred Thompson, in her book Reconstruction in Georgia, posits:

“As living conditions in the city’s [Macon] Black sections worsened, the rate of disease increased. The
mortality rate among Blacks was frightfully high. In December 1865, about five hundred died compared to the ordinary death rate of only about forty a month.”

These are the conditions the early worshippers confronted as they turned to their faith in God to help them through this nightmare in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

One city official opined that through July 1866, around five thousand Blacks had died in the city and federal hospitals. According to Paul Michael Johnson in his paper, The Negro in Macon, Georgia 1865-1877, “During the epidemic Macon leaders generally maintained a ‘business as usual’ stance…”. They blamed the spread of smallpox squarely upon the Black community.”

The small pox outbreak did not meet pandemic proportions because it was contained in the newly freed Negro communities in Macon and did not spread to White Macon. Probably because the town was segregated by race. Epidemics of smallpox, other diseases, and fires that burn down Black churches usually do not happen in a vacuum.

It is not hard to fathom that Macon’s rapidly growing Black population was cause for concern to White leaders who feared a Black takeover of the commerce of a prosperous section of the state. It would not be the first time that genocidal practices were applied to non-white populations that White Americans wanted to eliminate from participating in the process of American prosperity. See the population of Natives at the Ocmulgee National Mounds.

Such was the political, economic, medical, and moral climate our ancestors endured while organizing this Zion.

Very little information exists to document the members of that early church meeting in the house on the eastern side of the property of W. F. Elder Lumber
Company near Central City Park. Elder specialized in lumber and building supplies.

According to William Richard Cutler in the American Biography, “Mr. Elder was a son of David P. and Nancy (Head) Elder. His father was a planter in Spalding County for many years and was a leader of general affairs of the Methodist Church denomination. By 1910, W. F. Elder Lumber Company had a “capital stock of $12,000.00,” according to the Macon Telegraph. Twelve Thousand Dollars was a nifty sum in early twentieth-century dollars.

Initially, Elder’s Lumber Yard's worshippers were Methodists and Baptists. When the Baptist members of this fellowship left to form a Baptist Church, the Methodists continued to worship on this site. They adhered to the discipline of John and Charles Wesley. The Wesley brothers did not believe in slavery; thus, possibly the founding members of this church were freedmen. In any event, W. F. Elder was probably aware that a group of Negroes were worshipping in a house on his property.

This Methodist Church was made possible by a question raised at the Methodist Conference of 1790: “What can be done to teach poor children (white and black) to read?” The 1790 Conference answered like this, “Let us labor to establish Sunday Schools.”

This resolution was vital to forming Bethel Methodist Church because enslavers in the South had agreed to permit mission schools to teach Christianity to enslaved people.

Thus, within the framework of White Supremacy, for lack of a better term, the church could teach Blacks to read the Bible without running afoul of the law that prohibited the teaching of those in enslavement.

The Methodist Church Connection used this law loophole to teach enslaved people to read. It was still unlawful to teach enslaved Blacks how to write. If an enslaved person could write, Whites feared it would
make them equal to their White enslavers and enable the enslaved to send communication to each other, perhaps plotting and planning to escape from captivity.

In her book Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South, Janet Duitsman Cornelius notes that “Sunday Schools organized and led by blacks [Blacks] thrived in… Macon, Georgia.”

Among this group of church founders was Rev. John Zorn, who could have left the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, along with others in 1844 over the question of slavery but declined to do so.

Zorn may have been the offspring of Rev. Calvin Zorn, a white circuit rider from Virginia who rode the Methodist circuit in Georgia. If Calvin Zorn was his father, this could explain why Rev. John Zorn continued to worship with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South Connectional Church. He pastored Bethel for thirty-one years.

In 1865, The house of worship on Seventh Street and Riverside Drive in Macon was initially known as a Methodist church. It was more likely aligned with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, as the northern church split with the southern church in 1844 over the issue of slavery when Bishop James Osgood Andrews received notice to step down because he held Negroes in captivity. For a moment, the Methodist Church, South gave Andrews a pass, but then his wife inherited two enslaved Negroes, and the connection rose and said Osgood had to go.

Those White worshippers who favored Osgood owning human beings, as one would hold a piece of property, stayed with the Methodist Church, South. Those in opposition split off to form the Methodist Church, North. In 1968, the Methodist Church, North dissolved and formed the United Methodist Church to unite all Methodists. Today, the question of Gay marriage threatens to split the United Methodist, similar to the issue of slavery in the nineteenth century.

Contrary to the Methodist philosophy conceived by John and Charles Wesley, Andrews believed that owning human beings was not inconsistent with the Methodist doctrine; thus, he refused to free the humans he held in captivity. Therefore, the northern Methodists were not active in the southern states following the split of the Methodists Connection in 1844. The liberal Methodist left White southern Methodists to their own devices, owning and selling humans created by the same God who created them.

However, permission to organize missions on plantation property received approval, and Blacks continued to receive help and instructions from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Sometime around 1860 and possibly earlier, a group of Black Methodists held Sunday service on the banks of the Ocmulgee River. Many of these members organized the Holsey Temple C. M. E. Church.

As previously noted, other Black worshippers in this group gathered in a house in a lumber yard near Central City Park on the banks of the Ocmulgee River. The park’s development occurred in 1826, three years after the city’s founding in 1823.

Founding members of what would become the Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church were Brother and Sister Washington King, Brother Obie Jackson and his family (Jackson is the grandfather of the late Sister Anna Parker), Brother Reuben Richardson and his family, Brother and Sister Mingo Fickling, Brother and Sister Rena Ballard, Rev. Campbell and his family and Sister Sleina Gibson (Great-granddaughter of Sister Ursula Webb). Tyrone Wyche, who has worshipped at Bethel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church since the early 1960s, is a direct descendant of Sister Sleina Gibson. His grandmother and great-grandmother were the Bethel church family's mainstays for much of the twentieth century's first half.

The congregation grew with the close of the Civil War in 1865. The Baptists who gathered at the house in the lumber yard during what would become the church’s first “Watch Night Service at midnight on January 1, 1863, would soon leave the Dunlap house on the lumber yard property and build a church under a brush arbor, then a physical structure at the corner of Riverside and Seventh Street, then a new church at 1660 Pio Nono Avenue, in West Bibb County, at that time, outside the city limits of Macon, Georgia.

Paul Michael Johnson, in his paper The Negro in Macon, Georgia 1865-1877 summed up this period expertly:

“It is not surprising that Macon [B]lacks in the face of disease, poverty, and critical [W]hites began to look beyond the limits of the city for a better life. During the summer of 1866, some prominent [B]lacks in Macon organized a movement to recruit the city’s [B]lacks for emigration to Liberia…The vast majority of Macon Negroes were trapped in the city by virtue of their poverty, unable to leave the poverty, disease, and injustice that surrounded them; most [B]lacks realized that if their lives were to improve at all, it would have to be in Macon.”

Johnson concludes his study on Negro in Macon, Georgia, 1865-1871 with this dreary assessment of Black life in Macon in the early days of freedom.

“The educational, political, and economic progress of [B]lack Maconites from 1865 through 1871 could hardly be termed satisfactory. When the Civil War ended, Macon [B]lacks had little or no education, political power, or economic status. When 1871 came to [a] close [B]lack, Maconites had schools but still possessed nothing approaching quality education. They had gained some political power during the years, but by the end of 1871, they had lost it all. Also, Macon [B]lacks stilled lived in abject poverty.”

“Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us, Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won.” --James Weldon Johnson, The Negro National Anthem

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I don't know about you folks, but I'm furious with what this president has instigated to take us backwards, in this case, to the 1800s! Implementing DEI, for instance, is taking us back to the time when white supremacists--rich men who used slaves--are we any differnt now, except in extent of servitude--to allow them to get richer and richer... Don't be fools! Study the history of our nation! Read this and other books... Search historical videos! 

As you can see from this brief excerpt, even laws sometimes cannot force the rich from discriminating in any way they can, to both gain more riches and to cause harm to the rest of us! And the conman in the white house is the worst, and best, of thinking up ways to "use all of us!"

Especially Non-Whites!

Do NOT Allow the use of religion and claims that this is what God wants!

It Is Not True!

Keep listening and learning of God's Truth and His Love!

May God's Voice Speak to YOU!

Gabby

The World Must NEVER Forget! - Learn From The Storyteller By Jodi Picoult We Cannot Allow Going Back!

 It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, that repeatedly proves that one is no longer a man.--Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower

I promise you that I do not purposely choose the books I will next read... And yet, the stories arrive as if arranged... By God? You see, I can't help but compare, to a smaller significance, the "disappearing" of immigrants from America via ICE's removal of those who lived in America for years, by lying and claiming that they were all criminals and gang members, under this administration. Both actions are based upon hate, or hunger for power--for no reason other than that they have a different heritage... What evil can explain actions so cruel? 

From somewhere I learned that Donald Trump kept a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table when he was young... It was quite easy, therefore, to see the very real comparison as I learned of Reiner beating his brother in the exceprt below, who rose quickly in the German military forces... While at the same time, remembering how, when his Trump's brother, who had become an alcoholic, died, DJT worked to ensure that his two children would not receive their family inheritance as was normal in families... see books by niece, Mary Trump, by searching her name in th right-hand column...

Josef: I will not answer to the other name. That person, he is someone I like to think I have never been. But this isn’t true. Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other. To understand what I became you must know where I came from. My family, we lived in Wewelsburg, which was part of the city of Büren in the district of Paderborn. My father was a machinist by trade and my mother kept house. My earliest memory is of my father and mother fighting over money. After the first Great War, inflation spiraled out of control. Their savings, which they had diligently put away for years, were suddenly worth nothing. My father had just cashed in a ten-year insurance policy, and the proceeds did not even cover the cost of a newspaper. A cup of coffee was five thousand marks. A loaf of bread, two hundred billion marks. As a boy, I remember running with my mother to meet my father on payday, and then began the mad rush to the shops to purchase goods. Often, the shops had run out. Then my brother, Franz, and I would be sent at twilight into the fields of farmers who lived outside of Wewelsburg, to steal apples from the trees and potatoes from the ground. Not everyone suffered, of course. Some had invested in gold early on. Some speculated in fabric or meat or soap or produce. But most middle-class Germans, like my family, were ruined. The Weimar Republic, shiny and new after the war, was a disaster. My parents had done everything right—worked hard, saved well—and to what end? Election after election, no one seemed to have the answer. The reason I tell you this is that everyone always asks: How could Nazis come to power? How could Hitler have had such free rein? Well, I tell you: desperate people often do things that they normally would not do. If you went to the doctor and he said you had a terminal disease, you’d probably walk out of that office feeling pretty low. Yet if you shared this news with friends, and one told you, “You know, I had a friend who was diagnosed with that, too, and Doctor X cured him right away.” Well, maybe he is the biggest quack, maybe he charges two million dollars for a consultation—but I bet you’d still be on the phone to him immediately. No matter how educated you are, no matter how irrational it seems, you will follow a glimmer of hope. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, it was that ray of light. Nothing else was working to fix Germany. So why not try this? They promised to get people back to work. To get rid of the Treaty of Versailles. To regain the territory we’d lost in the war. To put Germany back in its rightful place. When I was five years old, Hitler tried to take over the government at a beer hall—the Munich Putsch—and failed miserably by most accounts. But he learned that the way to lead a revolution was not violently but legally. And at his trial in 1924, every word Hitler spoke was reported in the German newspapers, the National Socialist Party’s first propaganda onslaught. You will notice I say nothing about the Jews. That is because most of us didn’t know a single Jew. Out of sixty million Germans, only 500,000 were Jews, and even those would have called themselves Germans, not Jews. But anti-Semitism was alive and well in Germany long before Hitler became powerful. It was part of what we were taught in church, how two thousand years ago, the Jews had killed our Lord. It was evident in the way we viewed Jews—good investors, who seemed to have money in a bad economy when no one else had any. Selling the idea that the Jews were to blame for all of Germany’s problems was just not that difficult. Any military man will tell you that the way to pull a divided group together is to give them a common enemy. This is what Hitler did, when he came to power in 1933 as chancellor. He threaded this philosophy through the Nazi Party, directing his diatribes against those who leaned left politically. Yet the Nazis pointed out the linkage between Jews and the left; Jews and crime; Jews and unpatriotic behavior. If people hated Jews already for religious reasons or economic reasons, giving them another reason to hate them was not really going to be difficult. So when Hitler said that the biggest threat to the German state was an attack on the purity of the German people, and so her uniqueness must be guarded at all costs—well, it gave us something to be proud of again. The threat of Jews was in the mathematics. They would mingle with ethnic Germans in order to raise their own status and in doing so, would bring down Germany’s dominance. We Germans needed Lebensraum—living space—to be a great nation. Without room to expand, there was little choice: you went to war to conquer territory and you got rid of the people who were a threat to Germany, or who weren’t ethnic Germans like you. By 1935, when I was already a young man, Germany had left the League of Nations. Hitler announced that Germany would be rebuilding its army, which had been forbidden after the first Great War. Of course, had any other country—France, England—stepped in and stopped him, what happened might not have happened. But who wanted to go back to war that quickly? It was easier just to rationalize what was happening, to say he was only taking back what had once belonged to Germany. And in the meantime, in my country, there were jobs again—factories for munitions and guns and planes. People were not making as much money as they used to, and they were working longer hours, but they were able to support their families. By 1939, the German Lebensraum extended through the Saar, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Czech lands. And finally, when the Germans moved into Danzig, Poland, the English and French declared war. I will tell you a little bit about myself as a boy. My parents desperately wanted their children to have a better life than they had—and the answer, they believed, was in education. Surely people who had learned how to invest better would not have found themselves in such dire financial straits. Although I wasn’t particularly bright, my parents wanted me to test into Gymnasium, the most academic education possible in Germany, the one whose graduates were university-bound. Of course, once there, I was always picking fights or clowning around, anything to hide the fact that I was in way over my head. My parents would be called into school weekly to see the headmaster, because I had failed another test, or because I’d come to blows with another student in the hall over a petty dispute. Luckily, my parents had another star to hitch their wagon to—my brother, Franz. Two years younger than me, Franz was studious, his head always buried in a book. He would scribble away in notebooks that he hid underneath his mattress and that I would routinely steal to embarrass him. They were full of images I did not understand: a girl floating in an autumn pond, drowned because of a lost love; a deer hollowed by hunger picking through the snow for a single acorn; a fire that started in a soul and consumed the body, the bedding, the house surrounding it. He dreamed of studying poetry at Heidelberg, and my parents dreamed with him. And then, one day, things began to change. At Gymnasium, there was a contest to see which class could first get 100 percent participation in the Hitler-Jugend. In 1934, joining the Hitler Youth was not mandatory yet, mind you. It was a social club, like your Boy Scouts, except we also swore allegiance to Hitler as his future soldiers. Under the guidance of adult leaders, we would meet after school, and go camping on weekends. We wore uniforms that looked like those the SS wore, with the Sig Rune on the lapel. I, who at age fifteen chafed at sitting at a desk, loved being outside. I excelled at the sports competitions. I had a reputation for being a bully, but that was not necessarily fair—half of the time I was beating someone to a pulp because he had called Franz a sissy. I desperately wanted my class to win. Not because I had any great allegiance to the Führer but because the local leader of the HJ Kameradschaft was Herr Sollemach, whose daughter, Inge, was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. She looked like an ice queen, with her silver-blond hair and her pale blue eyes; and she and her friends did not know I existed. This, I realized, was an opportunity to change that. For the competition, the teacher put everyone’s names on the board, erasing those of the boys who joined the HJ, one by one. There were some who joined out of peer pressure; some who joined because their fathers said they had to. There were more than a dozen, however, who joined because I threatened to pound them in the school yard if they did not. My brother refused to join the Hitler-Jugend. In his classroom, he and one other boy were the only ones who didn’t. We all knew why Artur Goldman did not join—he could not. When I asked Franz why he would align himself with a Jew, he said he didn’t want his friend Artur to feel like he was being left out. A few weeks later, Artur stopped going to school and never came back. My father encouraged Franz to join the Hitler-Jugend, too, to make new friends. My mother made me promise to watch over him at our meetings. “Franz,” she would say, “isn’t strong like you.” She worried about him camping out in the woods, getting sick too easily, not connecting with the other boys. But for the first time in her life, she didn’t have to worry about me. Because as it turned out, I was the poster child for the Hitler-Jugend. We would hike and sing and do calisthenics. We learned how to line up in military formations. My favorite activity was Wehrsport—military marching, bayonet drills, grenade throwing, trench digging, crawling through barbed wire. It made me feel like a soldier already. I had such enthusiasm for the Hitler-Jugend that Herr Sollemach told my father I would make a fine SS man one day. Was there any greater compliment? To find the strongest among us, there were also Mutproben, tests of courage. Even individuals who were afraid would be compelled to do what we were told to do, because otherwise the stigma of being a coward would cling to you like a stench. Our first test was climbing the rock wall at the castle, without any safety harness. Some of the older boys scrambled to be in the front of the line, but Franz held back and I stayed with him, as per my mother’s orders. When one of the boys fell and broke his leg, the training was aborted. A week later, as part of our tests of courage, Herr Sollemach blindfolded the group of us. Franz, sitting next to me, held tightly on to my hand. “Reiner,” he whispered, “I’m scared.” “Just do what they say,” I told him, “and it will be over soon.” I had come to see a beautiful liberation in this new way of thinking—which was, ironically, not having to think for myself. At Gymnasium I wasn’t clever enough to come up with the right answer. In Hitler-Jugend, I was told the right answer, and as long as I parroted it back I was considered a genius. We sat in this artificial dark, awaiting instructions. Herr Sollemach and some of the older boys patrolled in front of us. “If the Führer asks you to fight for Germany, what do you do?” Fight! we all yelled. “If the Führer asks you to die for Germany, what do you do?” Die! “What do you fear?” Nothing! “Stand up!” The older boys pulled us to our feet, in a line. “You will be led inside the building to a swimming pool with no water in it, and you will recite the Hitler-Jugend oath and jump off the diving board.” Herr Sollemach paused. “If the Führer asks you to jump off a cliff, what do you do?” Jump! We were blindfolded, so we did not know which of the fifteen of us would be pulled to the diving board first. Until, that is, I felt Franz’s hand being torn away from mine. “Reiner!” he cried. I suppose at that moment I was thinking of nothing but my mother, warning me to take care of my younger brother. I stood up and yanked off my blindfold and ran like crazy past the boys who were dragging my brother into the building. “Ich gelobe meinem Führer Adolf Hitler Treue,” I cried, streaking past Herr Sollemach. “Ich verspreche ihm und den Führern, die er mir bestimmt, jederzeit Achtung und Gehorsam entgegen zu bringen…” I promise to be faithful to my Führer, Adolf Hitler. I promise to him, and to those leaders he has assigned to me, to give them my undivided obedience and respect. In the presence of this blood banner, which represents our Führer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God. And without looking, I leaped. Wrapped in a coarse brown blanket, my clothes still soaking, I told Herr Sollemach that I was jealous of my brother for being chosen first to prove his allegiance and courage. That was why I had cut him in line. There was water in the pool. Not much, but enough. I knew they could not let us all jump and kill ourselves. But since each of us was being brought into the building individually, we could not hear the splash. I knew, however, that Franz would, because he was already at the edge of the pool. And that, then, he would be able to jump. But Herr Sollemach was less convinced. “It is admirable to love your brother,” he said to me. “But not more than your Führer.” I was careful the rest of that day to avoid Franz. Instead I played Trapper and Indian with abandon. We split up into platoons based on the colors of our armbands and hunted down the enemy to rip off their armbands. Often, these games escalated into full-on brawls; they were meant to toughen us up. Instead of protecting my brother, I ignored him. If he was trampled in the dirt, I wasn’t going to pick him up. Herr Sollemach was watching too closely. Franz wound up with a split lip and bruises up and down his left leg, a nasty scrape on his cheek. My mother would hold me accountable, I knew. And still, when we were walking back home at dusk, he bumped his shoulder against mine. I remember the cobblestones on the street were still warm, from the heat of the day; there was a rising full moon that night. “Reiner,” he said simply. “Danke.” The next Sunday we met at an athletic hall and squared off in boxing matches. The idea was to crown a winner from our group of fifteen boys. Herr Sollemach had brought Inge and her friends to watch, because he knew that boys would show off even more if girls were present. The winner, he said, would get a special medal. “The Führer says that a physically healthy individual with a sound character is more valuable to the völkisch community than an intellectual weakling,” Herr Sollemach said. “Are you that healthy individual?” One part of me was healthy, I knew that much. I could feel it every time I looked at Inge Sollemach. Her lips were pink as ribbon candy, and I bet just as sweet. When she sat down on the bleachers, I watched the rise and fall of the buttons on her cardigan. I thought about peeling back those layers to touch skin, how she would be white as milk, soft as— “Hartmann,” Herr Sollemach barked, and both Franz and I stood. This surprised him for a moment, and then a smile spread across his face. “Yes, yes, why not?” he muttered. “Both of you, into the ring.” I looked at Franz, at his narrow shoulders and his tender belly, at the dreams in his eyes that scattered when he realized what Herr Sollemach wanted us to do. I climbed between the ropes and put on the padded helmet, the boxing gloves. As I passed by my brother, I murmured, Hit me. Inge rang the bell to get us started and then ran back to her girlfriends. One of them pointed at me, and she looked up. For one amazing moment the world stood perfectly still while our eyes met. “Come on,” Herr Sollemach urged. The rest of the boys were cheering, and still I circled Franz with my hands up. “Hit me,” I muttered under my breath again. “I can’t.” “Schwächling!” one of the older boys yelled. Stop acting like a girl! Halfheartedly, I shot out my right fist into my brother’s chest. All the air rushed out of his body as he jackknifed. There was a cheer from the boys behind me. Franz looked up at me in fear. “Fight back,” I yelled at him. I jabbed with my gloves, pulling my punches before I could make contact with his body again. “What are you waiting for?” Herr Sollemach screamed. So I punched Franz, hard, in the back. He fell to one knee, and there was a gasp from the girls in the bleachers. Then he managed to drag himself upright. He pulled back his left fist and threw a punch at my jaw. I do not know what flipped the switch in me. I suppose it was the fact that I had been struck, and was in pain. Or maybe the girls watching, whom I wanted to impress. Maybe it was just the sound of the other boys egging me on. I started beating Franz, in the face, the gut, the kidneys. Over and over, rhythmically, until his face was a bloody pulp and spit bubbled out of his mouth as he collapsed on the floor. One of the older boys jumped into the ring and raised my glove, the conquering champion. Herr Sollemach patted me on the back. “This,” he told the others, “is the face of bravery. This is what the future of Germany looks like. Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil!” I returned the salute. So did all the other boys. Except my brother. With adrenaline pumping through my veins, I felt invincible. I took on contender after contender, and everyone fell. After years of being punished for letting my temper get the best of me in school, I was being praised for it. No, I was being exalted. That night, Inge Sollemach gave me a medal, and fifteen minutes later, behind the athletic center, my first real kiss. The next day my father called on Herr Sollemach. He was very disturbed by Franz’s injuries. Your son is gifted, Herr Sollemach explained. Special. Yes, my father responded. Franz has always been an excellent student. I am speaking of Reiner, Herr Sollemach said. Did I know this brutality was wrong? Even that first time, when my brother was the victim? I have asked myself a thousand times, and the answer is always the same: of course. That day was the hardest, because I could have said no. Every time after that, it became easier, because if I didn’t do it again, I would be reminded of that first time I did not say no. Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn’t even any guilt. What I mean to tell you, now, is that the same truth holds. This could be you, too. You think never. You think, not I. But at any given moment, we are capable of doing what we least expect. I always knew what I was doing, and to whom I was doing it. I knew, very well. Because in those terrible, wonderful moments, I was the person everyone wanted to be.

~~~

But my mother also would have been the first to tell me that good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.

Mother's favorite song...

No matter how many times you hear a story about the Holocaust, there will always be another perspective to learn about. This time, the writer, Jodi Picoult, has brought in the family of two boys who will become part of the military under Hitler. How many of us, today, have asked ourselves and others how is our president getting away with all that is happening. Can't something be done? And, yet, there are some who continue to support him no matter what he does!

Is it true what was said when the mother of the Jewish family began to see and fear what was happening? That there are good and bad people and it has nothing to do with religion? After watching the years since 2015, I tend to "want" to agree, especially as, at present, religion is being used by those who are bad, in their attempt to sway our opinions... Just as happened in WWII...

The book moves back and forth in time, as well as from character to character talking, beginning with Sage who is attending a small-group grief session where people bring things in that they can't get over, such as not being able to get over losing your husband... Sage goes, not saying much, since her mother died three years ago... But really, she is unable to get past the accident that left her face scarred...

It was at a group session that she and Josef started talking. Soon there seemed to be a connection, but Sage can't figure out why... And then he starts talking about what happened during the WWII... Josef is in his 90s and feels like his life should be over, but his health is good... Soon, Josef has come to know Sage well enough to know that she is Jewish... And, he wants to share with her about his life, seek and receive her forgiveness...and then... have her kill him... Yes, you understand correctly... Of course, this is very upsetting to even be asked to participate!

What Josef doesn't know is there is somebody who could possibly be a better individual to whom he should seek forgiveness... Her grandmother... Her grandmother is one who has never found it possible to share about her time during the Holocaust. The only way Sage learned of it is when she saw her tatooed prison number on her grandmother's arm...

Readers will then become intimately involved with exactly what happened during the time leading up to and during the actual deaths of the millions who were killed in the 1940s. If this is your first time reading details, be prepared. The story is disgusting, devastating, and impossible to understand just how humans can treat other humans as they do and have... And, if you haven't read any book on this slaughter of men, women and children, I can tell you that this is an excellent book from which to learn.

The inclusion of those young people who were pulled into the German military based upon lies and manipulation is something that, indeed, we should never forget! In my lifetime, the closest devastation I am aware of is what DJT is doing to the world right now. His words, lies, threats, attacks on people, including the loss of millions of jobs, threats of recessions, and so much more, all to fund a major tax break for the richest people in our country, including himself, is simply incomprehensible...and yet, just as those who followed Hitler, there are those who accept what is being done, such as on the basis of DEI, causing disruption at every level of activity that can possibly be destroyed by criminal actions "mandated..."

As we know that the World must Never Forget, we also see continued wars around the world... Loss of Freedom for Ukraine is practically being handed to Russia by America--one day, then something changes, all on the whim and insanity of one man who has no idea how to constructively lead the U.S. Government. We cannot go backward and lose all that America has gained in the period since WWII! Eighty years... A Lifetime!

Many share their stories; others can't bring themselves to remember their own lives being under such a cruel group of armed men who had total control of each and every one that was killed in their homes, or gathered up to ride toward their deaths, based upon lies they had been told...

No wonder that we now face those who use lies to persuade and then turn their backs on those they have lied to and often destroyed. I recognize that this has turned into more of an opinion piece... However, I, along with millions who are protesting and otherwise speaking out, am compelled to be one of the good people who care about others... No matter whether they are in some way different from me...

It's Sad, don't you think, that millions of people look back at WWII with regret, shame, and, fear of it happening again...

While at the same time, we see attacks against Jews one day and then turning against them another day... Could it be, that, it's really about good people versus bad people... And, it's our time for America to have all of the bad guys, who just happen to be greedy on top of being bad guys?

Still, the surprise ending from The Storyteller reminds us that it is extremely hard to trust anybody who is asking for forgiveness and then wanting you to murder them, all the time while continuing to lie directly to your face...

Our only hope...

Psalm 118:8 It is better to take refuge in the Lord 

than to trust in man.

God Bless Us All

Gabby