T Town Tommy

And The Beat Goes On

I find myself back in East Texas this week taking care of my ailing Father and arranging for his long-term care. I expect I will be spending some time down here and unfortunately right now blogging is furthest from my mind as his condition worsens. For those of you that are still readers of T Town Tommy you may have noticed that my posts have been spotty at best and quite a few of you have even dropped me from your blog rolls, this is to be expected. I told myself I would never be a downer on this site; I want T Town Tommy to be equally fun, cool and insightful. I love to share my personal passions about life. However, I find myself at a place in life where family is taking an increased precedence of my time and energy.

I do not really want to go on about the death process and the requirements of the family. I do not want to dwell on friends I love dearly deeply wounding me and anger I feel about the ugly side of the gay rights movement in Tulsa. All of the things I have been experiencing since my return from Seattle and Canada and it has killed my creativity and passion to write anything of value for you dear reader.

However, after almost two years of effort towards this project and the wonderful response I have received worldwide I feel like an explanation is in order as to my absence and forced effort as of late.

In the post Becoming My Parent's Parent I shared with all of you what I was going through with my Father and our history together. The feedback in both private emails and posted comments truly gave me much to consider when making the life-changing decision of taking on the task of caring for an ailing parent. I decided it best not to take my Father away from his friends, church and our family roots going back to the early 19th century in Texas.

Like most people in my situation, I am wrestling with Medicare, insurance companies, banks, doctors, lawyers, accountants, family, ad naseum. I feel like I am juggling twenty things at once but keeping my Father comfortable in familiar surrounding while his care is met is worth all the effort. He is not doing well and the doctors say his outlook is grim with no course of treatment. When I first saw him after his recovery from surgery in the physical rehab unit, he was a mere husk of the man I knew as my Father weighing in at only 145 pounds, very different from his normal robust self. I was shocked and physically shaken once I got back to the parking lot that first night. Since then he has had numerous strokes and is still sliding down hill.

During my short time spent in Tulsa, I have also experienced some disappointment in my dealings with some of the "leaders" of the gay rights movement and the community in Oklahoma. Like any movement, some people have pure intentions while others are stroking their ego. I will not go into it now but hopefully generations Y, Z and Next will drop the attitude and pack mentality carried over by the gay Boomers and X generations in Tulsa. To add to the drama, a person who I thought was a friend and I am emotionally attached to also deeply wound me with his recent actions sending me into a funk on top of everything else going on. That sucks when it happens in our lives but the timing could not be any worse for me right now.

So here, I sit in East Texas with all this on my head and right now, nothing else can fit in it. I feel like Bill the Cat in Wranglers and boots. Therefore, I have decided to take a hiatus dear reader from blogging. T Town Tommy will stay online during my absence as I plan to return to writing some time this summer. Will I cover the Tulsa Gay Rights movement the same as in the past, doubtful, until some things radically change. However I have my faith that I will come back home to Tulsa a better person for taking care of my Father's health and will continue sharing that gay people and straight people are not so different after all in comparision to what the popular media want us to believe. Right now I am not sure what direction this site will take in the future but I promise to keep it interesting. So to you all, take care and God bless till next time.

::Signing Out::

Oklahoma Quote of the Day

From the Norman Transcript:

The Oklahoma Capitol hosted a rally in support of lawmaker Sally Kern, who said gays were more dangerous than terrorists. It's a question of family values. When the movie Oklahoma airs on television, the local station puts a blue dot over the dancing scenes.

Monday Morning Humor - The Three Stooges

http://deesillustration.com/

Do You Talk Too Much?

Just a FYI. Hat Tip to Insufferable Know-it-All

 

It’s Not All Doom and Despair After All

James over at The Mahatma X Files shares a list of people accomplishing some extraordinary social feats with out of the box thinking to problem solve in today's America.

 

 

 

Some accomplishments off the list that are my favorites:

Health clinics in rural New Mexico are community supported and succeed in ways corporate health care and insurance cannot.

A taxi cab cooperative in Madison, Wisc., run by the cabbies, brings in $6 million per year.

A pharmacist in Austin, Texas, works less and accomplishes more since he quit working for a chain and set up a pharmacy that ignores insurance companies and sells the least expensive generic medicine.

Strippers in San Francisco have unionized.

Check out the rest of the list at The Mahatma X Files

A Rally for Sally Kern or History Repeating Itself?

Today in the Oklahoma State Capitol Building over 1,000 supporters including over 50 Christian leaders held a rally in support of Sally Kern and her now infamous bigoted continued statements regarding LGBT citizens and those practicing Islam in the United States. Her ignoring Governor Henry's admonishment to "cool it" is leading to some frightening social trends and damaging statements being made, it's not looking good for LGBT citizens. Doing a Google search on Kern's name draws out two divisive sides on the issue of granting rights to a minority and the claim by Kern and national leaders that both gay Americans and Muslims living in America should be viewed as terrorist and a threat to our country.

Quotes by Kern to the rally of supporters today included:

"This is not about me," "It's about the church having the right to speak out for the redeeming love of Jesus Christ Who died to set us all free from sin. The Lord gave me a verse I've been claiming. Philippians 1:12, 'I want you to know that what has happened to me has really served to advance the Gospel.'" "I compared homosexuality to terrorism because [homosexual activists] want to destroy the traditional family and traditional marriage," "the radical homosexual agenda is seeking to destroy the very foundation upon which this country has been built, and we need to wake up and stand up for our conservative values, yea our biblical values as Christians, or we will lose not only the freedom to express our own opinions, but we will lose the freedom to influence our children with our biblical lifestyles"

In recent interviews Kern stated "homosexuality has deadly consequences" and the most disturbing statement when asked about what should be done in response toward LGBT minorities she said "I was not in any way advocating that we need to go after these people [physically]. I was giving an example. I was making a point, using a metaphor…"  when comparing the threat of having homosexuals and American Muslims citizens in the United States to our war with radical Islamic terrorist with the publicly expressed goal of establishing a fascist Islamic State in replace of the United States.

I expect Kern to fade into a footnote of history but her actions as a political leader speaking in the State Capitol erodes hard won ground so passionately fought for in the struggle for rights of the individual citizen. Our history is replete with minorities fighting for equal rights for all in the United States. Some moderates on the side of no special rights for lesbians and gays are trying to spin a more palatable option of "let the mass market" or "let the voter decided". There is another word for that moderate approach, it's called Mob Rule. It's my belief that the right to speak freely in our society comes with responsibility. It's an abuse of the right to Freedom of Speech by Sally Kern to make such statements as a public lawmaker to the mob against an unprotected minority of US citizens.

I don't know about everyone else but I was taught that it was mob rule and tyranny that caused courageous people to found this great experiment we call home. Our nation has lost its way many times in history due to mob rule, during times of strife, fear and ignorance. This type of minority fear based politics and statements by leaders led to forced relocations and military attacks against Native Americans resulting in the almost extinction of entire native tribes. Mob rule against minorities and supporting slavery again led in part to a Civil War causing 620,000 US deaths with millions of injuries, then yet again during World War II with internment camps on US soil imprisoning over 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, 62% of which were US citizens.

Kern has made it clear she would not want things going that far again but her actions leave people with the option of someone else picking up where she leaves off in her mad crusade of demonizing a minority to appease, in this instance, the religious sanctity of the mob. History has a way of repeating itself, Kern claims to possess knowledge of world history in legitimizing her outrageous arguments, however it would appear her knowledge of US history is lacking.

If her arguments are not checked at some point and carries out, conceivably internment camps will again be on US soil imprisoning its own citizens. The one thing I do know, having worked in the government for years, is that the soldiers and civil servants given orders to carry out will not bother with the luxury of a fine dance around the question of Kern's Son being homosexual, he will be placed on a bus with the rest of us. This is what has happened in our history against the minority by the mob due to leaders like Kern. Have we evolved past the horrors that scar our history, if so how do you explain the rally for Sally?

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals" - "K," Men In Black

Monday Morning Humor - A Selena Tribute From A BIG Fan

A Selena fan shows some big love to the deceased singer!

Hat tip to Perez Hilton

Okie Blogs Quote of The Week

Name calling, distrust, mud-slinging, etc accomplishes nothing. This much I have learned, guys. Am I wrong? Perhaps, but it’s how I’ve decided to live my life now. I grow weary of hateful discussions, anger, distrust, non-intellectual conversation and generally anything that promotes division. -Conservative blogger meeciteewurkor

Maybe there is some hope yet... maybe