I have lived in two worlds: America, where they may embark on a new civil war as we still fight the last one; and Canada, where, far from perfect, folks get along a lot better.

My first experience with a black person in Canada, a few weeks after landing, demonstrated something I’d never seen before: What I call The Wall.

I got on the bus and happened to catch the eye of a young black woman who smiled effortlessly at me. As if I was some random stranger on a bus worthy of a genuine smile.

I smiled back —…

Homo Sapiens is a fearful species. Possibly genocidal since we left Africa, anthropologists and archaeologists note that with every migration into a new land, an extinction of most native species occurred shortly thereafter. This may have included our human rivals. The Neanderthals and Denisovans also disappeared with the arrival of us.

We’ve uncovered countless millennia-old suspected murder victims.

Carroll O’Connor had passed away, and some cable channel ran a marathon of his classic TV series All In The Family in tribute to Archie Bunker, America’s Most Lovable Bigot. I finally understood the adult political humor my parents’ generation adored in the early 1970s.

Nineteen years after All In The Family’s introduction, In Living Color debuted, a sketch comedy show largely produced by blacks. They slaughtered enough sacred cows to threaten McDonalds’s bottom line. Their favorite target? Racial stupidity, ALL of it. They made fun of women and men; they even offered humor bombs like the disabled superhero Handi-Man…

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

— Scottish poet Robert Burn

I may be old and slow, but at least I’m dumb and blonde.

It took days before I figured out why the half-Native, half-white woman at the party got testy when I said she looked white.

I forget the context under which it surfaced. We sat next to each other, chatting. She mentioned early on she was half-Ojibway, and I don’t think we were talking about race or racism. …

By now, we’ve all seen the familiar blurbs at the top of many corporate or eCommerce website landing pages.

My uncle’s comment still drives my aging brain into woulda-shoulda-coulda mode.

It was what I didn’t do to get back at my cousin, and teach my lackadaisical uncle and aunt a lesson.

I’m still kinda pissed, forty years later.

“Dat’s what you get for playing weet boys!”

I have enough to be neurotic about without adding the Fireworks Stunt to my existential angst.

I began pondering the crazy mini-traumas lodged in our brains after reading another Medium writer’s tale of sexual harassment on the school bus.

Her debut into the sexist world for her tween-age self still bothered her twelve…

Singer, songwriter, dancer, and this week’s #MeToo cover girl FKA Twigs, the woman whose initials don’t stand for anything, who ‘just wanted a selection of letters that sounded quite kind of masculine and strong,’ filed a lawsuit against career violent bad boy Shia LaBoeuf for sexual assault, battery, and emotional distress.

She met him in 2018 on a movie set, years after he became more famous for his execrable behavior than for his acting, and got involved in a relationship with him.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG???

Cue the tired Greek chorus of female voices asking the same damn question…

He was a self-styled New Age Native American religion ‘shaman’ and a big-name author. Adored by thousands, his charms were many to his loyal fans and groupies: Learned, spiritual, and drop-dead gorgeous with those high Native American cheekbones.

The heroine in my planned novel would fall hard for him, only to discover his fallibility and phoniness. How many things are wrong with thee? Let me count the ways, you con artist. Native American religions are plural, not singular; you can’t treat them all as though they’re alike; Native American traditions aren’t ‘New Age’, they’re about as Old Age as you…