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Caravan of Dreams [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-05-30  

What follows is an excerpt from my autobiographical work, entitled, Caravan of Dreams -

It is not meant to serve as a guide to living – that would be preposterous and absurdly pretentious. It is not meant to judge others; I do not pretend to speak from an elevated platform, real or imagined. In my mind, the most profound, difficult and sometimes disconcerting task is to discover and understand one’s truest self. My thoughts do not exude from any rarified atmosphere of experience or being. It is not meant to serve as a recipe for success or self-fulfillment; I do not have certification as a “Life Coach” – I find it an interesting sign of the times that such a professional position actually exists.

It is intended, however, to elucidate the particular and unique experiences and cultural, political and social content of my life – at least of the first seventy-five years of it. It is interlaced with many and varied unsolicited commentaries and opinions regarding this often-preposterous world of the living. Amid long stretches of my personal history, objects of my concerns about humanity in the present time and my own projections into the future will show themselves like unexpected guests at a dinner party.

In looking backwards over the terrain of my past, it, in many ways, has the look and feel of a caravan moving through time and space sometimes full of color and adorned with regalia and exceedingly boisterous and chaotic. Other times, it reflects moments and periods of doubt and profound personal evaluation. It is, hopefully, filled with humor; for, to live life without humor is to, in many ways, miss the point. It is, in essence, a Caravan of Dreams.

By way of information I was born when the nation was about 157 years old – the US Constitution was signed on Sept. 17, 1787. As nations go, this country was barely out of its nappies. Continuing with this absurd kind of mathematics, at my current age of 75, my life has spanned 32% of the nation’s entire history (as of 2019). That represents a significant part of the American experience. Enfolded within this 75 years there were many wars along with a varied and explosive array of social issues including the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of World War II, the anti-Vietnam War era, the Civil Rights Movement and Jim Crow, the Gay Rights Movement, the Anti-Gun Rights Movement spawned by an incessant wave of random mass shootings, the Women’s Movement, the storm of conflict around, the Women’s right to Abortion (Roe v Wade), the horrendous destabilizing period around the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York (Sept. 11, 2001) and the concomitant war in Afghanistan, the Gulf Wars and on and on it goes.

We are all both the benefactors and victims of the history of our times – this is an inescapable reality. Hopefully, my story will shed some light on all of this especially for those who may read it at some future time when these aspects of history seem so distant that their essential significance becomes muted and seemingly irrelevant.

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