My saaxiib qurux badan – “beautiful friend” – Adnan is Somalia bound tomorrow.
For how long he will be away, neither of us know. What I do know is that I will greatly miss him and our shared times together.
Aware that he will soon be gone, Adnan and I have made sure that these shared times have been numerous of late. And we’ve attempted to make them as memorable and happy as possible so that they may be keepsakes of joy and companionship to sustain us in the months – perhaps years – of separation ahead.
Above and left: On Wednesday, June 19 Adnan and I explored the area of urban wilderness around the Winchell Trail, a largely unpaved trail that winds about 2.5 miles along the west bank of the Mississippi River from Franklin Avenue to Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis.
Above and right: At Can-Can Wonderland in St. Paul – Saturday, July 13, 2019.
Above: A filter-treated portrait of Adnan. We were at Fasika, an award-winning Ethiopian restaurant in Saint Paul – Monday, July 15, 2019.
Above, right and below: Adnan earlier this evening in my south Minneapolis attic abode on Chicago Ave., on the eve of his departure to Somalia.
Whatever you want me to do
I will do it for you
Whatever you want me to be
I will be what you need
Because it’s love that I feel
whenever you’re really here
I’m feeling sensual
I can’t rely on myself,
I’m wanting you and no one else
You’ve got me wrapped up
Wherever you are, I know it’s for real
I know you’ve had pains in your heart
That have torn you apart
I know you’ve been safe on your own
But together we’re strong
And deep in my heart, I know that it’s real
Because it’s love that I feel
whenever you’re close to me
I’m feeling passionate
And I can’t deny it in myself,
I’m wanting you and no one else
You’ve got the power
– From “Whatever You Want”
by Arthur Baker, Taylor Dayne and Frederick Zarr
(performed by Tina Turner on her
1996 album, Wildest Dreams)
For ages you have come and gone
courting this delusion.
For ages you have run from the pain
and forfeited the ecstasy.
So come, return to the root of the root
of your own soul.
Although you appear in earthly form
Your essence is pure Consciousness.
You are the fearless guardian
of Divine Light.
So come, return to the root of the root
of your own soul.
. . . Why are you so enchanted by this world
when a mine of gold lies within you?
Open your eyes and come –
Return to the root of the root
of your own soul.
At some point in our lives we began to pour concrete [within our hearts]. It was made of anxiety, fear, and stress. Our task is to bring down the walls of our own inner dams [made of this concrete]. We can learn to dismantle them. And we can begin by asking ourselves what kind of lives we want. Do we want to micro-manage every moment, or do we want to dismantle our control and trust the great river to carry us forward?
An untamed river, after all, is alive. It erodes banks and bursts them; it seeks new courses. It floods, and is astonishingly powerful. Dammed water is monumentally static: trapped, regulated, stagnant. Do we want to live in faith or do we want to be held back by fear?
When I'm in the flow – writing, hiking, making love – I know these are the most ecstatic times of my life. These are the times of my great self-forgetting, when the ego drops away and my anxiety with it. I become a channel for something wonderful to flow through me . . . creativity, celebration, love.
In these moments the breath of spirit reminds me to let go and ride the wild river into the heart of my life.
According to Martin Luther King, Jr., America needed a “coalition of conscience.” It’s time for people of conscience to think deeply about what is happening in America today.
Beginning today, ICE deportation raids are reported to begin in cities around the country. ICE is an ironic acronym, given that it perfectly describes the state of our national heart that we should be participating in such a travesty of justice. Thousands will be arrested – mainly from undocumented immigrant families that the government says have missed a court appearance or have been issued court-ordered removals from the country. According to reports, ICE is prepared to target more than 2,000 recently arrived migrant families – most of whom do not have criminal histories.
Many of the migrants who will be picked up are people who didn't get proper notice of hearings and were then ordered removed for failing to show up for court. Mayors across the country have refused to allow their police forces to in any way participate with the ICE officials. In the words of Houston’s Mayor Sylvester Turner, the sweeps have “enhanced the anxiety level of people within my city,” adding, “I can't quite see the upside.”
So why is the Trump administration proceeding as they are? Are mass raids standard operating procedure for immigration enforcement?
Absolutely not.
No matter who people are – no matter what their citizenship – they are entitled to humane treatment and equal protection under the Constitution according to our system of laws. Nothing should ever lead America to compromise our basic values as a nation.
Mass raids such as these are an instrument not of proper immigration enforcement, but rather instruments of intentional fear and trauma meant to give a signal to people literally all across the world that they should not even think about coming here. “America is closed to you. Look what might happen to you too, if you keep trying to get into our country.”
And let’s remember why people are trying to come here to begin with. People come here today from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in order to escape conditions of such violence and horror so great that they’re willing to risk anything – including walking across a desert with small children – to find a place where they and their families can live in peace. The humanitarian crisis at our border was preceded by the humanitarian crises in those countries.
I am outraged, as a woman and as an American, to think that after all the pain people have gone through in countries far away from here, today – in the country where they had sought asylum – they are living with the fear that at any minute, men with guns will be raiding their homes. And let us not forget that their children are watching, feeling the terror with them.
This entire dysfunctional, immoral cycle must stop. As president, I will establish a United States Department of Peace to make the amelioration of unnecessary human suffering the core of my international as well as domestic policy. We should not be surprised at such horrors as we are experiencing due to our immigration policies today, and it is an indictment of all sides of the immigration debate that things have gotten to where they are. The political establishment has failed to stave off these problems because it has failed to stave off human despair, putting economic desires before human needs as the core of our public policy. There is no reason to give that establishment another chance to get it right. It has been getting it wrong for far too long.
We need a fundamental pattern disruption of America’s public policy, both domestic and international. In both cases, we should see large groups of desperate people as a security risk. For desperate people will always do desperate things.
What is happening today is a dramatic example of the challenges that now face us as a nation. Who exactly do we now choose to be? Are we to be open-hearted and purpose-driven, seeking to be a beacon of democratic values? Or are we now no more than a selfish, hypocritical country that has turned its back on the values that have truly made this country great?
By supporting my campaign for the presidency, you’re supporting a much larger effort than simply protesting one cruel policy that’s in effect this weekend. You’re supporting an effort to transform America, as we address not only the symptoms but the cause of the problems that are tearing at our hearts today.
If you see ICE in your neighborhood this weekend, keep in mind that we are now at the point where “What would you have done if the Nazis came for your neighbors?” is no longer an abstract thought exercise.
Lil Nas X is a queer Black man who has spent 12 weeks in the number one spot of the Billboard Hot 100 chart with a country song. That's three solid months in the top spot.
“Old Town Road” was also the number one song in Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, and the UK. It has also been certified Platinum in France, the UK, and Italy; double Platinum in New Zealand; triple Platinum in the United States; and five times Platinum in Australia.
A queer dark-skinned Black man held the number one spot in 14 countries, went platinum in six countries, and was at the top of the US Hot 100 chart for the entirety of Queer Pride month.
This is history.
Indeed!
Following are the two official videos for “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, a song that features Billy Ray Cyrus. They're followed (with added images and links) by a recent piece from The Huffington Post in which the rapper talks about the “backlash” his coming out has stirred within some circles.
Yeah, I'm gonna take my horse to the old town road
I'm gonna ride 'til I can't no more
I'm gonna take my horse to the old town road
I'm gonna ride 'til I can't no more . . .
________________________
Lil Nas X: “I’m Already Getting Backlash for Coming Out as Gay”
By Curtis Wong
The Huffington Post
July 5, 2019
The “Old Town Road” rapper told the BBC that he’s focused on “opening the doors” for greater LGBTQ representation in country and hip-hop music.
Lil Nas X surprised fans last weekend when he opened up about his sexuality for the first time publicly in a series of tweets. Though the rapper’s announcement quickly lit up social media, he says not all of the response has been positive.
The “Old Town Road” star last Sunday urged his Twitter followers to “listen closely” to his song “C7osure” before the end of LGBTQ Pride Month. In a subsequent tweet, he posted the cover art of his EP “7,” which features a rainbow-colored building.
“Deadass thought I made it obvious,” he wrote.
True say
I want and I need
To let go
Use my time to be free
It's like it's always what you like
It's always what you like
Why it's always what you like?
It's always what you like, huh
Ain't no more actin', man that forecast say I should just let me grow
No more red light for me, baby, only green, I gotta go
Pack my past up in the back, oh, let my future take a hold
This is what I gotta do, can't be regretting when I'm old
Brand new places I'll choose and I'll go, I know
Embracing this news I behold unfolding
I know, I know, I know it don't feel like it's time
But I look back at this moment, I'll see that I'm fine
I know, I know, I know it don't feel like it's time
I set boundaries for myself, it's time to cross the line . . .
Fresh off his performance with Miley Cyrus at the 2019 Glastonbury Festival, Lil Nas X confirmed to the BBC on Friday that any fan confusion the tweets may have created was unintentional, and that he meant them to be read as a public statement “that I’m gay.”
“It’s something I was considering never doing, ever,” he said in the interview. “Taking [it] to the grave. But I don’t want to live my entire life – especially how I got to where I’m at – not doing what I want to do.”
As for whether he’d received any backlash in the wake of his announcement, he added, “Oh, I’m already getting it.”
The 20-year-old Georgia native, however, is taking any criticism in stride, because he “used to be that person being negative.”
“Old Town Road,” which features Billy Ray Cyrus, continues to be a massive hit among both country and hip-hop audiences. Given his crossover success, Lil Nas X told the BBC he’s primarily focused on serving as a role model for artists in both of those genres, where identifying as LGBTQ is still “not really accepted.”
“I feel like [I’m] opening the doors for more people,” he said.
On this Fourth of July, [we] should be celebrating our ongoing struggles for freedom and not celebrating as if we are free. We should be celebrating our disobedience, turbulence, insolence, and discontent about inequities and injustices in all forms. We should be celebrating our historic struggle to extend power and freedom to every single American. This is our American project.
Because power comes before freedom, not the other way around. Power creates freedom, not the other way around. We can’t be free unless we have power. Freedom is not the power to make choices. Freedom is the power to create choices. And to have the power to shape policy is the power to create choices. That is why power is in the hands of the policy maker. . . . Our American project is not built on the idea that we became free in 1776 or any year thereafter, but that we are fighting for freedom, oftentimes from the economic and political interests that became free on 1776. . . . . America is the story of powerful people struggling to keep their disproportionate amount of power from people who are struggling for the power to be free.
The power to be free should have particular resonance on this Fourth of July in the eye of Donald Trump’s America. Resonance for all those struggling for the power to free those Latinx children and mothers and fathers from the terror and horror that is the southern border. Resonance for all those Americans struggling for the power to free humanity and Earth from the fatal grips of climate change, bigotry, and nuclear war. Do all those Americans really have the power to be free?
Wealthy white men certainly do. Disproportionate power and freedom. I live in Washington, D.C., but I won’t be anywhere near the celebration or political rally on the National Mall. I won’t be anywhere near the Lincoln Memorial on old grounds straining to hold up the weight of armored vehicles. I don’t want to see that tragedy or the walking tragedy of red MAGA hats moving around covered minds. I don’t want to hear verbal fireworks from President Trump, a speech that is liable to set anything within earshot that is true or loving on fire.
. . . I have always understood why humans resisted tyrants. But I never really understood why humans fully submitted to tyrants until I studied American history, until I entered Trump’s America and watched the patriots to tyranny. To believe freedom comes before power is to stifle the struggle to equalize power. It is to reinforce the power of the extremely wealthy white men who declared independence years ago. There is no more docile slave than one who believes he or she is free.
. . . When Americans struggle for the power to be free, they are afflicting and revolutionizing and refining the United States. They are the Patriots. Patriotism on the Fourth of July is resistance.
The past Sunday, June 30, 2019, a number of friends and I joined with over 1,000 others in Minneapolis to rally and march against the Trump administration's rhetoric and policies on immigration, especially as they relate to the inhumane practice of separating families seeking asylum at the southern border; a separation that involves the placing of migrant children in over-crowded and unsanitary "detention centers" that have been described as concentration camps.
The march, dominated by families with children, started at the corner of Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue and culminated with speeches at the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis.
“Today we stand in solidarity and resistance,” the Rev. Ruth MacKenzie, a minister at First Universalist, told those in attendance. “We are fighting the racist policies hurting families and traumatizing communities.”
In reporting on the gathering at First Universalist, Marcheta Fornoff of Minnesota Public Radio News writes: “[S]peakers shared their stories and spoke against the separation of families, threats of deportation and other federal actions that have made headlines for months. President Trump has made stricter immigration and border control a signature issue of his campaign and presidency.”
For Sunday's march and rally I wore a t-shirt in support of Marianne Williamson's presidential campaign as I appreciate not only the forceful way that Williamson names and denounces the Trump administration's policies . . .
. . . but also her follow-up call to action:
Trump has politicized fear but we will politicize love.
And that's exactly what I and many others understood ourselves to be doing as we protested and marched through the streets of south Minneapolis on Sunday. We were embodying compassion and demanding justice for our immigrant brothers and sisters.
Following are more images from Sunday's march and rally. They are accompanied by a compilation of excerpts from recent op-eds and commentaries on the situation at the southern border.
America has much ugliness and many horrors in its history, ranging from genocide committed against Native Americans, to over two centuries of slavery as a legal institution, to concentration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. Most of us like to think that at least since [then] America has, by and large, embraced its better angels and cast aside the hate and bigotry of the past. Yet, as the ongoing human rights crisis at America's border with Mexico reveals, a portion of Americans, including Donald Trump and Mike Pence, exhibit a moral bankruptcy not that far removed from that of Germans who either participated in or conveniently looked the other way as Hitler and his Nazi regime committed atrocities and millions were murdered. Among those seemingly condoning the horrors at the border are evangelical Christians who continue to support Trump and his nightmarish policies. Indeed, as I have noted before, in the era of Trump, one cannot be a decent and moral person and be a Republican or Trump supporter. The two are mutually exclusive. For the rest of us, if we do not do all in our power to remove Trump and his acolytes from power, we become as soulless as his followers.
There are two categories of people trying to come into the United States, and Trump is blending them together. One category would be cartel people. They have enough money to buy an airport and a jumbo jet and as many passports and visas as they want. We’re not going to be watching them swimming the river. The most important category are the refugees. And they’re fleeing this ungodly world of violence and exploitation that’s being set up by the cartels all through Central America and for most of Mexico. We also have many people coming in from Africa who are fleeing genocide against their ethnic minority, or, for example, a young man from Ghana who is gay and was nearly killed by a vigilante mob and who was nearly deported last week.
. . . [T]he United States has everything to do with the creation of the monsters that are driving the refugees up to our border. They’re fleeing the cartels. Who are the heads of the cartels? Well, after the dirty wars ended, that included genocide and daily acts of torture and terror, according to the United Nations, those people changed their uniforms and became the head of the cartel groups. They’re extremely wealthy. They have full military experience, which is why a gang of young people are able to pull aside a bus so accurately. And they have unlimited access to all of the weaponry and everything else that they need.
Now, who were the people at the head of military intelligence, for example, in Guatemala? Well, those were people who were trained in the United States, worked very closely with the United States intelligence throughout the genocide. And we were, of course, severely criticized for that by the United Nations Truth Commission, and President Clinton apologized. Two hundred thousand people were killed by those death squads. Those of us that survived that era, we remember the sorts of torture and mutilations that the bodies would bear, when we found them out in the street. And they’re the same as now.
So, what’s happened is, the cartel leaders are the same people that worked hand in glove with the United States. They were armed by the United States. They were trained by the United States. They were sold equipment by the United States. And to a large extent, they’re still being protected by our intelligence division. They will not release key files on the genocide if it involved someone that used to work with our people.
The debate over whether “concentration camps” is the right term for migrant detention centers on the southern border has drawn long-overdue attention to the American government’s dehumanizing treatment of defenseless children. A pediatrician who visited in June said the centers could be compared to “torture facilities.” Having studied mass atrocities for over a decade, I agree.
At least seven migrant children have died in United States custody since last year. The details reported by lawyers who visited a Customs and Border Protection facility in Clint, Texas, in June were shocking: children who had not bathed in weeks, toddlers without diapers, sick babies being cared for by other children. As a human rights lawyer and then as a political scientist, I have spoken to the victims of some of the worst things that human beings have ever done to each other, in places ranging from Cambodia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Sri Lanka. What’s happening at the border doesn’t match the scale of these horrors, but if, as appears to be the case, these harsh conditions have been intentionally inflicted on children as part a broader plan to deter others from migrating, then it meets the definition of a mass atrocity: a deliberate, systematic attack on civilians. And like past atrocities, it is being committed by a complex organizational structure made up of people at all different levels of involvement.
Surely, the United States of America could not operate concentration camps. In the American consciousness, the term is synonymous with the Nazi death machines across the European continent that the Allies began the process of dismantling 75 years ago this month. But while the world-historical horrors of the Holocaust are unmatched, they are only the most extreme and inhuman manifestation of a concentration-camp system—which, according to Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has a more global definition. There have been concentration camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and—with Japanese internment—the United States. In fact, she contends we are operating such a system right now in response to a very real spike in arrivals at our southern border.
“We have what I would call a concentration camp system,” Pitzer says, “and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.”
Historians use a broader definition of concentration camps, as well.
"What's required is a little bit of demystification of it," says Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia. "Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed—at the most basic level—to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they're putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way."
Not every concentration camp is a death camp – in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning. Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions. So far, 24 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] under the Trump administration, while six children have died in the care of other agencies since September. Systems like these have emerged across the world for well over 100 years, and they've been established by putative liberal democracies – as with Britain's camps in South Africa during the Boer War – as well as authoritarian states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Camps set up with one aim can be repurposed by new regimes, often with devastating consequences.
History is banging down the door this week with the news the Trump administration will use Fort Sill, an Oklahoma military base that was used to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II, to house 1,400 unaccompanied migrant children captured at the border. Japanese internment certainly constituted a concentration-camp system, and the echoes of the past are growing louder. Of course, the Obama administration temporarily housed migrants at military bases, including Fort Sill, for four months in 2014, built many of the newer facilities to house migrants, and pioneered some of the tactics the Trump administration is now using to try to manage the situation at the border.
The government of the United States would never call the sprawling network of facilities now in use across many states “concentration camps,” of course. They’re referred to as “federal migrant shelters” or “temporary shelters for unaccompanied minors” or “detainment facilities” or the like. (The initial processing facilities are run by Border Patrol, and the system is primarily administered to by the Department of Homeland Security. Many adults are transferred to ICE, which now detains more than 52,000 people across 200 facilities on any given day – a record high. Unaccompanied minors are transferred to Department of Health and Human Services custody.) But by Pitzer's measure, the system at the southern border first set up by the Bill Clinton administration, built on by Barack Obama's government, and brought into extreme and perilous new territory by Donald Trump and his allies does qualify.
At least 2,000 children have now been forcibly separated from their parents by the United States government. Their stories are wrenching. Antar Davidson, a former youth-care worker at an Arizona shelter, described to the Los Angeles Times children “huddled together, tears streaming down their faces,” because they believed that their parents were dead. Natalia Cornelio, an attorney with the Texas Human Rights Project, told CNN about a Honduran mother whose child had been ripped away from her while she was breastfeeding. “Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing,” the Associated Press reported. “One cage had 20 children inside.”
In some cases, parents have been deported while their children are still in custody, with no way to retrieve them. John Sandweg, a former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told NBC News that some of these family separations will be permanent. “You could be creating thousands of immigrant orphans in the U.S. that one day could become eligible for citizenship when they are adopted,” he said.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly blithely assured NPR in May that “the children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever.” The administration’s main focus is not the welfare of the children, as much as the manner in which breaking up families at the U.S.-Mexico border could send a message to other migrants fleeing violence or persecution. Kelly defended the policy as a “tough deterrent.”
The crisis, to the extent that one exists, is of the administration’s own making. The people fleeing to the U.S. border are a threat neither to American economic prosperity nor to public safety, there is not a great surge of border crossers requiring an extreme response. There are a variety of options for dealing with them short of amnesty, and the separation of families is not legally required.
The policy’s cruelty is its purpose: By inflicting irreparable trauma on children and their families, the administration intends to persuade those looking to America for a better life to stay home.
I close with Henri Nouwen’s wise and beautiful words on compassion and the deep and mysterious way that, as humans, we are connected to one another.
Compassion grows with the inner recognition that your neighbor shares your humanity with you. This partnership cuts through all walls which might have kept you separate. Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, destined for the same end. With this compassion you can say, “In the face of the oppressed I recognize my own face and in the hands of the oppressor I recognize my hands. Their flesh is my flesh; their blood is my blood; their pain is my pain; their smile is my smile. Their ability to torture is in me, too; their capacity to forgive I find also in myself. There is nothing in me that does not belong to them, too. There is nothing in them that does not belong to me, too. In my heart, I know their yearning for love and down to my entrails, I can feel their cruelty. In another’s eyes, I see my plea for forgiveness and in a hardened frown, I see my refusal. . . . In the depths of my being, I meet my fellow humans with whom I share love and hate, life and death.”
– Henri Nouwen Excerpted from With Open Hands
Ave Maria Press, 1972
p. 92
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
