Hearts not pricks

Hearts sewn with my left hand to assuage my achy right shoulder. These hearts took nearly twice as long to sew, but sometimes the best things don't happen overnight.

What's so frightening about peace, love, and understanding?

My first novel featured a white woman with a biracial sibling. My second, and first indie publication, concerned a bisexual author, his long-time liberal Catholic girlfriend, and the AIDS epidemic. My focus has always been on inclusiveness amid varied genres ranging from literary fiction to fantasy, women's fiction to sci-fi. Sense a theme? It's all about peace, love, and understanding.

Today's title hit me yesterday morning, but other than ranting how different Jimmy Carter is from the incoming president, I didn't have much plotted for this entry, which I didn't want to turn into some raging blah blah blah that has already been done to death. Yet I want to mention how hearts matter more than male appendages, and while yes I'm a woman (So what do I know about penises?), I'm married to a man who just turned sixty and yup, age hits everyone.

During Carter's funeral, the incoming president scowled nearly the whole time. He looked mad. Indifferent to who was being lauded as an exemplary human being, a man concerned with others. Carter thought with his heart, which probably far outlasted what other bodily organs could maintain. The incoming president puts off an aura of the heart not being necessary, especially its empathetic purpose. Only the prick matters, as if men are nothing, or worth nothing, but a hard and powerful penis.

Lots of wide assumptions here, I realize that, and women are not immune from this need to dominate. But the essence is this: as we age, as we near death, our beating hearts remain the last organ to go. We might lose cognitive power, the ability to breathe on our own, our legs won't support us, elimination problematic. These bodies aren't meant to sustain us in perfect fashion from birth to our last day. But that damn heart muscle outshines and outlasts all those other functions, IT IS US. We are our hearts, from inside out. And if our hearts are full of peace, love, and understanding, no matter how screwed are up the rest of our corporeal shells, that peace, love, and understanding will ripple beyond the spaces we're stuck in, flinging light and love everywhere.

Some people seem terrified of that notion. Some people act as though selflessness is the antithesis of success. Some people appear to believe that only a few deserve happiness. This planet's history goes round and round on the axis of egocentric, power-hungry personas and again we're caught in that nasty cycle where peace, love, and understanding are for the weak and the foolish. Scowls matter. Ignoring or outright harming of the vulnerable is vital. Hearts aren't necessary, only pricks. What bullshit!

I have said many times that in writing fiction, when a character surfaces from catastrophe, a broken heart once mended possesses great capacity for compassion, mercy, love. I'm going to keep writing about that ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF HUMAN NATURE despite a segment of American society that wants to stamp out the feeling that emerges when faced with another's anguish and the sense of wanting to relieve that misery. That's the definition of compassion, and why is that so freaking hard for the incoming administration to grasp? That people matter, not power. That hearts last longer than penises. That love is truly what makes this crazy world go round, not the evil that lately mostly men coordinate. Sorry, but when it comes to world leaders taking out their aggressions on others, recently it's men in those positions. Our incoming president seems to suggest that anger and ruthlessness, indifference and tyranny make for a better human being, a better planet Earth.

Yet we all have hearts. And like I said, those hearts will be the last parts of us to go. I pray for a change of heart in those whose actions I can't fathom, and that someday peace, love, and understanding will be norm and not still our fervent wish.