Insane Earthlings

I was a Dad with a mission deep in the Hunan province of China. My six-year-old daughter needed some fruit to eat. When we arrived in the country, our guide had warned us not to eat fruit that might have been washed or cut. There were bacteria from the water on the fruit that our western tummies were not used to. It was fine for our new eighteen-month-old daughter to eat because she was acclimated to the water. She had spent those first months of her life in a local orphanage. But my fair-haired child wanted fruit. She was on the other side of the world with us, all normal routines were out the window. She had been a trooper, but she really wanted to have some fruit. My wife had suggested bananas since they would not have been washed or cut. I had seen a fruit stand earlier as we were taxied around the crowded city of Changsha. As the designated hunter/gatherer of our family, I set out to face the hazardous streets in search of a bunch of bananas. I filed into the herd of ...

Dr.  Frazier (Terry, in green shirt) hand-pedaling in 2020 If I was born a blank slate , it did not take long for the world to write the word WAR upon me. It was 1965 and the number of troops in Vietnam went from around 23,000 to over 180,000. That’s 180,000 young Americans sent to a country that most had never heard of, to fight a war that was un-winnable. A war that was misguided at best, illegal and immoral at worst. Soon the death toll of Americans would rocket and the shockwaves created would reverberate through every aspect of our lives. The names of the fallen were read each evening on the nightly news as families sat around the dinner table. Each name smudged on our collective psyche. Each wave of bombing would shake and tear at the fabric of our social order. The broadcast of real war footage into our living rooms shone a light on the horror of war previously unknown to those who had not been in battle themselves. This war, fought so far from our safe lifestyle here in ...