Country Mary

Decision on the Porch/The Value of Unconditional Love

My Grandma was born in Pennsylvania, and her dad was a photographer. He mostly photographed landscapes and nature, and living in PA that was easy to do. Maybe it’s even what inspired him to become a photographer. It’s beautiful up there. Grandma grew up to marry a man who would move her to Dial Camp, Texas. Dial was located near Borger in the Texas Panhandle. It wasn’t even a real town, hence the designation “camp” in its name. A camp that wasn’t much more than a cluster of shotgun shacks and a post office. It was home to the hired hands that kept the Gulf Oil Company running. At the time it was still kind of a new frontier, a place once unpopulated and suddenly over run with folks looking for oil and wealth. The landscape is opposite of that which my Grandma was used to. There’s nothing but flat land and sky, oilfield equipment and power lines, and cows and horses. The wind blows 40 miles an hour all the time and the conveniences of civilization are a long ride down a bumpy dirt road away. Borger turned into a big city after oil was discovered there in the 20’s and had a reputation for murder, sin and debauchery as a result. Then the Texas Rangers showed up and ran all the fun people out of town. Then the depression happened, so if Borger didn’t already suck to live in now it really did. And after all that suck descended on Borger, that’s when my grandparents moved there.

So I can imagine my Grandma, with her 2 little boys tending house in that crappy shot gun shack. These random people knock on her door and told her all about Jehovah. I’m sure they made her believe that they could improve her life and in that moment she looked around and figured her life could use some improving. She converted the whole family to Jehovah’s Witness. At the time my dad was 10 and his little brother Richard was 6. I suppose my grandpa took my grandma somewhere she’d never been environmentally, and she took him somewhere he’d never been spiritually.

My grandma was a Witness till the day she died. My uncle Richard, his wife JoAnn, and one of their sons Daniel are all still Witnesses.

My dad, on the other hand, joined the Air Force after he got out of high school, which is a violation of JW beliefs. They don’t even put their hand over their hearts for the national anthem. Somewhere along the line he wandered back and then he married my mom. My mom is Mexican, grew up in El Paso and was raised about as Catholic as humanly possible. But for reasons I still do not understand she jumped in the deep end of the JW pool after she married my dad. Then the JW’s decided that the world was surely going to end in 1975. The stories I heard about this were crazy. I’ve been told that people believed so much that the world was about to end that they stopped paying their bills and they started living in tents instead of paying for their houses. My dad issued a challenge to his faith by determining that if the world was still intact after 1975 he didn’t need to be a JW anymore.

So after my dad quit he and my mom were having a little disagreement since she still believed in it and he didn’t. But eventually she gave in and stopped going pretty much just to save her marriage. My dad purposely kept religion out of my raising because he didn’t want to mess me up the way he felt his parents messed him up. He actually didn’t want to talk about anything related to religion until I was about 19. So I grew up in a normal parental environment. I did a lot of stupid shit, but I knew that no matter how bad I pissed my dad off he would still love me.

One of the things I find most disturbing about the JW belief is that it’s wrong to associate with people who aren’t JW’s. So if you get kicked out of the church or “Disfellowshipped” as it’s called, everyone you know (even your own family) will quit talking to you. My uncle Richard’s other son, Ben, was a lot like me when he was growing up. He was the typical baby of the family and had the usual rebellious streak. He was depressed, he had problems fitting in, you know. The normal stuff teenagers go through. His counselor in middle school actually told his parents he should probably get counseling and maybe even meds because he was depressed. But they never did anything about it, probably because they thought it wasn’t that big of a deal. Anyway after Ben turned 18 and got out of high school he moved in with my grandma. During that time he ended up getting disfellowshipped from the JW church. I’m not sure what exactly it was he did, but I think it was for smoking and because he was hanging out with this pretty blonde girl all the time. And then some time after that he stole my grandma’s credit card and took off in the car she bought him. And he stayed gone. His family completely disowned him. My cousin Daniel, the good JW son of Richard, declared in front of the whole family that as far as he was concerned he didn’t have a brother anymore.

So about 10 years after Ben disappeared and never came back, my dad was talking to Richard’s wife JoAnn about a road trip she and Richard were about to take. This road trip was going to take them through Tulsa, which was the last known location for their long lost son. My dad made it a point to tell JoAnn that maybe she should stop in and see her son. She refused, said he needed to straighten up some. 2 weeks after that, Ben killed himself. My aunt and uncle had to go to Tulsa anyway, to haul their son’s ashes back in the trunk of their car.

My grandma was 86 when this all happened. She died a month after Ben did. The three of them share space and a headstone at the cemetery in Stinnett. Apparently my grandma didn’t just die because she was 86 and bedridden. She quit eating. She clocked out. What I really want to know is what she thought about in that last month. Did she wonder how much of an effect a simple decision made on the front porch of a rickety shot gun shack in the dusty West Texas plains had on 2 generations of her family? Did she understand the connection? Did she wonder if they would have just loved him more and tried to be there for him maybe it would have all turned out different? Maybe it wouldn’t have. But we’ll never know how much of a role that belief played in the death of my cousin.

Beliefs are one thing, but a belief that hurts people, that’s something else. Believing that you have to disown your own family because they aren’t part of your religion is crazy. I wonder if Richard and JoAnn felt the same kind of horrible pain most parents who unconditionally love their kids would feel. I wonder if they thought about how maybe their screwed up religion caused them to totally shit the bed on the way they raised their son. Did they recognize their failure?

So many questions I’ll probably never have answers to. I just know that this is one of the ways the JW’s have affected my family. And as a side note, I think my mom still believes in it a little bit. But she had to have several blood transfusions a few years ago, so I don’t think she believes it as much as she used to. To think, if she was still in it, would she be dead now?

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Killin’ Babies/The Paternity Test Generation

I want to clarify some things that I think were misunderstood about the abortion episode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0HFVIMrCIg

Obviously I couldn’t explain everything about the issue in that one episode. Plus it was my first time being in front of the camera. Y’all don’t know how freaking hard that was for me.
That having been said, I don’t think I made it clear enough where I stand on the legality of abortion. A few people brought up rape and incest victims and thought I was saying they should be forced to have the baby. I don’t think abortion should be illegal. So if abortion isn’t illegal then nobody is forced to have any babies. My whole point was that making it illegal isn’t going to stop it. And if making it illegal isn’t going to stop it, then what’s the point? It’ll just make it far more gruesome and unsafe than it already is.
Secondly, you are never going to convince the life side that a fetus isn’t a person. Like I said, it’s related to how individuals view life in general and it’s something that crosses all boundaries of theological belief. As far as I’m concerned, stating this over and over is just inflammatory and detrimental to the choice cause. Kind of in the same way that animal rights people wanting everyone to become a vegetarian is actually detrimental to the animal rights cause.

Even if a fetus isn’t a person it’s not like people need to just go around having abortions all the time. It’s legal to file bankruptcy too, but it’s probably not a good idea to intentionally put yourself in that situation. So the reason I focused so much on the birth control was because if we are to minimize abortion (which is the only thing we can do since we can’t eradicate it completely) then we need to prevent women from getting pregnant in the first place.
And last, I’m not really sure that I believe a fetus is a person. Actually, if it can’t live outside the mother’s body then it’s technically a parasite. To debate whether or not it’s human life is to ride down the slippery slope of fate. Like, maybe that fetus was created by God and was meant to grow up to be a person that would do great things for humanity. Or it could have grown up to destroy humanity. Whatever. So to terminate that fetus would be technically destroying human life because were the fetus allowed to remain it would be born and grow up to become a real person. But if you’re going to ride down that road, where does the whole thing begin? It could also be argued that birth control will prevent those humans from being born. You could even go so far as to say that if you didn’t want to have sex one night and that was the one night that you would have conceived a child that was meant to do great things then you have sinned by lying about having a headache or being tired. I really don’t think any of us want to go down that road. These are concepts that every individual is going to interpret differently. And no matter how much you argue what is morally right everyone is going to have a different opinion.
My opinion? Maybe it’s wrong to conceive a child irresponsibly and end up aborting it. But what really bothers me more than that is women who have kids they can’t support, and don’t even want to support. These kids have awful childhoods and many of them grow up to rob, rape and murder people. Just watch an episode of Maury Povich sometime. These people are raising children. And I fear for the day the “paternity test generation” grows up to adulthood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR8Xl3aFizs

God, to think people like this irresponsibly reproduce every day. You have to have a license to drive a car, to hunt, to fish, to cut people’s hair. But you don’t have to have a license to bring a child into this world that may or may not, depending on its raising and genetics, end up going crazy and murdering people one day. That, to me, is incredibly immoral.

So one of my new year’s resolutions was to write more. Of course I need to write more scripts and films and what not. And we need to shoot more shit. But I feel like my brain is in a “use it or lose it” state right now. So I have resolved to just write about whatever happens to be on my mind, and put it somewhere that maybe other people will read it so that it forces me to try harder. Something tells me this will be good for me.

That was just an experiment uploading a picture to see what it would do, But it’s kind of relevant, now that Christmas is over and it’s a new year and what not.

Also a lot of the things I’ve been writing lately have to do with religion.