One of the most disturbing movies ever made turns forty years old today

Happy Birthday to David Cronenberg's 1986 adaptation of The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.

"Be afraid.  Be very afraid."

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Late-Term Abortion: Musings of a Man Born Dead

This is the first photograph that was ever taken of me.  A few hours after I was born on March 31st, 1974.

A lot of people over the years have remarked that I was the brightest and most alert baby that they had ever seen.  That they had never beheld a newborn who had a smile like that.  One person told me that even then it was like I was plotting mischief upon an unsuspecting world.

Keep that photo in mind while I openly ponder some recent developments.

A few days ago Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed legislation that radically expands abortion in that state.  It is now perfectly legal to kill an absolutely normal and healthy baby in the womb immediately before it would be naturally delivered.

Massachusetts is now the twelfth state as well as Washington D.C. that allows abortion without limits.

I used to believe that a woman had "a right to choose". That was when I was much younger and far more foolish.  I started coming around to the true horror of abortion about the time that I started college.  I now regret that I ever supported the abortion procedure, but hey: we live, we learn.

My stance today could not be more wildly the opposite direction.  There is not only the life of the child that is exterminated during abortion, but there is a terrible social cost also.  When human life is judged "inconvenient" then anything becomes permissible.  A civilized society is supposed to be one that places a value upon the human soul.  But for more than half a century in this country that value has been horrendously diminished.  Human life has become something practically disposable.  What were once atrocities have become an accepted part of daily existence.

Abortion may not have started it.  Ultimately that is the fault of fallen human nature.  But abortion certainly has exacerbated it.  As Mother Teresa said when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, the greatest destroyer of peace in this world is abortion.  If a mother can kill her unborn child, then what is there to keep me from killing you or you from killing me?  There is absolutely nothing in between to keep that from happening.

So now it is legal in too many places to kill a child just before it would be born.  And the cold, cold rationale that I have read, from quite a few people, is that such abortion isn't ending a human life at all.  The reasoning is that a fetus only becomes fully human when it takes its first breath.

Let's be clear on what they are saying.  If a baby is moments away from being born but still attached to the mother by the umbilical cord, it's subject to abortion.  Only when it's outside the mother and breathing on its own, is it to be considered a human being.

Huh.

I might have some things to say about that.  Actually, I do have some things to say about that.

Look at that picture again.  The sweet little cherub who had his whole life ahead of him.  The miracle of life.  Among the most beautiful of the experiences of the human condition.

That picture however does not convey how much things could have been very different.

There were complications during my delivery.  A Caesarian had to be performed.  And when I came out of my mother I was not breathing.  I was not moving.  I was not doing anything.

I was just an immobile infant in the delivery room, unresponsive to any stimuli whatsoever.  Not crying.  Life's first breath was not entering my lungs.

According to too many abortion advocates, I was dead.  A "non-viable tissue mass".  Something that could have and maybe should have been discarded.  If I wasn't able to breathe on my own, then by what right could it be said that I could claim to be alive at all?

Dr. Carl Weatherly, an amazing man, saw that I wasn't breathing.  He went to work immediately, doing everything in his power to compel me to take my first gasp of air.

One minute passed.  Two.

Three.

Four and five minutes, still no breathing.

At six minutes without oxygen the cells of the brain begin to die.  With each passing moment the chances of irreversible brain damage increase.

Seven minutes.  Eight.

Nine.

And finally, twelve minutes after being born, I began to breathe on my own.

That's twelve minutes that I was, for all intents and purposes according to the pro-abortion side, a dead clump of inanimate tissue.

Dr. Weatherly and his team pulled off a miracle that Sunday night.  Or rather, I believe that God used them to pull off a miracle.  I was breathing on my own.  And a short while later the photograph you see above was taken.

Maybe I'm biased, but I don't think the baby in that picture was someone to discard as already dead just because he didn't come out of his mother crying as a baby normally should.

When I was first told the story of my birth, I resolved to myself that I would do what I could to make my life count for something.  That has taken me down many a strange and winding road.   I have had to confront a lot of bad things in my time.  But there have also been many wonderful and magnificent experiences also.  Sometimes I wonder if I've lived as fully as I had wanted.  Friends and family who know me best have told me that I've taken as big a bite as anyone they have ever seen.  Some good people were committed to making me survive that night.  I have done what I can to honor them.

And now, I merely want others, who have not yet taken their first breath, to have the same chance of that full life as I have been able to enjoy.

That some among us do not believe that those unborn children do not deserve that chance, and applaud the notion as did Governor Healey and the "healthcare workers" surrounding her this week as she signed the law, is nothing other than pure evil.  It is something that hearkens back to the sacrifice of infants on the altar of Moloch.  The ancient Israelites ended up paying a terrible price for their idolatry.

We cannot thrive, or even survive, as a culture that celebrates death.  It is impossible.

And it shouldn't take a dead man to state that obvious fact.

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What it will take to get me to return to Reidsville

Ten years ago this summer I packed up my car with the bare essentials and my dog Tammy and I left our hometown of Reidsville, North Carolina.  I didn’t know where we were going.  We were headed toward literally only God knew where.

We spent the better part of an entire year crossing America, looking for a new place to call home.  When we got to California I decided that we had gone as far from our old home as we could, so I spent a few months looking for work there.  That didn’t happen.

I didn’t want to go back to Reidsville a failure, but that’s pretty much what happened.  And I was there for a couple of months while I tried to figure out what my next course of action should be. That didn’t go so well.  Concerned friends came up with a plan: to let Tammy and me stay with them in South Carolina for awhile, long enough to figure some things out.  They were going to give me time to straighten myself.

That turned into a year and a half long stay in the Greenville, South Carolina area.  And it was time that I truly did use to heal and grow from.  I wouldn’t be the person I am today, of stronger mind, had it not been for those friends coming together to give me the assistance.

In November of 2018 I relocated to the Spartanburg area to be close to a job that I had taken.  A few months after that I changed jobs and became a mental health professional: by far the most rewarding career that I have ever had during the course of my life so far.  There wasn’t a day that went by that I wasn’t helping people.  And then the economy turned rotten and I had to leave that.  Since then I’ve had a string of jobs that haven’t had anything of that kind of stability or sense of personal fulfillment.

It’s been growing for awhile now: the encouragement from many friends to return to Reidsville, North Carolina.  To “come home,” to a place that God had told me to take up stakes and leave.  Now, that really would have made me feel like a glorious failure.  I was supposed to have left for good, shaking the dust from my boots and apart from a few rare occasions, to never return.

Circumstances lately have led my friends in North Carolina to tell me even more that “it’s time to come back, we need you here.”

I’ve thought long and hard about it.  And I’ve come to a conclusion: there IS something that would bring me back to Reidsville, North Carolina.  This time to stay.

I still maintain a great interest in what happens in Reidsville and the rest of Rockingham County.  The politics there is something I keep abreast of.  I stay informed about new businesses that come to the area.  I’m glad that it seems that Reidsville is making a terrific comeback, after decades of economic downturn going back over thirty years (the day it was announce that American Tobacco was being sold was truly a dark day for the city).

Where am I going with all of this?

Okay, here it is: what it will take to entice me to come back to Reidsville…

Television station WGSR would have to get new owners and they would have to make me its general manager.

I cannot begin to convey how many people have been telling me about how WGSR, the television station located on Gilmer Street in downtown Reidsville, is an embarrassment.  But then, they don’t really have to tell me anything.  I saw what was coming to WGSR a long time ago and knew it was headed toward a bad end.

WGSR used to be a very good company.  For its size and broadcasting footprint, it served the market well.  I was there as an employee twenty years ago and was truly amazed about the operation.  It had a healthy variety of locally produced programs, along with some syndicated content.  It was a thriving television station.  It seemed bigger than it was in actuality.  I was impressed.

But those days are long gone.  There is no locally-made programming anymore.  In fact, very few people seem to be going into the Gilmer Street location at all.  It’s being primarily used as a transmitter site, getting its feed from sister station WMDV located across the state line in Virginia.  For all intents and purposes Reidsville has no television station to call its own anymore.

What happened to WGSR?  How did such a thriving company come to such an inglorious fate?

It happened because of Charles Roark: the general manager of the entire operation.

WGSR came to be bought by Azile Roark, who also owned WMDV in Martinsville, Virginia.  Azile Roark put her son Charles in charge of both stations.  Sort of giving the Reidsville/Danville/Martinsville area a “super station” with coverage of a tidy little bit of real estate across the region.

And for awhile, it was good.  The two stations were under the same corporate umbrella but they retained their own respective identities.  WGSR served Reidsville, Eden and the rest of Rockingham County while WMDV was focused on Martinsville and Danville.  They each had their own unique personality.

But Charles Roark didn't know how to be responsible with a television station.  He was fixated on generating controversy.  He was, and still is, about riling people up to make a big deal out of it so that he could broadcast it.  Something that was best symbolized by what was for quite a long time the two stations’ biggest client: the “Church of Christ” cult headed by a very evil man named Johnny Robertson.  It could be said that Robertson was the real owner of WGSR and WMDV.  When he told Charles Roark to jump, Roark asked “how high?”.  It was a pretty slick system: Robertson was being funded by “the mysterious East Texans”, who provided Lord only knows how much money.  Robertson paid Roark for something around four or five hours of live broadcast time on the two stations each week.  Robertson and his cronies would go on their shows, which were invariably used to attack other churches and Christians because they weren’t “good enough” and “not real Christians”.  It was a surefire controversy generator and that’s something that Roark specialized in.

It went on like this for years.  Meanwhile legitimate local shows began ending production.  Fewer and fewer people wanted to be affiliated with a station that was on such a decline.  The station began filling the time up with reruns of the news and call-in shows.

The decline was dramatic enough already.  And then a year ago Johnny Robertson died by suicide.  The money train ended for WGSR/WMDV.  The two stations no longer had reliable income.

I’ve heard a lot of stories over the past several months about what is being done to keep both stations on the air.  It’s not my place to share the details of that.  But I honestly have to shake my head in sad disbelief.  The situation is on the air for all to witness however.  There is NO local news coverage for Reidsville.  WGSR is only mirroring the feed from WMDV, without dedicated programming of its own.  The few exceptions are for things like the Reidsville Christmas parade.

Speaking of THAT, Charles Roark almost single-handedly destroyed this past year’s parade.  Maybe he was possessed by the dark powers and “the Devil made him do it” but for whatever reason he jumped into the midst of a routine by one of the area's dance studios and threw the entire performance into chaos.  But then, this is a man who has made himself out to be the focus of the station’s broadcasts.  It doesn’t strike him that most people DON’T want to see him shirtless at a water park, or being on vacation in Key West, or many other places.  The man is a full-tilt narcissist and that’s something that a television station can’t be fixated upon.

So let me summarize: WGSR is a television station in name only.  It’s Reidsville location is not producing content.  The programming that it is sending out is from the sister station in Martinsville, across the state line.  That programming, well… it’s not good, if we are to be honest.

Meanwhile Reidsville is coming to turn things around as a community.  New businesses are coming to the area.  The shopping mall is being dramatically renovated.  People are moving northward from Greensboro.  Industries are looking at expanding to Rockingham County.  The place is starting to make a very significant comeback away from the stagnancy it’s been in for more than three full decades…

But the television station, to be very frank, sucks.  It does not reflect at all the community that’s coming to be bustling around it.  In fact, WGSR has become a black eye on the face of Reidsville.  “Star News” is a bad joke.  One that stopped being funny a long time ago.

The town, all of Rockingham County actually, deserves better than that.

So, this is what it will take to bring me back to Reidsville to stay for good.  WGSR has to find new owners.  RESPONSIBLE owners.  It has to come under the control of people who sincerely care about making a great impression and are committed to honesty and integrity.  They have to be people who appreciate the Reidsville community and want to serve it to the very best of their ability.  And then they have to hire me to be its general manager.

I don’t particularly care about what happens with WMDV.  The focus has to be on Reidsville, Eden, and the rest of Rockingham County.  That means locally produced programming, local advertisers, local news coverage (including sports).  Local talk shows.  Fill the rest of the airtime with syndicated content that is reliable and trustworthy.  When I was at WGSR we had a few religious shows and classics like The Lone Ranger on weekday afternoons.  As well as a syndicated “horror host” show on Saturdays.  Those seemed to have their viewers and there is no reason why they couldn’t again.

The station is there.  It’s not being used to its fullest potential but the studios and equipment and transmitter are sitting on Gilmer Street, waiting.  There is talent to be found in the area that can provide the heart and soul of programs.  The number of businesses looking to get the word out is growing by the month.

And people are hungry. They want and NEED a broadcast outlet that serves them and reflects their community.

I know these things, better than most.  Even though I’ve been an expatriate of Reidsville for a decade, I’ve stayed very informed.  And what has happened to the town’s only television station is an absolute travesty.

There it is.  If new people come in and take over WGSR, rebrand it, move it as far away from the current operation as it needs to be, and bring me aboard to be its general manager, then I will gladly come back to Reidsville.

Those are my terms.

 

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Ten years ago today in Dallas, Texas...

...Tammy and I found ourselves at Dealey Plaza.

The original plan was to blog all along the trek that the two of us had going across America, just as I've blogged about seemingly everything and anything since 2004.  But I discovered about this point of our odyssey that journeys of self-discovery lose something when you're also documenting it for public viewing as you venture forth.  It was in Dallas that I went on a respite for awhile, that lasted almost two years.  But in the end I came back, none the worse for wear, and filled with lots of stories to tell.

Such as August 1st, 2016.  Now, I had come to Dealey Plaza the day before, on Sunday morning.  There was very little traffic in the area.  And I had to drive through it twice before I realized where we were.  Dealey Plaza is much smaller than I had expected.  This is the most analyzed, scrutinized, discussed, debated, and bitterly argued about patch of land in modern history.  This is the focal point.  This is where all the theories of the past sixty years and more converge upon.  Dealey Plaza is where it all comes together at.

I thought it would be far bigger.

I really wanted to have a picture taken of us, but no one else was around. So we came back the next day about noon when there were more tourists about.  That's when the above picture was taken.  If you click and enlarge the photo and look at Elm Street  behind where we're standing, you can see a small white X on the road, noting the position of the car when President John F. Kennedy received the fatal blow.

There's a parking lot near the old Texas School Book Depository building (now a museum).  And it just so happened that there was an empty spot precisely at the picket fence atop the grassy knoll, where depending on what you choose to believe is where the second (or is that only?) gunman was who fired from in front of and toward the right of the Lincoln Continental carrying President Kennedy, Texas governor John Connally, and their wives.

So here's me and Tammy atop the grassy knoll:

Dealey Plaza is well worth a visit if you're ever in Dallas.  The city has done a terrific job making it easy for people who find all the notable spots of that day, such as where Abraham Zapruder was standing when he shot the footage - the most studied length of film in history - with his camera.

This was a place I had long wanted to see with my own eyes.  The assassination of John F. Kennedy is something that I still haven't come to any resolute conclusion in my own mind about.  As I've gotten older I find myself increasingly believing that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but I've also come to maintain an open mind about what happened on November 22nd, 1963.  This is the grandest mystery in American history, and we are not likely to ever have any solid finality about it.

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