I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

For any who want more, complete list of all posts by month since 2011

  • Benghazi – Revisiting the Obama Presidency


    Our lecture for today, O cyberspace class, is the epistemology of the second chance. (Sometimes I just throw in a big word to see if anybody’s paying attention.)  Frankly, I don’t remember  much about epistemology from my scholarly life except that I heard it used in my undergraduate philosophy classes and my graduate studies in theology.

    To refresh my memory, I looked up the definition and found the word epistemology involves knowledge and the justification of knowledge; but then the dictionary wandered off into a question of what is knowledge and how can it be justified and I immediately remembered why I dropped out of seminary. Way too much digression and iffiness and grey areas for a 23-year-old CPA who dealt in absolute numbers before answering a “call” to the ministry that was surely a wrong number.

    I gave up absolutes many years ago, however, about the same time the numbers became images on a computer screen and lacked any connection to reality. Who knew if 2 + 2 equaled 4 any more and who cared?

    So I’ve grown accustomed to vague responses and half-truths and tried to blend in with a landscape camouflaged by degrees of knowledge  that are justified with competing strident voices blasting away at each other from polarized positions of territorial absolutes. Wow. Now there’s a mouthful to chew on.

    Yep, nothing like trying to convince people you own a piece of knowledge when they don’t agree with you. You just can’t justify it to them no matter how hard you try and how loud you get. Because, see, they own a piece of knowledge, too, and it happens to be totally different from yours. And there’s the rub.

    A good example is the current turmoil over an Anti-Muslim film that was Made in the USA. The American President has denounced it, the American Secretary of State has apologized for the fact that it was filmed in California where they film every possible film you could ever think up without anybody checking to see if it’s inflammatory because that would require an Army of Film Checkers, but the justification of the knowledge of the situation is irrelevant to a Muslim world that owns a different enlightenment which doesn’t include the concept of second chances.

    That’s how it all goes downhill and the histrionics aren’t far behind.  I’m wondering how many Muslims are golfers?  If they were golfers, they would know about Mulligans.   Mulligans are second chances.

    If you hit a shot with your driver off the tee on the first hole and the little white golf ball vanishes mysteriously in deep woods closer to the fairway for the third hole than they are to the first hole and you know you’ll never be able to find it, you can say Mulligan and have a second chance to locate your own fairway again.

    You may hit a beautiful shot for your Mulligan or you may not, but the important thing is you have a new opportunity. The American government asked for a Mulligan from a partner who doesn’t play the game the same way it does. The game is over before it even starts.

    In our personal lives second chances are sometimes painfully obvious and at other times so subtle we may miss them.   Lesson Number One: Be open and available and alert and don’t think you won’t ever need one.  You will.

    Lesson Number Two:  When you get a second chance, try not to think of it as an opportunity to repeat mistakes.  Mistakes are hard to take back so don’t blow the Mulligan.

    Lesson Number Three:  Be sure to tell your friends about your second chance. It may give them hope and inspire them to offer one or accept one. Honestly, can there be too many second chances going around?

    Lesson Number Four:  Your second chance may be your last chance.   Really?   Really.

    Lesson Number Five: Never be afraid to take a second chance when you have one. As Franklin Roosevelt famously said when the Hounds of the Baskervilles were closing in around him, We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

    And so, O cyberspace class, the lecture concludes with a little bit of knowledge mixed with a bunch of justification that adds up to the epistemology of the second chance as seen from the eyes of a 66-year-old who has had her own share of second chances and has, at various times in her life, blown them, needed a third or fourth, and had some of them bring incredible joy and happiness.

    Be generous to those you love and even to those whose knowledge is different from yours. Ouch. Is that really necessary?  Absolutely.

  • A Different Type Home


    Worsham Street Looks The Same

    But Mama and Daddy Don’t Greet Me

    The old home town looks the same as I step down from the train, and there to greet me is my mama and my papa…it’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.

    When Claude “Curly” Putman, Jr. wrote these lyrics in 1965, he was a wannabe songwriter plugging songs for Tree Publishing company in Nashville, Tennessee, and he couldn’t have realized at the time the impact they would have on his life.  Country music legend Porter Waggoner recorded the song later that year and Curly Putman’s writing career ignited like a firecracker that kept popping out hit after hit from then on.  The words inspired more than four hundred artists to record them over the next fifty years in all of the world’s major languages.  Why?

       Because it’s a song about going home which is a universal longing whether it’s for a literal place or a metaphorical sense of wholeness – we want to go home.   We  want to be welcomed and embraced by those who love us most whether we are Prodigals who lost our way for a long time wandering in a wilderness of self absorption or whether we are Victors who fought the good fight over ourselves and won a precious trophy we need to share.   We want to go home.

    I grew up in a rural setting in a tiny town in southeast Texas in a county that measured wealth by the number of cows you owned or the number of acres you farmed.   My dad bought 105 acres in 1954 through the GI Bill from his WWII service in the Army Air Corps  and we never had more than twenty head of cattle except in the spring when the calves were born, but that was okay because the farm wasn’t our home.   My daddy and mama were schoolteachers in the 1950s and we lived in my maternal grandmother’s house with her and my mother’s two older brothers.  It was a small home and we were in very close quarters every day, but the closeness I remember  was the intimacy we shared as a family.

    When Curly Putman penned his Green, Green Grass of Home, I had left my home town and was a student at The University of Texas in Austin.   My freshman classes often had more students than the entire population of the little town where I was from.   My daddy taught me many lessons, but the ones he may have regretted teaching involved my becoming independent to a fault and understanding the whole earth was my territory.  I took him at his word and became a solitary sojourner from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean before finally settling in a city two hours from the Atlantic Ocean.  That was forty-five years ago and my definition of home expanded when I found lasting loving relationships as an adult in South Carolina.

    Through the years I’ve made the trip to Texas  at least a hundred times to visit and two years ago my partner and I bought the Worsham Street house pictured above which is eighteen miles from the place that belonged to my grandmother, the place I once called home.   The principal characters in my family were gone except for my mother whose illness was the impetus for our purchasing the house in Texas.  My visits became more frequent and lasted longer as my mother’s  health declined.   In the process of reconnecting to the places and people I knew in my childhood over the past two years I heard my daddy’s voice reminding me “You can take the girl out of Texas but you can’t take Texas out of the girl.”

    Three days ago I once again traveled the thousand miles from South Carolina to Worsham Street.  I was surprised by my feelings as I crossed the Louisiana-Texas border going west toward the familiar Highway 59 that would take me south toward home.   For the first time ever, and I mean in nearly fifty years, I had the uneasy sensation I wasn’t really going to where I belonged.  At the end of this journey neither my mama nor my daddy would be there to greet me and I felt like the green grass might be growing in foreign soil.

    I talked to one of my neighbors who is also a good friend about the conflicting emotions I was experiencing in this first trip to Texas since my mother’s death in April.  I’d only been gone three months, but it felt much longer and the distance from my South Carolina family seemed too far.   She said something that made sense to me, “It’s a different type home now.”    It is a different type home, but the green grass still grows on Worsham Street, and I’m glad to be able to touch it once again.