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
  • Gloria Steinem: the Ultimate Influencer (1934 – 2026)

    Gloria Steinem: the Ultimate Influencer (1934 – 2026)


    In an emotional tribute, Oprah Winfrey praised the writer’s (Steinem’s) “courage and persistence”.

    “She leaves us with more freedom than she inherited and with the responsibility to keep widening that freedom for the women and girls who come next,” the media mogul mused. “What a life. What a legacy. What a difference she made.” — Cover Media, September 04, 2026

    When I was a child my heroes were cowboys like Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger.  I loved the good guys back in the days when they were easy to identify.  They were the brave men who stood tall against  villains with black mustaches curling oddly around snarling lips – those were the best. I wanted to be one of them. You could have your Superman with his Big S on his chest but seriously, who would go flying around in an outfit as tight as his? Come on, man. That wasn’t believable.

    Cowboys, on the other hand, rode beautiful horses, wore boots with their jeans or buckskin pants, and had great wide-brimmed hats with no worries about kryptonite. Their pretty girlfriends knew who they were and were prepared to wait for them while they fought their battles in the dusty streets and sage-covered hills.  They always won because they could outdraw or outsmart their enemies. It was a perfect world for a little girl watching westerns with her daddy on Saturday mornings in the 1950s in rural southeast Texas.

    When that little girl grew up and lived to be eighty years old, her heroes had to change because her world had revealed itself to be imperfect. I’ve had new heroes who don’t ride horses or wear six-shooters on a regular basis.  Not surprisingly for an old dyke, most of my heroes are sheroes. I could list hundreds, but I’ll name ten in no order.  Susan B. Anthony.   Gertrude Stein.   Barbara Jordan.   Gloria Steinem.  Dolly Parton.  Ann Richards.   Molly Ivins.   Edie Windsor.   Meryl Streep.  Michelle Obama. These are the activists whose courage stands out to me. The villains may not have mustaches any more but these women met them at some point in their lives and stood up to them through their words and actions. 

    Gloria Steinem grew up in the 1940s and 50s during the time when women’s roles were being redefined by world wars, shifting geographical boundaries, higher educational opportunities. As she matured she entered the world of work through journalism at the New York Times. Her commitment to social justice, equal rights for women, and determination to make a difference wherever injustices reigned supreme led her to become one of the early leaders in the second-wave feminist movement of the late 1960s and 70s. 

    Steinem wrote nine books in her life, and I have great admiration for anyone who has the tenacity to send their stories to the great unknown. I think she was brave to fill empty pages with her words. A word warrior. In 1983, she had published Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions – her first published collection of essays. Topics included sexual harassment, genital mutilation, and the words that spoke louder to me personally was the essay on unequal pay for equal work. I totally got that one.

    Her book tour brought Steinem in 1983 to the University of South Carolina’s System in Conway, South Carolina, known as USC  Coastal Carolina. I’m not sure what led me to make the two-hours drive by myself from Columbia to hear her speak, but I did. I was thirty-seven years old at the time, remained mostly closeted, frustrated by my perceptions of the failures of the second wave of the Women’s Movement, already weary of teaching accounting at a technical college in Columbia, and wondering what I could do to make the sweeping social changes I felt were so desperately needed.

    Gloria Steinem’s speech answered me in an unexpected way. Before she closed, she challenged everyone in the audience to close their eyes and think of one thing we could do when we went home in our everyday lives that might be thought of by people as an outrageous act, one small act of rebellion in our daily lives. That was the heart of her message to her listeners that day in Conway, South Carolina, in 1983.  As usual, I had focused on the big picture and forgotten about the little moments I looked past. I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

    If you live long enough, you’ll figure out the world isn’t perfect and you’ll definitely meet some nasty villains, but remember you aren’t alone in the battles. Gloria Steinem, Dolly Parton, and a whole host of sheroes have gone before you. May the spirits of those women ride with you, give you comfort, courage, and encouragement in the showdown moments of your life.. 

  • Dolly Made Me Do It

    Dolly Made Me Do It


    This week I was forced to say goodbye to Dolly Parton, who has been one of the inspirational women in my life. Dolly has simply been there – singing to the world the values she learned in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee – for as long as I have music memories.

    We were both born in 1946, Dolly in January and me in April; we began to be known as the beginners of the cohort called the Baby Boomers who have been rightly saddled with the blame for many of our planet’s woes, trials, and tribulations of epic biblical proportions. Although she grew up “dirt poor,” in her words, she never let challenges or ridicule or insecurities from her background define her. She became an international treasure for her indomitable spirit and determination to bring people along with her.

    I have been touched this week by her spirit of perseverance through adversity one more time, and I feel guilty for my relatively good health coupled with my glaring lack of resolve to keep on keeping on this year. Over the years several of her songs have been the cornerstone of many of my personal favorite blogs in this space including one I wrote in December, 2012, about a Hard Candy Christmas following the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Dolly made me reconsider my retirement this week and, sadly, my consternation over our country’s love affair with guns and violence continues to be a theme that resonates in headlines every day.

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    Gosh, the hard candy Christmas has gone viral.   I thought we could keep it local with just a few hits along the holiday trail stories but nope, Newtown, Connecticut changed the name of that tune.   We Americans have a tragedy of unspeakable grief that will quickly reverberate in cyberspace around the world to a populace who will ask themselves, What is wrong with those people in America?

    I think it’s a fair question and one that we must ask ourselves.   What is wrong with us?   How do we enable and encourage this rage and senseless violence against our own?   Why do we have a Columbine in our not-too-distant history and how will these same historians record the massacres in Aurora, Colorado, and at Virginia Tech?  What can possibly be written about the Sandy Hook Elementary School horror of losing twelve little girls and eight little boys and six adults who were their educators in a few minutes on a regular Friday morning at their public school.  Much will be written through the coming years, but what we do in response to these shocking events will define our culture and our country.

    To the politicians in Washington I say, You need to become statesmen and stateswomen.  You need to set aside your vitriolic verbal attacks on each other.  You are the adults in our family, and we have placed our trust in you by electing you to represent us and when what we see on our Ipads and Iphones and other high-tech gadgets as well as on our regular old television programs is bitterness and bickering and bashing each other verbally, you’re setting a bad example for your children.  You make them believe that rage is not only acceptable but necessary.   Take a deep breath.  Step back for a moment.  Look at yourselves and see what images you project for your people.   Could you please just play nice.

    To the parents who have brought children into our world and have great expectations for their futures and who now are bipolar between anger and anguish, I say I’m so sorry.    No one deserves this.   No one is being punished for removing God from Sandy Hook Elementary School.  God isn’t in this equation or else we would have to blame Him for allowing the assailant to have weapons, wouldn’t we?  Not so fast, my friend, or as my daddy and Ann Richards used to say, That old dog won’t hunt.  But what can we do?  Should we as parents insist on police protection for our children in all public schools regardless of age?   Would police protectors be able to thwart the enraged and armed assailants?  These are the questions we ask ourselves.

    Which brings me to the central dilemma of the complex  challenge of early identification and intervention for our Angry Ones and that is, of course, beyond Thunder Dome to me.  Our children are now raised in a culture of violence.  They play games with it, they sing songs about it, their heroes are violent athletes, their movie stars make action movies with so much “action” their hearing is impaired when they leave a theater, their country sends soldiers to places they have to learn to pronounce and spell like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria…Viet Nam…Korea..and these soldiers kill other people in the name of peacekeeping. 

      Our children are surrounded by violence.   They may go to sleep with the sound of gunfire in their neighborhood and on their street corners.  They may wake the next morning to find a friend, cousin, uncle, grandmother, father, sister, or brother has died during a battle over what?   Drugs?   Gangs?  Money?   Territory?  Aha.  There we have it.  There is no escaping the violence so why on earth would we be surprised that these children who are accustomed to violence, who have access to weapons, would shoot us when we make them mad or when we are, well, just being ourselves and they don’t like us that way?

    This is the season of hope, joy and celebration for some; the Prince of Peace and Santa Claus are the bearers of Good News and Great Gifts for many of us. But it is also a season of sadness for those who have lost family during 2012 and who will be reminded that their holiday season is different this year. The season won’t be the same – ever.  Some people will struggle to find the money to give their children what they want under the tree.   Friction and tension will make family gatherings more problematic than peaceful.  In our sense of hurry and anxiety over putting food on the table we might miss the opportunity to say: I love you today, I love you every day and you will always be special to me.

    I remember a hard candy Christmas with the disappointment of not getting what I wanted from Santa Claus but rather getting a sack of penny candy of bright different colors that tasted alternately sweet and sour but couldn’t be chewed at first because it was so hard.  Gradually though, if you waited long enough, you could bite the smaller piece in two and swallow them both.  Success.  Astonishingly delicious.

    I expected a hard candy Christmas personally this year for a number of reasons, but I wasn’t prepared for a national one.  Regardless, here it is and my hope is that America will never be the same – ever.  That our national consciousness is raised to include in our vocabulary the words kindness and reconciliation and forgiveness and a genuine passion for a better world.   We’ve waited long enough.  We have tasted both the sweet and the sour and, as Dolly Parton sings through the lyrics of Carol Hall, we won’t let our sorrows bring us down.

    I’ll be fine and dandy
    Lord, it’s like a hard candy Christmas
    I’m barely gettin’ through tomorrow
    But still I won’t let
    Sorrow bring me way down

    **********************

    Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library was started in 1995 through her Dollywood Foundation and books numbering in the millions are delivered annually throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom (Wikipedia). I applied to the program for our younger granddaughter Molly who was three years old at the time and would love to share the covers of the 9 books she’s received thus far. Here’s a sample!

    Thank you, Dolly, for the example you set in living a life that was real. Your courage and sacrifices taught us how to be better. I believe in angels – I have believed in you. Rest in peace.

  • summertime and the living is, uh, not quite so easy as we’d thought originally

    summertime and the living is, uh, not quite so easy as we’d thought originally


    Originally published in 2020 – we still enjoy the screened porch, but now have two granddaughters who will share the summer solstice with us this year. I’m sure they will roll their eyes and say I’m boring them when I begin to explain the significance of June 21st. tomorrow. The summer solstice will hopefully take a back seat to their celebration of their daddy for Father’s Day, but just in case…

    I asked Pretty to join me on our screened porch last night a little after 9 o’clock. Pretty who had had a stressful day putting out fires she didn’t start, didn’t hesitate. Ok, she said as she began to move outside with me. That’s one of Pretty’s best characteristics – she’s never afraid to switch gears – she’s always willing to humor me when I make a gear switch.  I guess that’s really two exceptional qualities, but who’s counting.

    Today is the summer solstice, I reminded Pretty, it’s the longest daylight of the year. I wanted to enjoy it with you, I said. Look, it’s almost 9:15 and just now getting darker.

    Pretty exclaimed with enthusiasm – oh you’re right. I’m so glad you suggested the porch.

    ***********************

    You can blame this on the frogs

    While Pretty and I talked on our porch last night, I tried to explain to her what was going through my head on this first day of my 74th. summer. The sounds from our porch were connected to the sounds of my earliest memories of summer when I slept in a small double bed with my maternal grandmother while a cheap oscillating fan turned slowly from side to side as it valiantly tried to cool us in the hot humidity of an East Texas heat a thousand miles away from South Carolina, a heat that would not be relieved by opening every window on the porch where we slept or the random whisper of cool air from a small oscillating fan made by Westinghouse. The sheets were always clean but never actually cool.

    I never trusted the sheets anyway after discovering a scorpion hiding between them one night.

    But it was the sound of the frogs around our pool here on Cardinal Drive – particularly after a rain – that drew me to those hot muggy nights of Grimes County, Texas, where I was raised. My grandmother’s wooden house made from a retail catalog blueprint had many design flaws, but its one awesome feature which had nothing to do with the design really, was the magical pond (or tank, as we called it in East Texas) behind her house.

    The tank was the focal point of my only-child imagination play stories during the day, but it was the tank’s music of those summer nights I hope will never be erased from my memory. Specifically, it was the frogs, or bull frogs as my grandmother used to call them  just before we drifted off to sleep. The low guttural sounds were always behind the house and were somewhat subdued until every light was turned off at night. But then, those frogs got louder and louder until they hit a mighty crescendo. My grandmother and I laughed out loud when we heard them.

    The frogs who live in our backyard on Cardinal Drive are rarely as raucous as the bull frogs in my tank in Richards – I think they are smaller frogs. But occasionally I hear one of those loud guttural sounds looking for something, probably safer water supplies, and I am transported to different days. To a grandmother who guided me with her wisdom – now to a woman who loves sharing another summer solstice with me.

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    I was blessed with a loving eccentric family who in the end gave me what they could – so much more than I realized. Today I stand with the Poor People’s Campaign and their national Call for a real Moral Revival to discover a soul within ourselves that will move all people to address the intersection of poverty, systemic racism, social injustices.

    One of the co-founders of the movement, Reverend William J. Barber II says, “In the long arc of human history, there are moments when the universe itself groans and declares, ‘It’s time.’”

    It is, indeed, time. It’s also summertime and contrary to the Gershwin hit song from Porgy and Bess, the living is definitely not easy for most of our fellow citizens who continue to demonstrate in our streets or elsewhere. Keep the faith. We must do better.

    Onward.

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    The Obamas were pitch perfect as always in their ceremonial addresses opening the Presidential Library/ Campus in Chicago this third week of June, 2026. They still give me hope. I need a large dose of that this summer when the living continues to be, uh, not quite so easy as we’d thought originally in these United States.

     

  • Memories of My Daddy and His Bird Dogs

    Memories of My Daddy and His Bird Dogs


    I first published this piece about my daddy and his dogs in August, 2015. Father’s Day will be here before you can say jack rabbit – be thankful for the dads, their dads, and all the dads before them. I would love to be sitting down for a Father’s Day meal at my grandmother’s house this coming Sunday. We’d have a lot of catching up to do since my father died June 30, 1976, at the age of fifty-one. I was thirty years old and lost not only my daddy but also my best friend.

    From the time I was five or six years old growing up in rural southeast Texas in the 1950s, my daddy used to take me with him to hunt quail during what I remember as a relatively short season in the late fall and winter months. Quail lived in coveys in fields in the countryside around us and were excellent at hiding from their enemies in the tall grasses that would become hay when baled. You could walk and walk and walk some more until you felt like your legs were going to fall off if you had to put one foot ahead of the other again, but the quail were always one step ahead of you unless you had help locating them.

    Enter the hunter’s best friend: the German short-haired pointer a/k/a in Grimes County, Texas, as the bird dog. A good bird dog could run through a field sniffing and sniffing, sometimes whining, until he caught a whiff of a covey of quail and then he would stop, raise his right front leg to a ninety-degree angle,  curl his medium-length tail over his back and point his nose exactly in the direction of the covey. He remained in this precise position until the hunter walked up beside the dog which would cause the quail to take flight with the sound of their fluttering wings making a whoosh noise as they left the ground.

    Whoosh! Bam! It was over that quick. The covey rose from the ground cover, and my daddy would shoot his twelve-gauge shotgun. Occasionally a bird would fall, and I would run to retrieve it and put it in my jacket to take home to my grandmother who would be happy to fix it for our supper. We rarely got our  legal limit, but we would usually have enough for a meal.

    The problem my daddy had was he never had a “good” bird dog.  He got the puppies from different people  in the area who always assured him their dogs were the best in the field, but invariably the pointer he got didn’t respond well to training. A common trait Daddy’s dogs had was rather than stopping to point and hold their position, they would  stop to point for a split second and then run as fast as they could to try to catch the birds by themselves. Of course, the quail would take flight when they heard the dogs and be long gone out of  shooting range by the time we caught up with the dogs. Daddy would halfheartedly fuss – and the dogs rarely improved.

    As I think back on this now, I believe our dogs had an identity issue which caused their lackluster performance in the field. Whether they did well or not in the hunting arena, they were fed regularly with  delicious scraps from our table (dog food wasn’t on Daddy’s radar screen) and petted and hugged on an equally regular basis. They came indoors for their pets and Daddy often scooped the big dogs up and held them on his lap while he talked to them about their shortcomings. My daddy was a very diminutive man – about five feet six inches tall – and those dogs weighed almost as much as he did. They looked at him with adoring eyes and absolute trust…and seemed to be saying I promise I’ll do better next time…but they wouldn’t.

    My daddy loved his bird dogs. We always had at least one dog in our family for as long as I can remember and at one time when I was in high school, we had three.  I know that for sure because I still have the original oil paintings he commissioned  at that time from an artist friend of his.

    001

    Daddy’s Bird Dogs: Rex, Seth and Dab (circa 1966)

    No wonder I love my dogs. I’ve never personally owned a bird dog, but I’ve been on the receiving end of the adoring eyes and plaintive expressions of more than a few dogs of my own throughout my adult life. I confess to holding them on my lap if I can scoop them up, but even if I can’t do that, I will give them lots of love and kisses whenever and wherever they will stand  or sit or lie down to be so smothered.

    Loving dogs – or any animal for that matter – is the gift that keeps on giving to us mere humans, but the gift comes with a high price tag because their lives are relatively short. Indeed,  it seems the older we are, the faster we lose them.

    Two of our three remaining dogs that have given us much more loyalty and adoration than we deserve over the past decade have now been diagnosed with cancers that will ultimately take them from us. What I have learned from them is that they both keep their pain to themselves without complaints. They are not troubled by wondering why they are in their particular situations, and I think this allows them to try to keep changes in their routines to a minimum. They like to roll the way they’ve always rolled if they possibly can.

    I am a contemplative person – I can’t help myself. I find I can spend a great deal of time trying to figure out “why” this happened or that took place. Unfortunately, discovering “why” doesn’t necessarily lead to productive change. As a matter of fact, the opposite is likely to occur. So when I find myself in a position similar to the ones my dogs are facing today, I hope I have learned my lessons from the examples they have set for me and focus less on “why” and more on “so what.”

    That’s the way I’d like to roll.

    P.S. My daddy never asked anyone to make an oil painting of me.

  • Impasse

    Impasse


    “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” United States Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, War of 1812, September 10, 1813, following his strategic victory in the battle on Lake Erie over the British Navy. Hooray.

    Walt Kelly’s political satire captured the imagination of the public on Earth Day in this country with his 1970 Pogo cartoon that coined a re-phrase of Commodore Perry’s words in 1813. Hooray?

    Helen Lewis argued in her article The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote or Work. Or Have Opinions. that a movement of “masculinism” in America seeks “to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men.” (June, 2026, The Atlantic) What? Seriously?

    We have met the enemy, and it’s women. No Hooray, please.

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    I published the following piece on June 10, 2017, nine years ago. I had a personal painful reminder of old tapes played too often in my life. Helen Lewis’s words opened old wounds.

    Impasse

    Webster’s Everyday Thesaurus has these words for impasse:

    deadlock, stalemate, blind alley, bottleneck…dead end, dilemma, predicament, quandary, standstill, standoff.

    This past week I had a heavy dose of impasse which intermingled with my increasing preoccupation about the American Civil War. I look more and more frequently at the map of the red states and blue states that make up our United States and wonder anew at Abraham Lincoln’s commitment to keep the country united as one. I understand the problem better for sure. I always wondered how brother fought brother on different sides during the Civil War. They were family first after all, right? Not so fast, my friend.

    The American people are a “duke’s mixture” to quote my granddaddy who used the words for his Saturday barbershop customers in the 1950s when my grandmother asked him who’d stopped by the barber shop that day.

    George, who all came by for a haircut today?

    Well, Betha, it was a duke’s mixture.

    To which she would shake her head and look at me and ask, What does that tell you? Duke’s mixture.

    My granddaddy would laugh as if he’d told a funny joke, and I would laugh with him. My grandmother never cracked a smile.

    Today I find myself not laughing, either. Rarely cracking a smile at the impasse among the citizens in our country which must surely have my grandparents spinning in their graves. My grandmother invented social media via the telephone party line we had in our little town as surely as Al Gore invented the internet. She relished listening in on other people’s conversations and delighted to repeat juicy gossip at her kitchen table… but please dear God, don’t ever mess with her family.

    This week I did something I almost never do. I responded on Facebook to a post made by a first cousin twice removed who has a world view that I have long ago accepted as different from mine. Most of the time I hide his offensive posts from my timeline and move on.

    I can’t bring myself to “un-friend” him because I truly love the little boy I remember visiting us in Richards so often with his grandmother who was my grandmother’s sister. But this week he posted that liberals must have a “mental illness” to think the way we do, and that struck a nerve for me.

    You see, I grew up during a time in the 1950s and 60s when being a homosexual was considered to be a mental illness. Think about how you would feel if you grew up believing that you had a secret mental illness and, if exposed, you could be institutionalized. Lock her up. Throw away the key. I heard an old tape begin to  play in my mind.

    Somehow our thread on Facebook took an unpleasant turn, as I already knew it would and we got into a discussion regarding a prevailing Muslim  belief in some places that gays should be killed. Unfortunately, one of my cousin’s friends chimed in with the following comment: “We knew someone many years ago that would probably want to buy a plane today, load them (gays and lesbians) up and drop them off over there (wherever Muslims live). I sure miss him.”

    Wow. I was transported to a conversation I had in the early 1990s with a client who sat in my office and said, “If it were up to me, I’d take all those queers and put them behind barbed wire in Kansas and tell them to stay there.” I didn’t respond then. The old tape was playing louder now.

    One of my mother’s most infamous quotes for me was that she wished all those gays would go back in the closet where they belonged. She would be happy to slam the door shut. The old tape was so loud now I could barely hear myself think.

    Luckily, I didn’t accept the old tapes as I don’t accept my cousin or his friend’s thinking about who I am today. I’ve spent my entire adult life working for equal treatment and fairness – my liberal social justice beliefs.

    In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. I was 28 years old. In 2017 at the age of 71, I am personally declassifying liberalism as a mental illness.

    I resolve to limit my social media interaction with my first cousin twice removed to Happy Birthday wishes. No need going up that blind alley again.

    I feel better already.

    *************************

    June is Pride Month – celebrate with joy!