Happy 19th Birthday son!

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless."

Have the peace of mind to know that for every day over the last 10 years, YOU were the first thing on your father's mind. I have failed to protect you from abuse, and you have a right to be angry at that. But this entire Website is because of the suffering Karie and Robbie forced on you, and that the whole world ignored. When you go to sleep tonight, and every night, know this: You are deeply DEEPLY loved, and have nevr once been alone. Every time you looked out to the bleachers at your Panthers JV football games, I was wearing my Santa Rosa Panthers shirt, and if you mother didn't lie about your jersey number, and confuse their schedule, I would have paid anything to watch you play. So, instead, I subscribed to the NFHS Network and watched your games streamed (thank your uncle Maurice for letting me know about your streams!)

We can never get back the memories your mother and Robbie stole from us. Their power over you is gone. You are free. Please, do not go through life in silences, a slave to fear.

You are a miracle, and you have a home that is safe. You have a family who is in tears because we can not live, laugh, and enjoy just knowing you.

Your stepmother, Buddy, and I are in pain every morning without you. Please come home.

Dad.

There is a simple question: Can I make a difference?

Yes. People who care can always make a difference. It is the people who know and do nothing that are active in preventing good outcomes. Facing evil is scary. It makes most people run away (that is essentially the point of it). People who get asked to help fight against evil handle it differently. Some surround themselves with people who would never ask the uncomfortable question. They choose their relations (or they try to choose them) based on the drama people have put on a person's life. If someone's been a victim of too much of it, they won't be getting a call. Other people handle the question by painting the world as if each of us is living a life of our own choosing, and so these can heap all the pains in a person's life onto that person's choices. Those people have never apparently seen a mirror, and never stop to think why we even have a justice system in society. Injustice is a real tool that wants to hurt us all. And another way people express their fear of doing the right thing is by stuffing their time, and creating the excuse that "I would love to help, but I have so many chores to do," (and if they don't have their time adequately filled, a quick run to the mall can fill it up nicely with things that need care and maintenance). I used to be the last kind. I bought tools and took on projects that completely filled my routine with things that would impress family and friends. I used to think that doing good things and being a good person left you in a good situation; or at least, it would keep the bad situations away. That isn't even partly true. A bad situation is something that is and will always be beyond one person's ability to control. The people who design bad situations, design them that way. "Don't walk home alone at night" is the simplest example. You see police cars patrolling your neighborhood regularly if it's a decent one, and you don't see them often enough if it's a bad one. You see community neighbors out walking in a good one, and no one walks in a bad one - except the people who design bad situations. You see cards and calls and visits in a family in a good situation, and you see distant loners living in isolation, never getting heard from or asked about in a family open to a bad situation.

It takes a village to raise a child. This is very true, and poorly done in my country. We have taken the stance that when you have a "right" to do something, then it is right to do it. Those two words have nothing at all in common except their spelling. Many people are hurt badly by others who obey the law; and many people are helped greatly only when the law is challenged. We can all point to the days of slavery, or the days before women's suffrage as popular examples. Those challenges are "almost" behind us, but the laws are very far away from being able to protect a family. A family is protected by a family. Nothing more. There is no agency out there turning your tax dollars into loving and well-cared-for children. Yes, there are things called "Child Protective Services" that respond after someone is brave enough in the family to say that something terrible has happened. In my child's state, they need to have several brave people report bad things documented before they step in. One lone parent making some claim will be ignored (ask how I know).

There are no judges carefully pouring over facts in our families lives and working to make sure no one crossed any legal lines. Burglars, bank-robbers, drug addicts, and prostitutes can all be moms and dads until they cross the line of hurting their children. No policing happens in a family court. None at all, unless it is proven that whatever "bad thing" they did  has directly hurt the child. What does "proven" mean? It means nothing, because family judges don't look at evidence provided by a parent. They take the words of the child first at face value, never checking how those words came to be, and never looking at context.

So in short, the way to invite drama and traumatize children in the American society is to step away from the village. Walk the street alone at night, never checking up on others, and never allowing them to check up on you. 

Now, of course, there is the problem of time. Getting on the phone with some people just can never end. There are ways to be tactful in exiting a call like that, but the call itself is more valuable in protecting us than the content. Just knowing that the other person isn't lying helpless on the floor (because they answered the phone) is monumental. Then, of course, there are letters (not emails). A physical piece of paper with your phone number on it doesn't go away if the power drops, or if the social media provider decides your phone is too old to support, or your inbox is buried in spam. You can assume all of those things will eventually kill off your digital "I love you" messages. Digital connections are useful, just realize they have fleeting value, and so you need many more of them to have the same effect. They actually take more time out of your life than a letter does in the long run. Life has a common theme: convenience has a high price.

I am writing a book. Something I would never have said out loud before this experience, and that is not exactly accurate; but I am being used to write a book. Every story needs a crisis, they say. And so, when you have a good crisis (whatever that means), you have a good story - something that others who are suffering must know about. All that is missing is a good storyteller. And so, I hope I am becoming a good storyteller, so the world can be a little bit better off. Many people have my same crisis, it turns out. Many children are dying from it. Many other children are damaged in a way that, when they have three or four children of their own one day, there are three or four more families suffering with this crisis. And then, of course, there are the numbers of grandchildren who follow the same path. And so on.

This crisis has been a part of civilization forever, because it uses such a very simple mechanism: brainwashing. There is a sad public opinion that brainwashing is some mystical or highly complex process that requires special training. No, it does not. It very often is done purely by accident - by a parent with a lack of training. Brainwashing in children is made possible by their natural feeling of love and care. When a child sees someone hurt, they have a natural instinct to soothe the suffering. It is a universal instinct. Brainwashing is nothing more than taking that instinct, and steering it the way you want it. When a mother runs through the house in tears every time the telephone rings with a bill collection notice, her child will try to understand why mommy is crying. If the child can make the connection between the bill collectors and mommy's tears, they will do whatever they think will stop it. Steal and hide the phone, maybe the response of a young child. A more mature child might understand that bill collectors want money, and they will try to get money (work unhealthy conditions, steal money or things to sell, gamble, etc.). This is natural family love driven to accidentally create a juvenile delinquent; the child normally loves family and community, but now because the thing hurting mommy can be only be stopped with money, he is forced to choose which love to violate: family or community. Mommy had the responsibility here to lie about her feelings, and tell the child what really upsets her - being unable to provide a wonderful life.

What kinds of things can your child be forced to choose between by your actions? People of different colors? Yes. People in a different social status (richer than you, or poorer than you?) Yes. People in your own family who provide more than you? Yes.  Can they actually throw away one of their own parents just to "protect" the other one? They can.

But does that really matter? Don't they just grow out of it once they realize how petty someone was being? They do not. They suffer their entire lives when they discover they were used as a weapon.  The difference comes down to allowing the person control over their outcomes.

• A child who lost a parent to disease or an accident can complete the grieving process. Something was lost, and that hurts, but the thing which stole from them can be eventually forgiven when no one intended harm. The grown-up child has control over forgiving and moving forward. This hurt is in the past, it can't be experienced again. It can have closure.

• A child who lost a parent because the parent was a dead-beat and just never gave them love, can rest easy at night knowing the consequences are just to the choices one parent (or both) made. Again, the child is holding the controls over the forgiveness. They were wronged, the culprit is known, and the power of choice is theirs. They can look back at the empty dinner table and memories which never formed and point to the person who was responsible, then make a choice. It is all about having the power within yourself to forgive, and knowing who needs forgiving. They travel through life and see happy families together, and can understand why they don't have memories like this. It can still hurt, but the hurt has a place to go. It didn't come from a sniper hiding in the trees who can still shoot at you today, it came from the person who left you. You can see the enemy, and can avoid them.

• A child who sat down with family but never got gifts or love or cards from their mommy or daddy, because that love and those gifts and cards were taken away from them, will normally "boomerang" and grow up to hate the person who stole their love away. As they go through life, looking at normal families and seeing the commercials of family gatherings, or hear of them at work, they also have a target for their anger. It is not good to target any in your family with anger, but having one grants a little control. They have been brainwashed to hate one parent because "daddy never gets you anything, because he doesn't care." Eventually, maybe they find the missing gifts and have a hard choice to make. It's horrible, but not the worst case.

• A child who has been taught that mommy or daddy is too dangerous to have in our lives suffers the worst damage. Not only do they walk through life hating everything "normal" (because they can't relate to it and never experienced it), but they have to live knowing they still have to choose between parents. Do they dare confront the alienator who pretended the other parent was dangerous? "Are you calling me a liar, after all the lies that one told?" is the easy response. It's easy because neither parent is perfect, so the child now has to become the judge over which liar was worse. One parent is exaggerating, one may be truthful; but neither actually knows what the truth is. That was the design: kill off communication and hide the evidence - forever. This child can never find closure when they grow up. Unless, one caring family provides an objective fly-on-the-wall account.

Brainwashing is easy and we all do it to some small degree. It isn't mysterious, and it is a problem compounded by our modern family courts. That is the point of this. What has been done for ages was under control when we had families who were "into each-other's business." Never let your loved ones walk alone at night. That is the goal. Let's walk with each-other.