I had been working since the age of thirteen, forty-one years, before my retirement in 2011. Among my jobs were farmhand, electronics tech, journeyman toolmaker, computer systems admin, automation and robotics engineer, and automation project manager. Farm work was by far the most rewarding, engaging, and least taxing, and I returned to it with joy when my real life resumed after that final layoff.

Born southern, white, and male in 1957, I am old enough to remember the end of segregation in the South. My co-workers, neighbors, friends, and enemies of African descent have so enriched my life that the possibility of life apart from them does not seem real. I know there was a lot more to the Civil Rights movement of my childhood than Dr. King, but he has always been for me the ideal against which I measure myself as a writer, a thinker, and a man. Had I ever met another Christian of such articulate intelligence, integrity, conviction, and balls, I might still be one.

I was born into a country that had awful problems to fix, and buddy, we were going to fix those problems. The great thing about America back then was our dream of the better country we were determined to become. Most of the problems we faced in the 1950s have compounded into worse ones since, and withal we have lost our determination to fulfill the dream that was America. I despise Democrats and Republicans and everything they cringe for, but I still love my country. The flag I saluted with tears in grade school is loathed around the globe for the lies, treacheries, murders, bombings, and baby roastings it commits with a tyrant's impunity everywhere, every day, but our people are our country, and I still love the people that we are. Peel back the jingoism, the cant, the puerile truisms and the elaborate denials, and beneath them you will almost always find a true heart that yearns for brotherhood, community, trust, and hope.
What's still great about America, and the reason hope still lives in me, is that we are the world's greatest mix. No matter what you look like, if your family has been here a hundred years, you are a mix of most of the races on this planet, and that is great and beautiful. Chances are good that I won't live to see our people find their way home, but I will die believing we have what it takes to dream a better world than this, and to live our dreams to life.