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Moral turpitude

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“Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
– Clive Staples Lewis

There are many forces in the world that attempt to regulate and control the activities of the individual human being. Nation-states, religious institutions, legal courts and municipalities are just a few examples of these forces. These various concentrations of power are an attempt to keep us from destroying each other during the course of our daily lives. Sometimes they work in this endeavor. Sometimes they just clean up the mess that’s left behind after we exert our free will. Sometimes these institutions make things worse.[su_pullquote]Moral Turpitude  A phrase used in Criminal Law to describe conduct that is considered contrary to community standards of justice, honesty, or good morals.[/su_pullquote]

Crimes involving moral turpitude have an inherent quality of baseness, vileness, or depravity with respect to a person’s duty to another or to society in general. Examples include rape, forgery, robbery, and solicitation by prostitutes.

Many jurisdictions impose penalties, such as deportation of Aliens and disbarment of attorneys, following convictions of crimes involving moral turpitude. The idea of what constitutes moral turpitude and how an individual should be punished for engaging in such behavior changes drastically depending on time and place. A gay man in Russia in 2014 may be punished with a beating or by having containers of human urine poured over his head. It’s true. I watched a documentary containing video evidence last night. A gay man in Afghanistan is likely to face little to no backlash. They reckon the year differently over there, and that man probably won’t admit he is gay, but in the time and space I’m referring to it is perfectly fine for two men to copulate as long as they don’t talk about it publicly. Today in the United States a gay man can get married to another gay man in some places. Here we are – the human race – spinning through space on a ball of rock. And somewhere in Africa a gay man is being killed for being gay.

You’d find lots of people who, if interviewed, would passionately claim that being gay or engaging in homosexuality is a crime of moral turpitude. You’d find another large swath of humanity that would argue the exact opposite. I fall into that category. I feel no physical or sexual attraction to my own sex. On the other hand I have to ask myself how something consensual can be wrong. Human beings who engage in consensual behavior that doesn’t harm anyone else are not engaging in moral turpitude.

That’s where things tend to get fuzzy. Some people think they are being harmed if you do something they disagree with. If you do something that offends them. If you engage in behavior that they themselves wouldn’t engage in. These people are wrong. Human freedom is more important than your personal moral code. Human freedom is more important than your personal agenda. Human freedom is more important than anything you believe in.

When a human individual engages in behavior that makes you uncomfortable you always have the option to disengage. The only exceptions are when an individual perpetrates force or fraud against others. These are nonconsensual activities. You have every right to defend yourself in such cases. I study the communities and power bases in the world around me on a daily basis. I watch the ways that my fellow humans attempt to exert unnecessary control over one another. I spend a lot of time thinking about moral turpitude and my own moral compass.

I’ve made a million mistakes in my life to date. Engaged in a million choices that could have been improved upon. I’m probably guilty of lots of moral turpitude according to the people who decide that sort of thing. I am fortunate enough to have been born in a society that has mostly supported my ability to learn from each action, decision and mistake I’ve made without locking me in a cage, torturing me or stoning me to death.

I’m still allowed to exercise my free will and to publish my thoughts. These freedoms are gifts I don’t want to squander. They lead me to a mental plane where I spend a lot of time reflecting on the idea that I should be contributing to the evolution of personal freedoms in every human society I am able to engage with.

Moral turpitude. It’s not worth much if you use it to censor or censure people who aren’t harming others. Which leads me back to the quote at the top of this piece of writing. I won’t force my conscience on you unless you are directly harming others. Can you say the same?

The door

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Greg Smith took a deep breath and looked up the face of Old Man. The crisp granite had a wet sheen to it this morning. He glanced up the hundreds of feet that he was planning to on-sight. He’d climbed the Old Man before, but never on this side. It was going to be one hell of an adventure. Particularly because he had never done it alone.

Their fight this morning had been epic. Sheila was pissed. She didn’t want him going up the mountain alone. She didn’t understand his need to escape the rat race. Or the feeling of freedom he could only find at the top. How it took him out of his head. Out of the petty problems he was sick of dealing with. Work was dragging him down. Today, regardless of what anyone else wanted or needed from him, he was going to climb.

Greg checked his equipment and looked at the sun. He breathed again. Put the job out of his mind. Put the argument with Sheila away. I’ll make up with her tonight he thought. He began to climb. The rock called to him. The top called to him. All of it sang softly. The cool, crisp air. The warm sun on his back as he worked his way slowly upwards.

After he’d reached a distance he guessed was about 200 feet up from the bottom, he stopped for a minute to collect himself. He placed an anchor point into the face, checked his chalk, harness and carabiners, and continued upward.

After what seemed like a few minutes but was actually more than an hour Greg stopped again and took in the view. The valley below was breathtaking from this height. He saw an eagle above him and wondered what it was hunting. From this high he wouldn’t be able to spot whatever the bird was stalking. He looked down anyhow.

A vehicle’s dust trail was coming down the gravel road towards where he had parked. Greg wondered if he knew the climber or climbers inside. He wondered what Sheila was doing. If she was still fuming at him for needing this today. Those worries could wait. He begin wedge a nut into a crack in the face. And felt the first trembling. His heart skipped a beat. Had the mountain just moved?

He looked up. Then down. What the hell? This time the earth definitely shook. The mountain was unhappy. He clung to the face, desperately trying to get the nut further in. He gave it a tug and attached the rope. The mountain was shaking now. He scrabbled as dirt and small rocks came down on his helmet.  Getting his grip and settling in, he waited. More shaking came, and more showers of dirt. The rocks were bigger now. A boulder bigger than his head fell past him. And then a few more. His heart beat faster.

And then it was over. Greg looked up. No more debris. He looked down and saw two figures far below. The vehicle had pulled up next to his Xterra and he could see two small figures looking up at him.

Should I go up or down? He couldn’t believe his brain was wondering this. I need to go down. What if the Old Man shakes again? For reasons he couldn’t understand Greg found himself looking for the next handhold leading up. He began climbing again.

Then he discovered the door. The impossible door. Set a few inches into the face was a red wooden door with an ornate brass knob that looked like a human face. Stunned, Greg paused on the face. What the hell? After a minute, unable to contain his curiosity, he climbed up to the beckoning mystery and put his hand on the handle. He turned the knob.

Greg stepped into the door in the mountain wondering what was happening to him. This place couldn’t be real. It hadn’t been here the last time he climbed Old Man. He felt nervous and excited.  Inside, the room he found himself in was filled with cool air but warmly lit. He took it in, stunned. A rectangular space with rich wood paneling. Most of the wall space in the impossible place he found himself was dedicated to bookshelves. He took in the entirety of the madness and noticed more details.

He saw a fireplace. The fire crackled and glowed invitingly. Rich carpets and comfortable reading chairs were scattered about in between the shelves in the walls.

“Welcome Greg.”

He gasped as he noticed a composed, regal woman sitting in one of the chairs nearest the crackling fire. She was dressed in a white flowing garment that shimmered in the firelight. She looking at him commandingly.

“Please, have a seat. We have a discussion ahead of us.”

Greg’s knees went weak. He automatically grabbed for the harness, intending to check the rope. It wasn’t there. Astonished, he looked down and realized that he was no longer wearing his climbing gear. Rather, his outfit consisted of his favorite cargo pants and sneakers. His continued the self-inspection and realized that he was dressed for lounging around the house on a fall day.

“What the hell?” Greg turned towards the red door unsure what he should do. The door was no longer there. The place he had just stepped into the room through was now a bookshelf. He noticed one of the titles on a red spine: Abrahaim Abadi.

“Take a breath Greg.” The woman looked at him without any apparent emotion. “Have a seat. Let’s talk.”

Greg shuffled towards the woman woodenly. She graciously pointed at another chair on the opposite side of the fire. Oddly, she used her entire hand to point instead of a single finger. He lurched towards the seat and flopped into it feeling weak-kneed.

“What is happening to me?”

She nodded. “That’s a perfectly natural question Greg. But let’s start with orientation. My name is Saphira. I am an agent of change. You are here because you are in the midst of a major change. You’re dead Greg. And now you have to make a choice. Take a moment to let that sink in.”

Greg thought of Sheila. “I’m not dead. I’m right here. Talking to you.” Another part of him screamed silently. He felt the truth of what she was saying in his core.

“You’re dead Greg. The first rock knocked you off the Old Man. The shell of you is down at the bottom. Those two people you saw called 911. The authorities will come clean up the scene. You were dead within seconds of impact. Welcome to what some would call Purgatory. I have this discussion often Greg. You’ve had a pretty grounded life. Now it’s over. Time to choose a new one.”

The woman sipped from a cup of something on a little wooden table next to her chair. She smiled at Greg.

“Look around. Every book contains the bones of a life. You can stay in this room as long as you wish. Until you’re ready. Until you make a choice. Choose one of these lives. This is the nature of the universe.”

Greg found himself unable to speak. He looked around at the shelves and the hundreds of books.

“Gah.” It was all he could muster.

“The Hindus sort of come closer than the rest of you to getting it right. I’ll run you through the basics. Every life starts as the bones of a book. Every soul chooses which bones to anchor itself to. The rest will be up to you. The stories you see here, the bones available to you, the anchor points – they are all an algorithm. Every choice you ever made, in your time as Greg, has led to this point and these selections.”

She looked into his face. He noticed that her eyes were an impossible purple color. That she was beautiful. In a way that was somehow completely asexual.

“But what about heaven?” Greg’s voice surprised him.

“None of those ideas come close. There is no heaven. There are only infinite pathways and endless choices. And this room. You’ve been here over and over.”

Greg thought about it. The woman looked deep into him and continued.

“You have the benefit of memory for now. Once you make your choice you’ll be born again. Into the bones you’ve chosen, into the time and place you’ve selected. You won’t remember any of this life. It will be a fresh start. But it won’t be completely sanitized. Sometimes, the echoes of past incarnations will be audible. You may get prompts. You may see little glimpses of other roads you’ve walked. This is all there is. Endless stories made up of endless choices.”

The woman pointed again in her odd way, using her entire hand to sweep the bookshelves. “I’ll be here the entire time you are reading. There is no rush. This place is timeless. Compose yourself and choose a book. We have eternity to talk about your options.”

Home

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She did her shopping alone today. Casually browsing the aisles looking for nothing in particular. It was strange. They were all grown. Finally. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. Birds flown from the nest. Her husband was on the golf course. Enjoying stories and lies with his friends. She thought about what a good man he was. Then she thought about how content she was. It made her uneasy. And she liked it. She had always liked the sharp edges of things.

He’ll do well in college, she thought. Her youngest son had always been her favorite because of how different he was. Like her but unlike her. She sighed and placed an avocado in the plastic bag which crinkled with a noise she loved. She loved many strange little details of her white picket fence life.

Moving down the aisles aimlessly she continued to think about her children. It was hard to believe they had grown into adults. It was hard to believe that she was so old. She’d never expected to be old. She wondered what she would watch on television. She wondered if he would come home drunk again and fuck her. He seemed restless. Retirement didn’t suit a company man like him. He was driving her crazy. Maybe they would take a trip somewhere exotic. They needed something different.

He built his power base carefully. A marijuana business had never been something that interested him. It was lucrative though. When more than half of the states in the union found their sanity and legalized recreational use he invested in cultivation. Then he expanded to retail. He was a criminal but he was also a gentleman. He broke the rules but never for the sake of breaking them. He was cautiously reckless. By skirting the lines and applying grease where it was needed his business outgrew that of his competitors.

He had to kill one of them. She was a cutthroat. She was unhinged. When his competitor had one of his fields burned her people killed one of his employees. That was unacceptable. He went to his locker, took out one of the rifles and practiced for several days. Then he shot his competitor through the head from a hilltop a mile away while she was sipping white wine from a crystal glass. The glass didn’t break when it hit the deck of her home with expensive mountain views. Her head exploded and he had the rifle smelted down into its base elements. The deck was demolished and rebuilt so the realtor wouldn’t have to disclose that someone had been murdered in the home. His business continued to grow. His remaining competitors became more cautious.

When she arrived at home she thought about how empty the house felt. Then she got high and fisted herself. Got lost in a memory and talked to a man who only lived in her head. He didn’t come home until well after midnight. He didn’t fuck her. She wondered if he had someone else and realized it didn’t matter if he did. She dreamed about a demon who shape shifted into an angel. At times she forgot if the being had appeared as the angel or the demon initially. She realized it didn’t matter. In the morning he went into the garage and lost himself in a project. She got high on the porch. That night they began planning their exotic trip.

He took a small portion of his profits from the marijuana business and built a special place. In his travels all over the world to meet growers and convince politicians it was in their best interest to vote his way on legalization he’d come across a few very special parcels of real estate. Through a shell company he made a land purchase. Then he drew up a blueprint and hired an old friend who had gone into contracting after they left the military and the wars. The contractor was reliable and knew how to keep his mouth shut. The place took a year to build. It cost him millions. Mostly because everything had to be flown in from a great distance by seaplane. The house at the end of the world took shape. The special room inside was constructed exactly to his specifications.

When they did the final walkthrough his friend knew better than to ask any questions about that room. They were like that. There was no need to discuss what the room would be used for. They had been through so much together. There was no need to talk about what or why anymore. Some people just get things done.

The trip was going wonderfully. She was falling in love. She did that a lot. The girl was younger than her. Beautiful. Her husband was too busy drinking and playing golf on the savanna to notice that she was sneaking off to play with her new friend. The two of them were comfortable being apart together. When she and the girl finally decided to explore each others’ bodies fully it was magical. They got high and tasted everything including each other in the tent while giraffes grazed outside in the acacias. She drifted off to sleep and dreamed that she was being kidnapped.

Everything was ready. It had been for some time. The plane arrived on time. He had interviewed and hired everyone for this job personally. It went like clockwork. The girl arrived with the package on time. Everything had been planned meticulously. She woke up a little groggy. It took a few minutes to realize that she was in chains.

“Hello girl,” he said. “It’s been long enough.”

She fainted.

When she came back he was doing something noisy. She heard scraping and a crackling noise.

“Hello again girl.”

She struggled to see but her head was clamped into something. Something made of metal. She realized that her head was trapped inside a cage made of metal mesh.

“I’m going to brand you now,” he said quietly. The words sounded so loud inside her head. “It’s well past time.”

She thought about the history the two of them shared. About the decades in between the beginning and the now.

The smell of her own flesh burning made her feel more loved than she ever had before. She cried as she realized she would never leave this place. The wandering and wondering were over. She was home. She was his.

The memory of storms

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There is only the memory of a storm. Lingering on my skin, haunting my dreams. Baghdad, Iraq. In the year 2006. Sounds and smells come back the most. I try to suppress them because of the panic attacks and the way those have crippled me at times. I haven’t had one for a while.

Now, when the memories come unbidden, it is usually an overwhelming feeling of sadness and loss. The awareness of my own fragility. The death of innocence. The inevitability of endings and an understanding that the privilege of memory is not granted to everyone.

All the fragments came together in the storm my last night in Iraq. I slept eventually but first my brain forced me to travel unwanted pathways. Made me ask why my life was intact when so many others had been shattered. When so many souls had leaked out onto the ground or been dispersed into bits and fragments inside the concussive blasts of hatred that I felt many times. Those punctuation marks only frayed my mind. They failed to shatter my body.

It doesn’t rain often in Baghdad. In a year we had perhaps a half dozen storms that actually contained life giving water sent down from the skies. My last night in Iraq I experienced one of those. The air became heavy with that smell of impending wet while my unit shuffled from line to line suffering the endless insults of modern war. The wind picked up as we finished our checklists and winded our way through the endless t-walls, machines and tired soldiers to take our sustenance. By the time we returned to our tent to retire, the sand was blowing into our faces. Stinging our skin.

The tent walls moved and sang to us in harmony with the angry air outside that night. As the storm’s fury mounted, I wondered why I was lucky enough to be alive. My overwhelming sense was that I wouldn’t make it through the night. That the storm had been sent as a last cruel joke. I felt that since none of the mortars or rockets had taken me out I was due to die in the tent that night. If a sniper didn’t have my mark, then surely the tent would fall in on me and finish the job.

I finally drifted off into a troubled sleep thinking about all the things that hadn’t killed me. Some men and women can fall asleep anywhere after being exposed to war. I haven’t mastered that skill. I was probably the last one to fall asleep that night.

I woke up to the sound of thunder crashing. The tent walls were moving so much I was certain they would collapse in on me at any point. I could hear vehicles grinding by and see lightning through the entrance flaps as the wind played games with my worldview.

Instead of waiting for the tent to collapse and end the nightmare I’d been living, I did what human beings do. I fought my way through the chaos and uncertainty to relieve my bladder. The memories of that short journey are burned into my brain.

Endless convoys of sand colored armored gun trucks moving through the darkness sometimes illuminated by the sodium lights that seem to be omnipresent inside U.S. forward operating bases. In the rare moments between thunder crashes, shrieking gusts of wind, the sound of rain hitting sand and the grinding, rumbling noises of convoys the closest thing to silence was the constant hum of diesel generators powering the camp. War has a very distinct set of sights, sounds and smells that I cannot forget.

That storm, on that particular night, added a level of surreal to the backdrop. The storm ensured I will not lose the tableau of that night until I am dead. It burned in the significance of my fragility, the randomness of man’s hatred towards man and the fact that I was supposed to go home in the morning.

The tent survived nature’s fury. No mortar landed on me during my fitful sleep. The chartered jet we flew across an ocean to return to our world did not go down in the ocean as I suspected it would.
But that storm is still raging in my head. Reminding me that one day I won’t be able to escape an ending to my story. Storms remind me that I shouldn’t waste time. Remind me that the routine always holds the potential to become life changing.

What am I doing with my time? How am I spending the moments between storms? I lost a friend yesterday, long before I expected it. His storm came in a different form but it had the same net effect as the one I experienced on my last night in Baghdad. His tent fell in on him and became a burial shroud.

The memory of storms reminds that I should use the moments I have left intentionally. That I should live mindfully. That I should choose my relationships carefully. That every moment is an investment in becoming. Connectedness and love mean everything. I wish I’d understood that lesson better the night I was waiting for my plane out of Baghdad.

To my friend who just passed, I want to say, thank you for allowing me to know you. Thank you for letting me use the memory of your final storm to reinforce lessons I believe will cause my life to resonate more richly. Thank you for serving as an example of kindness and love that will allow me to be better for the people around me.

My final storm is coming. Yours is too. The only question is what will we do with the time between this moment and that one?

In memory of Dan

Training wheels

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I remember learning to ride a bicycle. Not the color of the thing. Not the size of the seat. Whether that first bicycle had a bell, or cards in the spokes of the wheels escapes me. What I remember most about my first weeks with a bicycle is the feeling I got when the training wheels came off.

I took my first hill in a terrifying, wobbly series of leg motions and then I was in the gravity well of that downwards curve going at breakneck speed. Back then I didn’t have the automatic routines that kept my speed carefully controlled. No brakes. The subroutines I have now that would auto position me in the softest landing spot possible should disaster have struck in the form of a blown tire or other mishap just weren’t there. I wasn’t wearing a helmet. For the first time ever, I was on my own.

I was heading out into the world without a safety net of any kind. And it was glorious.

There is a lot to be said for an experience like the one I had on that hill on that day. Without my training wheels for the first time. I felt exhilarated. Free. Out of control. More alive than ever before.

I could have fallen. I could have broken my head in half. I didn’t. I might have, and then it is possible you wouldn’t be reading this story.

The training wheels stay on too long nowadays. I don’t like all the things we’ve added to the mix. Orange safety vests. Helmets. Kneepads. Elbow protectors. I don’t need a spacesuit when I go fast. I want to feel my mortality without being terrified I’ll fall down and die. With the understanding of what it all means. I want the risk. I embrace it and own it.

The toughness and resilience I have now are byproducts of prevalent social mores in my youth. The balance between risk and safety during those years makes more sense to me than what I see happening now. Before I was a legal adult I’d seen many of the faces of mortality. Not the way kids see them on television now. As dramatic falsehoods.

We protect young minds from death and mortality. Try to insulate ourselves from real risk. Some of the mechanisms we put in place are good but others poison us. We desensitize ourselves and our children to the truth of being human. Overstimulate the parts of the brain that process loss, fear, risk. Then we medicate the ones who can’t cope with that overload. It turns into a downward spiral of self-doubt and weakness for some of us.

I can’t tell you when you should take off the training wheels and let the people you love most go down their first hill without any safety net. I can tell you that if you do, they’ll be stronger and wiser for it. If you overprotect the people you care about you are actually doing them a disservice.

You won’t always be there when they need you. That’s impossible. It’s dysfunctional to even try. Let them go fast on their own. Don’t always make them wear a helmet. They need to know what falling down feels like. One of the most important lessons I ever learned came from falling down as a teenager.

I had been successfully copying someone I saw in a movie. Cars would be going by slowly making a turn and I’d sneak up behind them on my skateboard and grab hold of the back bumper. I’d let them pull me along until they were going about 25 miles per hour and then let go. I thought I was pretty slick.

Until one day when I hitched a ride and waited too long. The car pulling me was going down a hill. I didn’t let go when I should have. By the time I did, the inevitable life lesson was unstoppable. I lost control of my skateboard and learned what eating asphalt feels like. Everyone needs a moment like that. Some of us need a few. Not all of us will survive them. That’s part of life.

The gravel that got embedded in my skin that day taught me a lesson as it worked it’s way out of my body over the next 20 years or so. Reminded me of limits every time I felt it. If I had been wearing a helmet and protective gear the experience would have been completely different. I wouldn’t have learned the same lesson.

The point is this: take off the training wheels and let go. You will fall down sooner or later. Going fast and falling down aren’t something we should be terrified to experience a few times. All of us need that context to be well rounded, thoughtful, considerate human beings. You only have so much time to live. Be brave and let your people and yourself learn that our world can hurt us sometimes.

Don’t set the limits so cautiously that the you or the people you love end up unable to cope with falling down. Because it will happen no matter how hard you try to avoid it. You might as well have some experience under your belt by the time you start pretending you’re an adult. Take off the training wheels when it’s time. Zoom down the hill. Gravity will slow you down on the upslope.

It was like this…

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The human brain is a funny thing. It doesn’t really hold on to the past very well. I speak for myself of course. Every brain is different. Some people, I’m told, have photo recall. They see remember everything exactly as it happened.

I know a girl who forgets some things almost immediately. Other things, her brain clamps down on and holds close with the teeth of a vicious attack dog. Her brain does one thing with the past and mine does another. We’re different that way. Someone else I used to know turned everything into a life or death emergency. Yet another person who passed through my life insisted on revisiting every recent event in the hopes that all concerned would agree with her version of how things went. She had a compulsive need that way.

My brain turns memories into stories. Softens the edges. Creates heroes and villains. Adds richness and descriptive details. Changes the timeline for dramatic effect. Sometimes I think that makes me a liar, and sometimes I think it makes me a good storyteller. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

I have to deal with the way my brain holds on to the past and processes it. Acknowledging my own tendency to distort the past and turn it into an entertaining story is important.

I can process a trauma by making my own role something I can live with. But that might not be what actually happened in the moments. In the story I might be brave. In real life I probably wasn’t. My hands were shaking. My teeth were chattering. I was behind a wall when the bullets started flying. Not running towards them.

There are 1,000 ways to get through events that should have or could have killed you or left you mentally broken. My way of coping is to make the thing into a story. But I mix up the pieces and parts of everything after a while. The faces get stuck on other bodies. The weather is more menacing and alive. Timelines get stretched and compressed. Antiheroes are born out of the shells of boring people.

In my stories, the omniscient narrator is me without the omniscience. How it happened and how it happened in my head are often two different things. Especially after years pass before I write the story. Often times I change details or major plot twists intentionally. I’m a fiction writer after all. Most of my stories start out that way intentionally. In my stories the line between reality and fantasy gets blurred. It happens to you too. Trust me.

It was like this doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as what actually happened. My brain tricks me. Chances are yours does the same thing. Memory is all we have sometimes to chart the course guiding us into the future.

Remember that. Looking back through the distorted lens of your own filters can be inspiring but it can also be deceiving. Stories are an important part of being human. Be open to the way others see things too. Hear their stories and pick the pieces that fit into your own.

No guide for life is the complete truth because every single one of them has been produced and filtered through human brains. In a world filled with a hundred million stories, pick and choose the ones you believe in carefully.

Make your own stories. Write them down before too much time passes. Pick out the truths that resonate with you and live your own fantasies. Memory is what you make of it.