A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME

The decision to take on this podcast endeavor at 68 years old is more of a necessary mission than just something to do with my retirement experience. I retired from the teaching profession after close to 30 years of having an unusually diverse background of service to education. I had teaching experiences with students at the elementary, junior high, and high school level in both the public and private setting. Many of these years were spent working with at-risk youth.

Additionally, my nomadic-like career had taken me to rural, suburban and urban environments. I ended up finishing my career in education, for almost 14 years, with a job that I was meant to do. I ended up helping adult men, of all ages and in very intense environments, with preparing to pass their GED and Stress/Anger Management classes. Additionally, I became an advisor/consultant to several hundred men over that time. I involved myself in their lives in prison and their family issues on the outside.

Consequently, my interactions with these men had an unintended effect on my own life. I was able to bring my own life to a point of clarity and peace that I had never known before. Eventually, through hard work and "practicing what I preached" to these men in prison, I was able to recover my relationship with the "real me" that I always struggled to be and with my family that I thought I had lost.

The program that I developed and ran in the prison over those years was, by feedback from the men themselves, a success because I had lived a life emotionally that most of them could relate to over their lifetime. Through our experience together, we were able to zero in on one common point at the beginning of my time with them. I would always begin by saying "you can't fix what you most likely don't understand." In the end, we always were able to get beyond race, ethnicity, politics, and every other roadblock we Americans usually let get in our way to understanding one another in the good ol' USA!

So, let me get back to why I came out of retirement to start this podcast. The main thing I missed from that prison experience is the interactions with all those men in my program. Whether they agreed with me or not, they always knew that I wanted them to be who they were, even if I felt their views were wrongheaded, as long as they didn't favor mean-spirited or violent behavior. I always stressed the fact that every American has the responsibility to work toward having an unbiased acceptance of truth and facts, whether they agreee with them or not. Only then, you have the right to an opinion about anything in life.

I'm at a point as an American that loves this country, as I always have, that's lived a lot of life, through both positive and negative challenges, where I feel the need to make an effort to fight back against the anti-democratic, fascistic, authoritarian nonsense that we've seen since 2016 and still see to this day. We can't afford to pretend that this behavior from approximately 35% of this country's citizens will just subside on its own. I hope to use this podcast to have those same conversations, as we did in the prison environment, about accepting truth and facts to keep our democracy intact for future generations long after I'm gone.