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Words have power, and that gives writers great responsibility. Responsibility to use words carefully, to know words and their history and connotations well, and to think through nuance and various sociocultural aspects when using them. Some words have particular meanings to particular groups. And so, when a writer uses them carelessly that writer can find himself or herself facing criticisms they might not have expected. I think nothing has made me more aware of this than the recent revelation of being a parent.

You see, I married into kids. I didn’t help conceive them. My kids are the product of my wife’s prior relationships. And my kids are Filipino through and through. So now we are a mixed household. They don’t have the same frame of reference culturally as I, and certainly not from life experience. They are teenagers, I am fifty-four. My wife is thirty-seven and she also has different frame of reference for the same reasons. But being a father and loving my kids, which I do—because love is not about sperm and eggs. Love is a choice and love is an act of choosing people who are yours and caring about and investing in them—gives me new challenges of responsibility in how I use words and how I frame the world. I mess up all the time. Sometimes unintentionally, but most of the time carelessly. And I suffer when I do. Because nothing is more important to me than protecting and keeping my family—keeping them safe, healthy, happy, you name it. So when I hurt them, when I cause them harm, I ache with pain and regret.

I have explored parenting in my books, especially the John Simon series but also Shortcut with Jason Maxx and even back to my early Davi Rhii books. For these, I tended to draw on my experiences as a child and stories I heard from friends and family, but now it’s personal. Now it matters more. You see, there’s something about being a parent that makes you want to preserve the purity of your kids in every way as long as you can and as often as you can. And that’s pretty damn hard in a world of Trumps and Vances and so many others. How do you explain to your kids that it’s not okay to question someone’s racial heritage when the former president of the United States does it right on TV? Or explain the importance of women as equals and respecting their choices when the running mate insults them for not having children?

I should explain that I don’t like getting political on social media much, but I do have very strong opinions. And the thing is I grew up sheltered with an idealistic view of the world taught by my parents who sheltered me. In my house, people helped each other and sought ways to serve the community. My parents did so professionally as a doctor and a nurse but also serving in the church or volunteering in the community to do things like help immigrant families, help fight for education rights for the disabled community, and so much more. My parents never once spoke a word about anyone that had anything to do with their race or sexual preference. Oh, we were raised Christian—American Baptist, and my parents voted conservative, yes. And we were about traditional values like celibacy until marriage and do unto others, and so on and so forth absolutely. College was important because education was the way to success. And kindness was the right choice always, even when it cost you. It’s both funny and sad how the world has changed and here I am raising kids in it. My instinct is to try and instill in them the same values I had as a kid, but realism leads me to struggle along the harder path—a more honest and unfamiliar one in the face of the country we live in and the struggles we see playing out there daily on social media and television.

(For those who wonder, I am a registered independent these days because I find I just don’t agree 100% with either party and I vote character and issues, not party anyway.)

You see, my kids and my wife will never not be Filipinos. They may become Filipino Americans in time. But what they will never be are white Americas. Where as I always have been and always will be a white American. But what mattered more than such things to my parents was moral character. And that’s why it’s always mattered to me. Integrity is my highest ideal, and though I don’t always achieve it, it informs so much my actions, words, and lifestyle. And always has and will. And it informs my choices in whom and what I vote for much more than any other factor, including party affiliation, religion, and so on.

When I was a kid I was pretty innocent. Because my parents never made race or sexual preference an issue, I treated everyone the same and watched with surprise and sadness when others did not. I struggled to fit in because it seemed so many considered these factors important unlike myself. How did I stay “cool” or avoid being bullied if I didn’t go along? I am ashamed to admit there were times I played along when in a group, even if privately I tried my best to make amends and treated people the way I had been raised. Now there were limits to my participation. I never, for example, called anyone the N word. Or any other similar word like Spic or wetback or name your iteration. To me, that was too far. In fact, I used to hang out in gym class with several POC classmates, and I heard them tossing that word back and forth a lot and talking about the difficulties they faced. Being naturally curious and, as a result of ADHD, far too naturally blunt, one day I asked them point blank, “How come you guys can call each other nigger, but if I say that word you would kick my ass?” My friends laughed and explained, “Because we mean it to take away the power of the negativity. If you use it, it is like a signal flag of the history of abuse the word represents.” Oh, they probably didn’t say it so formally or exactly, but I got the meaning. And one even said, “If you said it, I’d think you were going crazy, because I know shit like that never comes outta your mouth. You a good guy.” And it meant a lot hearing that.

In fact, of my two longest standing high school friends that I have maintained touch with over the decades regularly, one was a POC classmate who unfortunately died this past year. He had the misfortune of also struggling with his weight his whole life, and now that I share that struggle I can tell you my time as a the skinny white friend of Jason really resonates and taught me a lot about what he went through. Not as POC, mind you. As fat. And that’s me saying that in a time and age when teasing me about my weight is something I hardly ever encounter because it’s just not okay anymore in public in most places, thank God.
In fact, I never got teased or persecuted for my faith much either until I got to college. I think the first time was as a camp counselor at an arts camp, and the most recent times have been in the science fiction community. Those are the two places I first encountered Atheists and Agnostics who hated the church. And their hatred runs so deep if they even get a hint you might have faith the implication brings with it a bunch of assumptions as baggage—such as you must be a homophobe, you must hate gays, you must be dumb and ignorant for believing in an unseen God, and all the excesses of the church are your fault for supporting it, etc. You see that’s the power of words. The word Christian brings all those connotations. The same as the way the N word for some hateful people brings connotations of inferiority and stupidity and other ignorant nonsense. Or the way the word gay implies abnormality and depravity to some people and so on. Also nonsense.

So how do I raise my kids to be kind and accepting and not worry about such things in a world where it seems even odder to not see race or sexuality or gender as an issue today than it did in the 1970s and 80s when I was a kid myself? Seriously. It’s become painfully obvious the past twenty years that we are far from over that shit. This is, after all, the world of George Floyd and Charlottesville, Eric Rudolph and Orlando, and Trump, Vance, and so much more. When I was younger it was Matthew Shepherd. That was twenty-five years ago. And have we learned nothing?

So much were matters of race and sexuality non-issues for me that I spent decades working to help people without any regard for those factors. When I went to Ghana on a trip organized by a professor, for example, I realized there was a huge need for musical training and team building. So I organized a non-profit to go back and provide leadership development workshops. We did three in Ghana and then got invited to Brazil, Italy, and Mexico and did more there. I was once told by one of the church members as I interacted with a Mexican congregation that what they admired most about me was how I was the only white visitor they’d seen who moved in and out amongst the Mexican church people without seeming intimidated or awkward despite the fact I barely spoke a word of Spanish. Part of that is because I didn’t put emphasis on differences but focused on what we have in common, in this case, the love for Jesus, our faith, and senses of humor. My gift of a wicked sense of humor has been a huge bridge builder for me in so many situations. We may not be able to understand each other’s words much but I can chicken scratch out enough words, facial expressions and hand pantomiming to make them laugh, and one you are known as funny, people can’t help but like you. Boom. You’re in. It’s no accident I use so much humor in my writing either. It warms over readers to, and I love to entertain as well as move people and inspire them.

Of course, none of this truth of my life mattered to people who took my words from this very blog and twisted and misinterpreted them and tried to “cancel” me before Cancel Culture was even a term. There wasn’t one thing they said to others about my words that had even entered my mind when I wrote them but that’s the power of words. As I said before, “Some words have particular meanings to particular groups.” And people who are sensitive and emotional and looking for persecution around every corner can always find something in what you say to assume you mean them harm. All it takes is a few who resent you for being white male or being more successful or being too kind even to take such assumptions and present them as truth trying to weaken and disarm you in front of others as happened to me. How can I hope to protect my kids from such cruelties? Such heart break? No one who knows my past or my dedication to service regardless of race, sexual preference or gender would assume these things about me, but those who don’t know love a good scandal and will run with them if given a chance. What about my kids? Will being Asian and non-white keep them from such cancellation attempts? I’d love to think so but then the ex-president decides to suggest the Vice President isn’t really POC after all and I have to wonder what hope is there for anyone?

My kids ask me about these things too. “Dad, what’s the deal with the Olympians mocking the Lord’s Supper?” They see Christians jumping ignorantly on that bandwagon and they wonder if they should be outraged too. I mean, they like these Christians have no knowledge of Dionysus, the Greek God, or mythology and French culture, and certainly no knowledge of French painters but they do know DaVinci and his famous “Last Supper” which is known the world over as a Christian painting. “We live in a world where people rush too quickly to judgement,” I tell my kids. “Whether Christian or non-Christian, gay or straight, Republican or Democrat, male or female, people just jump on the bandwagon at the first report of wrongdoing without being bothered to check the facts. This is why the Scriptures warn us not to let ignorance lead us to sin. It’s why education is important to your mother and I and why I want you to read books and study history and get much more context than just what you hear at school or on social media.”

A whole lot of people in this world could use a dose of such context these days, I think. Maybe if they did the world would be a better place. Certain “cancel culture” would lose a lot of its power and so would Trump and Vance and a lot of politicians and media figures who thrive on misleading people who can’t be bothered to read up and to the work. This makes the wordsmith’s responsibility even greater in this day and age, I think. Before someone tried to “cancel” me I could never conceive of anyone interpreting my words the way they did. In fact, a friend named Cat Rambo and I wrote similar essays and compared notes. She thought I articulated things well but when we released our posts on the certain matter almost simultaneously, hers was embraced while mine was ridiculed and misinterpreted and used against me. Is that because she’s a woman? Is it because she’s not Christian? Maybe, I don’t know for sure. But I do know it’s ridiculous, and frankly a sign of great problems in our word. Don’t get me wrong, I am NOT wishing it happened to her instead. I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies what happened to me, except maybe for a short list of people who instigated my “cancellation.” Having those people get a dose of their own medicine would not strike me as unjust. Karma.

But the point of this essay is not about cancellation or revenge or karma. The point is about parenting and how we can raise our kids not to emulate our mistakes or the mistake of those around them and instead rise above and make the world better by being better people in it. I wish I knew the answer to it because that’s what my father’s heart most longs for. What I do know is that it starts with words because words have power. Words matter. And using them always comes with responsibility, whether we think so or not. Character matters but even more so our words reflect our character. So all the more so, if we want to be considered people of good character rather than just “characters” or “a character” and if we want those around us to also learn to be of good character, we must choose our words with care and wisdom. We must take it upon ourselves not to assume but to know, and if we can’t absolutely be certain we know, to educate ourselves until we do. And to educate our children as well and all those we care about. After all, we can make the world we want to live in at least in our immediate vicinity, I have always believed. And the world I try to make with my stories is a world where justice and honesty and decency and kindness matter and can change the world. I hope my kids grow up to do the same. And I’ll do my best to teach them that.

For what it’s worth…

In PATTAYA 24/7 the terrific 8th book in his internationally bestselling Vincent Calvino series of detective novels set in Southeast Asia, Christopher G. Moore writes: “The tolerance that acknowledged everyone was protected equally, including those with different skins, religions, and opinions, and that no one had the right to slaughter the ‘other,’ was a good tolerance. A country has grown up when its people have the ability to distinguish between the two.”

Tolerance is an interesting word and it’s something you hear a lot about in this day and age. It’s constantly mentioned in the media and on social media especially. I remember a time when the idea that everyone had the same rights no matter their skin color, religion, or opinions was something I took for granted. I grew up believing it because my parents demonstrated it daily. I never saw or heard either of them judge or look down on anyone for any of those reasons. I did hear them criticize people who acted like assholes, however. So I have always grown up believing in equality, and tried to treat everyone no matter who they sleep with, what their skin color, what they believe, or what opinions they hold with equality—the same way I want to be treated.

As I’ve traveled the world, I’ve time and again witnessed situations where people were treated differently because of all these things. In Africa and Southeast Asia, for example, the darker your skin, the lower your class. That is just assumed. People spend lots of money on products to whiten their skin. Women walk around under the sun with umbrellas to avoid tanning. The fact these attitudes were inherited from white colonial rulers who long ago were defeated and ejected from their countries isn’t something they think about. The attitudes are so engrained culturally now that it’s just how they think. No matter where it came from.

In Africa, there is still a great deal of attitude about homosexuality being unnatural and even a crime against society. You have an obligation to reproduce, to perpetuate the species. If you choose to “mate” with someone with whom you can’t fulfill the obligation, you are harming the community, not just yourselves. That’s an attitude I witnessed time and again. In the Philippines, much like the western world, Muslims are the enemy. Even though scattered numbers live amongst the larger population, you can find many people who fear them and regard them as violent and unstable because extremist Muslim groups have been fighting the government and killing, kidnapping, robbing, and harming foreigners and locals for 100 years. Since the Philippines is by and large Catholic, with a few Protestant denominations mixed in, Muslim are easily written off as having the wrong religion. I’ve never felt this way. I believe we worship the same God, myself, but I do see why under such circumstances, people come to hold that point of view.

Ironically, the other place I have found religious intolerance most common is in the U.S. amongst the arts community. Many times in the past people brought up my past religious activities and beliefs and used them to try and “cancel” or harm me, accusing me of all kinds of “-ists” and “-isms” that have never been part of my personal ideology or philosophy. My words were twisted, false meanings implied and spread around in attempts to silence me or write me off as irrelevant. I’ve seen others who are openly religious experiencing the same thing, and I know many others who keep their personal religion private for just that reason. To be honest, more and more of it is happening these days. It used to be white men in power who were the primary targets, but now people look to be offended and jump on the first opportunity to do so and make a stink. Ironically it is people who constantly talk about “tolerance” and demand it for themselves and their favored groups who seem to most practice such behavior. It doesn’t help that our leaders embrace extremists just to get elected. It doesn’t help that they empower people to say things which really are discriminatory and hateful about anyone who disagrees with them. The media loves it too, and they encourage it with their own rhetoric. But none of this represents tolerance by any definition I can find. It’s flat out discrimination and even verbal abuse or social media bullying. That it’s become common place is a result of people being more afraid of standing up against such awful behavior than they are of shutting down a bad behavioral pattern that hurts us all. In the last few years, thankfully, celebrities and others have spoken up about it. While some deny the existence of “cancel culture,” others fully recognize that it is a reality and one that does real damage.

Conflicts over differing opinions are leading to cultural divides in more and more places. Philippines, U.S., African nations like Ghana, Brazil, Venezuela—and many more. And to me, it’s sad to see. I find it really sad that neighbors and even family members are so adamant and angry that they’ve begun to regard each other as enemies and stopped talking. I’ve always believed what made “America” great was our ability to respect each other of differing views and seek compromises for a better way we all can live with. No, that has never been perfect, but it beats the hell out of the constant attacks and cancelling and name calling and other denigration and violent rhetoric that seem to bombard us daily nowadays. That kind of thing makes you want to retreat into a box, but how can one do that and still live?

To me, the answer is to practice true tolerance by a strict definition like Moore’s. Respect each other and agree to disagree, then learn to be comfortable with that. Ideological warfare has torn us apart with a “we must win it all or nothing” attitude. It’s truly less about tolerance and more about conformity. “You must agree with us to accept us” seems to be the mantra. But then how many parents agree with their kids’ attitudes and behaviors 100%? I can’t name a single one amongst my acquaintances, yet they’d still die for them because they love them so much. I have friends from all backgrounds and beliefs I love dearly. We have way more in common than we have different and we can enjoy each other and agree to disagree. As a society, we have forgotten our commonalities and focused on our differences, and in the process we have lost all sense of our common humanity. To me, until we get back to that, there will be no real tolerance, because real tolerance applies to everyone equally, not just those you agree with or deem “on the right side.”

In his amazing study of middle class-poor relations in Manila, THE PATCHWORK CITY, Marco Z. Garrido writes: “Understanding another person or group does not mean coming to see things their way; it does not entail agreement, but serves rather to clarify the basis of disagreement. Understanding means attempting to put ourselves in the place of others to ‘get behind’—to stand under or look up at—their perspective.” To do this requires empathy. And that is something many seem to find impossible today. They refuse to even attempt it. “No way those people can be empathetic,” some might say, “we are nothing alike.” And hence comes the core of the problem. As a travel aficionado and artist who likes to go out and meet readers, I run into people often who see the world very differently from myself, and yet there hasn’t been a single one I couldn’t find something in common with. In fact, more than one. To not see those commonalities is a conscious choice. Today, people choose to shut themselves off from “seeing” the other. And as Garrido clearly argues, recognition is part of accepting others. You can’t really tolerate another if you can’t recognize them as your equal. You cannot see someone as equal if you look down on them as less than you—less in intelligence, less entitled to their opinion, less capable of reasoning or deciding for themselves, less valuable, less human, etc.

I hear the term “on the right side of history” thrown around a lot by one side, but history is what we make it. History is happening around us twenty-four hours a day. So you can’t be on the “right side” of something that hasn’t finished happening yet. However, you can be actually tolerant as Moore defines it. You can choose to live with acceptance of people whether they are religious or not, whether they attend your church or not, whether their skin color matches yours or doesn’t, whether they sleep with men or women or both, whether they are rich or poor, whether they speak with an accent or not, whether they have your same first language or culture or not, or whether or not you share their opinions. You can choose to recognize their value as citizens, human beings, creations in the image of God, living beings, etc. That is something you can choose. And the world would be a better place if more of us did.

I’m not holding my breath. And I’m not going to say I have all the answers. I’m just saying this is how I choose to live. And whether people try and attack or persecute me or not that has not changed for thirty plus years. And it won’t. It’s who I am and who I want to be. The only people I choose to avoid or reject are assholes. People who consistently behave like assholes, that is. Everyone has off days, but people who show time and again their contempt and disrespect for others for any reason have no place in my world. What about you? What kind of world do you want to live in?

For what it’s worth…