Truth and Consequences

Mid-April 2025

The hackneyed expression is “truth or consequences” — but my life has always been a matter of telling the truth and experiencing consequences, from an early age.

I don’t want to be cosmic about one’s fate in life, but I do believe that I was born to state the truth, in my own inimitable way, that others won’t speak. It usually worked out great for The Others, but, initially, not for me.

Nevertheless, I kept choosing to fulfill my fate.  Running away from it brought even more dire consequences for Debra.

Those Others were pleased as punch that I was willing to spout the syllables of gospel truth that sparked the response that the silent ones secretly wanted.  Me, I was trying to figure out why truth provoked such a ruckus.

I wasn’t willfully provocative in stating the obvious that was supposed to be kept hidden.  The awful truth just slipped out of my mouth.  There may have been a time, or two, when I understood that my take-on-things would not be easily accepted; but, for the most part, I didn’t really care.  I paid very little, if any, attention to “reading the room”.  I was too busy reading a book!

The Shoot the Messenger scenario played itself out in school settings with results that I now perceive as comedic, with the exception of that tragic day in November 1963.  My primary school grade class had returned from lunch, and was assembled in their seats.  I, however, needed to go to the bathroom, which, back then, in my little red-brick schoolhouse in New Jersey, was located in the basement, near the boiler room.

After exiting the lavatory, I was passing by the two janitors, Gus and Pete.  These two elderly gentleman, the first gruff and stocky; the latter tall, thin and soft-spoken, were seated at a table.  They were smoking cigars, hunched over and listening to a radio.

“Hey, you.  Come here.  Go tell your teacher that the President’s been shot.”

I dutifully did as asked upon returning to the classroom.  My Baby Boomer teacher gave me an extremely hostie look.  She then left the room to congregate with other instructors in the hallway.  After a while, she came back into the rather quiet classroom, walked into the cloakroom, and had herself a very long cry.

The recent official U.S governmental release of the JFK files has informed me of very few new truths.  The information consolidated my opinion that my father had been chillingly accurate in his conclusions about the slaughter of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  When you’re being schooled in reality by a parent who’s a Goldwater libertarian, inhabiting the wide open countryside in northern northern New Jersey of the 1960s, you develop a perspective that is unique.

Perhaps my most salient memory of that doomed motorcade is the extraordinary, and instinctive, physical courage of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, rapidly climbing over the rear of that limousine to seize some form of help for her slain husband.  The mothers of my girlfriends, who had slavishly adored, and mimicked “Jackie” would, upon her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, speak so scathingly of her that I realized how phoney, fickle and superficial are the females who idolize public figures.

I did keep my mouth shut on my firm opinion that this traumatized woman could do whatever she had to do, to survive immeasurable griefs.  She owed nothing to the sycophants.

After the death of my father, a little more than two years later, I became the shoulders upon which my widowed mother emotionally leaned, for several years.  I then began to understand that my little shoulders were becoming stuck, frozen if you will, from the weight of adult responsibilities that did not belong to me, or to anyone other than a perfidious woman who had lived her entire life in very bad faith.

Initially, I’d quite willingly taken on those duties.  I excelled at them, without a word of thanks, or any sign of gratitude from the woman who gave birth to me.  I was expected to silently accept whatever was demanded of me, from a woman intent on destroying herself, and anyone else in her covetous futile path to gain that illusive sense of power over other people.  Tough love at thirteen is a hard lesson to learn, but I was learning many other lessons as well:  logic, foresight, and insight.

There was, in the late 1960s, a spate of gory murders of single young women, and a justified sense of fear filled the second-story rented flat of this widowed mother and her three daughters. I, the youngest, was tasked, in early adolescence, with the reconnaissance mission of going first, up the stairs, and into the house, to check under the beds and behind the shower curtain for a murderous intruder, in wait to massacre us.

“What do I do if I find him?”  I asked.

“Oh, Debra, don’t say such a thing!!”

“Then why I am doing this to begin with?”

My blunt science of reasoning was not appreciated.

As I watched the horrendous consequences of anyone, anytime, anywhere for speaking the truth about COVID, I hearkened back to the days of my innocent youth, which were not so innocent. I became grateful for the moxie that I ‘d been forced to summon within myself during those times of my life that were far more dangerous, even potentially more deadly.

I observed the panic among the weaklings of morality.  I didn’t get frightened, or angry (anger being a secondary emotion to conceal fear).  I felt disgust at the lower levels of humanity who’d been put in charge of the upper levels of government, media, medicine, whatever economic sector had been infiltrated by bought-and-paid-for prostitutes of that profession.

It’s been said that you have to get Debra mad to get her moving.  Perhaps that summation is accurate under certain circumstances.

After the Camp Fire of 8 Nov 2018 in Paradise, CA, Gavin showed up for his Photo Ops.  He wasn’t even legally governor yet:  the election that coronated this clown took place only two days earlier, on 6 Nov.  The phoney ballots were still being counted.  Gavin had to BE there, though, in his theme wardrobe to basically turn a human tragedy into the narcissistic feed for this bottomless pit of stupidity.

I was living in the rental dump, awaiting the closing of the sale of my previous abode, and trying to locate a General Contractor in Placer County to build The Dream House.   I could have sold the three acres, at a profit, that Dear Hubby and I purchased in August 2017, and thereby bail out on the thought of living in the forest, the Tahoe National Forest, to be precise.

For whatever reason, and reason might not have had much to do with my instinctive decision, I stuck to my plan, with even more determination.  I also got going on Writing Those Westerns, cause I was getting sick and tired of lugging those materials in their boxes, in satchels, and in Lands End Square Riggers — from house to house to house, and from phase to phase to phase in my life.

I know where I’m going, even when I don’t consciously know where I’m going.

The Idiots-in-Charge of California, and of all the other “blue states” do not know where they’re going, especially when they claim they’re leading the way!

As part of decorating for Easter, I set out some small wrapped Reese’s peanut butter eggs in a silver-plate basket, an antique from Scotland.  The consistency of the warm candy ruined the entire taste-experience.  I put them back in the frig.

Dear Husband asked me if I want him to buy some of those pastel M&Ms.

“No, they’ll remind me of the Jordan Almonds that we had to keep purchasing in downtown Sacramento for your brother when he decided to turn his wedding into Ten Cents a Dance.”

My hubby laughed and laughed.  “Zia really loved it when you came out with that one.  This is great!  I’ve been wanting to say it for years!”

Yes, My Zia.  She wore black to my wedding, and looked stunning, especially wearing that huge hat!  I too was trying to block out certain truths and consequences.

Zia always introduced me to her special associates as her “niece”, which, given the fact that my hubby is her nephew, gave me that unique sense of keeping it all in the family!