Kenneth Edward Hart

A New Jersey author

On Race and Religion

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The argument over what is called Critical Race Theory has brought an unspoken reality to light. In the harsh glare of that light, many have regressed to an attitude of not wanting to hear about it. White people have long known that they are favored by the legal system in the United States. Some have rationalized with anecdotal retorts to this idea. Everyone has a relative or friend who feels that he or she was the subject of reverse discrimination. These anecdotal renditions are often one-sided. They discount the innumerable injustices that have been foisted upon people of color with the cliché “two wrongs don’t make a right” or the oft used “I never owned slaves. Why should I be punished?”
Turning up the light to a glare, many on the other side have decided that unless the system that tilted the table against people of color be dismantled, it cannot be righted. This results in many rationalizations for behaviors that are unproductive and self-defeating. “The white man always protects his own and that will never change” is a refrain.
I look at my own life in this light and wonder if I have, by my very existence, supported this inequality. I am a white man who has aged to 72. I come from a long line of American families. I am a son of the American Revolution. I was born and raised in the multi-racial city of Newark, New Jersey. I grew up around racial slurs and attitudes. When I was very young, I no doubt adopted these views in order to be part of my tribe.
I was an inquisitive boy who was encouraged to learn. I took that to mean that I was encouraged to question. I began by questioning that which my family held dear: religion. I noticed that I was taught that belief was stronger than reason and faith more powerful than fact. I could not find a basis for this attitude and, slowly, it drove me away from Christianity. Then it drove me to look at all organized religions as methods of control. There was plenty of supportive evidence but was cultural control at the heart of religion or did it just develop into a means of control? Was it a function of the bureaucracy?
The romantic power of faith and belief does speak to us on a level deeper than reason. It does promote potential blind spots in who we are. For those who believe the moral scales can surely be tilted by the moral thumb of belief. However, belief may be at the center of the very construction of the scale. Its framework may be the creator of its own contradictions. When faced with this level of complexity, we search for solutions with simplicity.
I was in school at a time when the teaching of United States History was inculcated into my thinking from early primary education throughout my undergraduate studies. But there were noticeable gaps. While the Civil War was covered in some detail, what followed was reduced to a few scant chapters that were highlighted as “Radical Republicans and Waving the Bloody Shirt” to “Scalawags and Carpetbaggers” who took advantage of the dark period of American History that was glossed over in a race to get to expanding Industrialization and World War 1.
The South was depicted as romantic, beautifully gracious and reliant on an agrarian culture that depended on human labor that would have been wiped out by Industrialization anyway. They were shown as married to this original sin of slavery from their inception. But it was also pointed out that slavery was not unique to the United States. It was pointed out that slavery exists throughout history on most every part of the planet where humans have lived. It was pointed out that in the natural world species sometimes enslave smaller members of their own kind. This was taught as almost a natural division of labor. Was this a huge rationalization of American Slavery or was it an attempt to understand who we were and how we had met and not met the challenges of the past?
Examining the challenges of the past is not a smooth road for organized religion. The Judo-Christian-Islamic faiths are religions of the book, of the words. The words can be changed or interpreted. They have been but each claims divinity for its own interpretation, rendering the others unworthy.
The same is true for the proponents and opponents of Critical Race Theory. Just as Christianity once vilified Judaism and Islam dismisses both as lies at their very core, we face this challenge over race. I think of the many wars fought over religion. I think of the many wars fought over race. No matter what we do, we are the descendants of these conflicts. Of course they are woven into the fabric of our systems. If we cannot accept who we have been, how are we to know who we are and what will become of us? Even the highly praised advocate for social change Gandhi, a Hindu, believed in the retention of the caste system.
Some, like myself, decided on personal interpretation. But we would be just as much fools if we do not think and believe that we carry our past influences inside of us. For all of their flaws, our nation was founded on the idea that we could do better than we had done before. It is the aspirational notion of our union that carries this belief at its core.
Time and again we have failed in this struggle but we have continued it. We have, this point, endured. In this, one of our great writers, William Faulkner was and will continue to be, I fervently believe, correct.

Places I have written

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Places where I had intimate interaction and that shared themselves with me for a time. Not the bolted-down desks where I was made to sit and write at school that felt like writing from a cage. A living room couch in the basement apartment where I was young, at home, with my legs bent over a stack of pillows and a pad propped on my thighs. That was also where I liked to read but there were just two rooms and that was where the TV was.
On the floor that was covered by a rug, I watched TV. I tried to write while TV was on, but the TV found its way into the words. I could block everything out when I read and I had to learn to do that when I wrote, and then undo it. Then to be able to slide between doing it and not doing it, consciously and naturally.
The next place was on my bed. I had a desk but it was in a dark corner and the only light was a too-bright overhead. I used it for storage and to lose things in. I wrote on my bed. Sometimes I wrote at the kitchen table, looking up at the street level traffic.
At school, the desks became movable but the rooms were distracting. It was like writing while blocking out and I wandered off course, went on tangents. I didn’t like the place and I wanted to get it over quickly.
I wrote on my bed pretty much all the way through school. I lowered my bed to the floor and pushed it under a window. Now I had the bed and the floor and a window. I was happy! I typed at a kitchen table.
My first writing table was old office furniture, heavy squared maple legs and a scarred top. It had one drawer underneath. I covered it in cloth that women gave me. I arranged objects at the far corners. I was attracted to bronze and used bronzed baby-shoe book ends to hold up the line that I was using. A feather-tipped quill pen sat in an empty, red ink jar. I padded my rolling chair. It was my table. It welcomed me into its embrace. Then I added a plant to grow by the window next to my table. I would ride on the vibrations of my things, along with stereo music.
The TV and radio could be somewhere else. Maybe the radio should be by the bed. I had the necessary elements of a room! Just a window, lamps, a rug, my records, books and stereo. A place to go to the bathroom and to eat. Later, I hung things that interested me on the walls.
The room grew to hold bookcases and paintings. My desk became a blank door set up across sawhorses. There was a lamp at either end. A typewriter and my padded rolling chair. A chair for someone else that I made look like I used for reading, but I still read in my bed on the floor, by my radio and TV. I sat by my multiplying plants.
So what makes a study?
My first thoughts are about things, books and a table but maybe it is a place that provides a sense of comfortable privacy. Maybe it’s wherever you wind up most alone. Maybe it is the place where you perform your last dance. Or the one after that.
Planks of wood on cinder-blocks, a bronzed cup from the 1905 World Fair: they were parts of older studies that didn’t make the trip. Either they were misplaced, discarded, or crumbled.
Always a table somewhere. Once across an opening that looked across to the kitchen. Once in a room that leaked from ice damming.
Then there was my window on the lake from a small room that overlooked it. There was a floor to ceiling built-in bookcase and closets on one entire wall. I added another bookcase and the computer furniture that was now so important to my writing. But it was from my chair at the computer table that I looked out daily on the wonders of the ever changing lake.
Now my study is a room with scarred furniture. Refinished pieces that are thought to be too heavy today. I still do not write at my desk. Now I have an L shaped work station with two computers and a printer and a modem and a router. My router looks like an old style desk set, pens sticking out of their slots that are now antennae for reception. My walls are filled with collages and photographs but none are of family and all have found a family here. My Chippendale fan back chair sits in this room with the secretary it sat next to 70 years ago and in a different world. I came to visit then and now I have brought them back together after so many years and experiences. I feel what they carry for each other across overlapping rugs.
There is one window but I mostly keep it covered to shut out the light. My plants have moved next door and have their own room.

The World Has Passed Me BY (part two)

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Recently, I have heard Joe Manchin described as a non-binary politician. Why did he achieve this distinction? He does not conform to the standard description of what a Democrat is. He is a Democrat in a largely Republican voting state. It supposes that the word Democrat is not inclusive enough to accommodate the political philosophy that he embraces. If one is a Democrat, one must be this or that, and if Manchin does not fit under the somewhat restrictive umbrella, he must be something else.
This is not surprising. We have done the same thing with gender. We have limited the scope of what male or female means to the point of needing 35 gender designations. While to some this seems perfectly normal and awakened to the new reality, to me it seems an extraordinarily limited view of what it means to be either feminine or masculine.
Does it mean that all of the people who are in our culture who once thought they were gay were really victims of the “haphazard natal gender” to which one is born? Is that not insulting to all of the gay and lesbian children who may have interest in things traditionally considered interests of the opposite sex? Our Trans activists with great confidence are encouraging children who offer even the slightest alternative gender proclivities the chance, and in some cases the obligation, to assert their transgender status because they are victims of gender dysphoria.
Is this done after counseling and introspection? I have a question about this. How deeply does one believe a preadolescent child is able to contemplate this decision? In order to answer, it becomes necessary to dismiss much of the brain research that has been done about the developing mind and the formation of the prefrontal cortex. We know that this is the last aspect of the brain that develops and that it controls, among other things, decision making and impulsivity.
Many have laughed or sighed with friends and family when reflecting upon the outrageous behaviors of youth. How often have you heard the refrain, “we are lucky to still be alive.” We make laws in our culture based on the reality for the need of this development in the human brain. We have age of consent laws. We have age minimums for driving and for voting and for marriage and for the consumption of alcohol, tobacco other substances. We even have laws about this when it comes to the highly emotional decisions about abortion. What do we rely on? Is it not generally the age and mental competency of the person in question? Do we not temper the lack of impulse control with parental and societal guidance?
Is this standard applied to the young community who may be encouraged to pursue a transgender life? Are children encouraged to wait until they are capable of making an informed decision, or are they guided by a group who have great interest in proselytizing gender dysphoria at an earlier and earlier age?
Is the natural rebellious attitude that is part of preteen and teen years in our culture given the option of now voicing their rebellion by claiming gender dysphoria? Imagine the immediate satisfaction that comes from setting the adult world on its ear by making such a declaration.
Perhaps it is just a phase that kids now may go through. This is something that may or may not be real. In the in-tact parental structure of an atomic family, it can be accommodated, considered and ultimately accepted as being the case or not. In a family that is no longer intact, this is not the case.
There we are graced with the intervention of the family court system. Surely everything is being done that can be done to enlighten judges to this new sense of development, isn’t it? Or is the training being done, in large part, by Trans advocates who push an agenda of inclusivity that suggests that this declaration is cause for celebration and affirmation not introspection and counseling? Do they not tend to advocate or push the gender dysphoric agenda?
Perhaps it is a tempest in a teapot and maturation will continue to reveal its true proclivities. This would be true if maturation was allowed to continue at its normal path, but now we have the additional complication of tinkering with this development through the use of puberty blockers.
We are told that puberty blockers simply “postpone puberty” and can be a good psychological and physiological tool for gender dysphoric children. If this is true, there should be studies on the results for kids who took puberty blockers and then changed their minds. What happens to those children? Are there any studies? Are there any examples of kids who started these blockers and then stopped?
I have not found any. Some contend that is because puberty blockers are a one way ticket to a transgender approach to life. Some suggest it is a decision that is particularly difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. But we should be able to have this discussion with professionals who rely on such data in their decision making, shouldn’t we?
I have not found such studies but would be happy to read them when they exist.
So now let’s return to our political subject from West Virginia. Is democrat so narrowly defined as we need a new label for Mr. Manchin? Or have we become so narrowly defined that we cannot embrace the differences that naturally occur in political parties and in children?
There was an episode in The West Wing that illuminates this problem perfectly. A senator from a western mining state is pushed and insulted by the White House for not being democratic enough. The result was that he changed parties. This was not the outcome for which the White House longed. But in their hubris of knowing what felt right, it was what they wrought.
Are we really to do the same thing with our children?

The World Has Passed Me By

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I have become familiar with the maxim the world has passed me by. I am not sure where the world is going, but that certainly has become the case. I know that I have not grown a dependency on the electronic appendage of a smart phone. I did relent and get one, when necessity required it. I did adapt by devoting a block of my time to computer usage each day. The difference is that it does not travel with me. When I get up from my desk, I am no longer connected. I know that this might amount to trauma for some, but I have always smiled in condescension and continued on my way content in my sporadic connectivity.
I felt that the world caught up to my generation when it came to civil rights. I applauded the introduction of laws allowing for the reality of gay marriage. I do not feel like I am the bearer of white racism, even though I have not been penalized by the pigment of my skin. I do believe in a social safety net. I do believe in voting rights and the democratic rule of law. In this regard, we are all thrown into the struggle for America, even if we do not choose to admit our investment.
I have watched the progress of the people who wish to defend the planet from those who are blinded by the profits that come from destroying it. I am both frightened by and stand in awe of the implications of genetic science. I have studied with the groups of people who mapped the human genome, and see only a fragment of the immense value for learning and understanding. I am eternally curious about the workings of the brain and all of its awesome implications.
Then, I witnessed the “cancel culture” and the “me too” movement. While I understood the need to have a cogent voice to explain the tragedies of history, I cringed at the proposed solutions. I recalled how the statues of the favored were erected then erased in other cultures. I thought about Ozymandias and laughed at the antiquity and obscurity of my metaphors. I thought to every season.
I cringed again when I heard stories about the denial of free speech on college campuses. I see the confusion of free speech and hate speech and do not know exactly where to draw the line between them, except to know that what I believed was right had not really changed. But what I felt was right might become a story that was no longer told.
I applauded the taking down of moguls like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby. I was far less energetic about its use against Al Franken. Did that mean that I had a sense of discrimination, or a political blind eye? Are there not degrees of offense? I recall from my reading that there was one penalty for crime in early Japan, death. Was I now to adopt a version of that philosophy in order to keep up with the times?
I began to ask myself if an accusation was enough to enact a penalty. I was dismayed by the hypocrisy of the answers that I got. What are our new measuring sticks? Has it come to the sensitivities of the crowd vs. the rule of law? I decided to put my faith in the rule of law and thought that I was on firm footing, until I was confronted with instances of the involvement of the rule of law. Here is one that I saw and felt.
Domestic abuse is a wide-ranging topic. One would think that because of the damage it inflicts, that the laws would be quite clear. They are as clear as their enforcement. There seems to be a decided reluctance for family court to address domestic abuse. Unless the damage is physical and egregious and attended by sustained police corroboration, it isn’t addressed if the abused party just agrees to dissolve the union.
What becomes of the children in such a domestically abusive situation? After the separation has been adjudicated, what prevents the abuser from using the court and, in the name of “father’s rights,” continuing the abuse? What safeguards and laws have we put in place?
New Jersey is a progressive state when it comes to instances of domestic abuse. In 1990, it passed the Domestic Violence Act. Harassment and terroristic threats are against the law, but is this law enforceable?
In particular with regard to custody disputes, will the court entertain the application of this law in its renderings? Or is the court swayed by New Jersey’s efforts to ensure fathers’ rights?
Will lawyers refuse to take this kind of case because it is not clear cut? There are no hospital records or photos and even if there are old examples of the abuse, the court seems to look askance at their use. So, I wonder in this brave new world of Wokeness, how the abused spouse is to proceed? Should the abused party keep records? But what if the people involved are not interested in the documentation because it is messy? Do the records indicate a level of paranoia on the part of the abused party?
What is the court’s wisdom when it comes to helping the other victims of this abuse, namely the children? Well the court might appoint a guardian ad litem. The court might also appoint a parenting coordinator. But what agendas do these people come with? And what is the agenda of the family court judge? Does our new-found wokeness provide guidance in these circumstances?
In some counties in New Jersey, judges all begin as family court judges. This seems to indicate that those with the least amount of experience and those most wanting of advancement are placed in these courts. It would then be natural to see what judges normally do in order to achieve their advancement and how this correlates to their decisions when it comes to cases? There are few such studies.
So let’s focus on the child for a moment. Let’s say a child was witness to the repeated trauma of abuse, when it was physical, and as it continues as verbal and emotional abuse. The child watches how the adults handle the situation and takes cues from that.
Do the parents continue to act in the best interests of the child, or does the animosity felt for the other partner cloud judgement and make this very difficult? Suppose the abused parent has finally gotten up the courage to get help from an abused women’s therapist. Might the parenting coordinator deem that having one parent cast in the light of being abusive creates an unfair prejudice against the allegedly abusive parent? Might this court appointed lawyer require counselling to stop or no longer involve the child?
What message does this send to the child? Is the message that it is really OK for Daddy to do what he does to Mommy? Is the child supposed to navigate this complex set of understandings alone or will the court provide counseling? What will be the nature of this counselling? Will the counselors have an agenda if they are court appointed? What is the role of the parents during this counselling?
This is clearly uncharted territory, or at least I have not discovered the guidelines that have been charted. I would like to know what guidelines are followed to ensure the oft mentioned best interests of the child. What is the scope of the information considered?
Now let’s follow this child as the pitfalls that have been placed in front of him or her are confronted. One parent sets no rules and showers the child with gifts. This parent makes no complaints about behaviors and surely does not involve the court. The other dutifully reports, attempts to parent by establishing limits and providing a healthy environment. Not only will the child find the showering parent better, but the court seems to rather the showering of gifts to the squeaky wheel parent who continues to point out her abuse. Whatever documentation there can be of emotional or verbal abuse, is often dismissed as being not pertinent to the “well-being of the child.” How then is this “well-being” achieved without the acquiescence of the parents?
Now let’s shift back to the perspective of the child. Perhaps in times of parental stress, the child has been blamed as being the reason for the lack or harmony between the parents. Perhaps the child has been weaponized to the point that any expression which does not go along with the supervising parent’s wishes, results in bad experiences for the child. The message is clear that the kid should shut up and go along. The child has no power. Let’s further assume the child is ten years old and this kind of conflict is all that is in the child’s memory banks. What does the court suggest? How does it provide guidance? Does the child have any rights other than the well-being that is mouthed with frequency and unaccompanied by clear action?
The child’s natural response is withdrawal and a search for avenues of escape. Enter the wild hair of gender dysphoria. Suppose all of a sudden, with no inkling of warning and contrary signs of natural development, the child now declares “I am a member of the opposite gender.”
Surely, an announcement like that would be met with surprise and a need for explanation, would it not? Surely the child would be recommended for help to address this brand new response.
Not in New Jersey. In New Jersey it is necessary to “affirm” the child’s decision. It is mandated that if either parent is not totally supportive of the child’s declaration, that parent is considered “transphobic.” The court becomes highly interested in affirming the child’s new gender because it aligns with the LGBTQI+ community’s advocacy. The voracity of the decision becomes secondary to its affirmation. Not unlike the Me Too or Woke communities, there is a single penalty: one is labeled trans-phobic if there is any questioning.
The world has passed me by. I was born into a world with two genders. Now I am told that there are at least 33 and perhaps as many as 35 genders if one counts those who say their gender is the moon. I am not employing hyperbole. There is a current group petitioning for the moon to be a gender.
It is not considered Woke to apply scientific logic to this, because it is based on the feelings of those who make these declarations. They may well be real, but they may be made for other reasons. There are currently no contingencies for they may not be real. Only the expression of a very young person who is looking desperately for escape and some sense of control over life.
The child is has now shifted to a 2-2-5 parenting schedule based on the guardian ad litem’s recommendation. A confused child who now is not sure which night provides lodging where and is now spending massive amounts of time being transported to and from, because her father decided to move over an hour away. Two Two Five, as it is called, gives each parent a guaranteed two nights a week with alternating weekends.
The child speaks of suicide but only with the abused parent. The father contends the mother is the cause and threatens to sue for further custody, which has now been reduced to 50/50 by the guardian ad litem’s recommendation and the judge going along. The father has remarried. He bribes the child with a dog that the child can only have at Daddy’s house.
The mother continues to struggle on her own. His new wife files complaints of child abuse. All of which are dropped but all of which are cited as evidence by the father’s lawyer.

Food disorders were born of the same logic, except the affirmation that starving one’s self received, was not as praiseworthy as what happens to the self-declared gender dysphoric child. Yes, there was the adage that one can never be too thin, and there was the fashion industry touting the emaciated look, but people who pointed out the unhealthy aspects of the condition were non considered “thin-phobic.”
I realize that an eating disorder is not comparable to exhibiting gender dysphoria. Dysphoria is defined as a form of dissatisfaction. From where does this dissatisfaction emanate? Is it not a feeling that something is wrong inside with who you are? Is it the result of biological miss assignment or are there other related reasons?
Now let’s return to our warring ex-spouses. What will they do when confronted with this new reality?
The parent close enough to understand that there were no hints of this inclination in the past and, in fact, there was a decided prejudice in favor of one’s natal gender is viewed as transphobic, while the less involved parent who sees this as a way to make points and a way to continue to torment the abused spouse, might have no questions at all. Why question a new weapon before you see what it can do?
This becomes a quagmire of wokeness. The Woke, for example, are not unaware of the dangers caused by extreme use of cell phones. They choose to disregard them because they feel that they cannot live without that appendage.
The Civil Rights movement, by and large, walks hand in hand with LGBTQI+ community and blissfully dismisses and difficult questions that their stances may render.
But we are left, in this case with a child who found an avenue of escape from the ongoing tension of conflict and could not now voice feelings to the contrary without incurring everyone’s wrath.
Has this child been Woke?

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