The Perfect Little Town

A Woke Fairytale

Character book: Lords, Dukes and the Ghost by ash_knight17

There once was a perfect little town. The houses were all painted a soft shade of gray and looked the same so no people felt left out. There were numbers on the doors so no people got confused. There were no parents and there were no children. There were no men and there were no women.

All such divisive labels had been dropped long ago.

There were people. And they were all united as one. There were no reasons to feel jealous or sad. There were no reasons to feel anything at all, except when watching the screens.

Thanks to the gods who appointed the magicians, elixirs and injections had miraculously taken away all pain and suffering. Disease and mental illness were problems of the past. People lived and then were gone. Often a people simply disappeared out of a house, but the other people didn’t concern themselves about it.

All people were connected to the magicians who looked after them and to the gods who lived above them in the castle. Life was a perfectly connected web. People never felt alone. People were never hungry or cold. Work was unnecessary. They never complained. They were kept busy on the screens that were always before their eyes and filling their brains. Far away there were workers, of course, or else how did the things they needed arrive so conveniently?

Up on a hill overlooking the town was the magnificent castle, rising so high it seemed to touch the stars at night. There lived the benevolent gods who watched over the people in the town, and in fact, watched over the entire world. The people of the town realized how fortunate they were to have the gods so close to them. They kept everything balanced. People never wondered how the gods got there. Sometimes little thoughts entered people’s heads about wanting to go to the castle. But then those people got terrible headaches and the thoughts were gone.

At night, big screens lit up in all the houses and the people sat down to watch. Stories were told, one in particular that everyone loved, even though it was scary. It was the story above all stories. No one thought about whether it was the truth or not. Somewhere along the line, the word truth had disappeared. Many words had disappeared and no one really remembered the words, or how and why they were gone.

At least once a month the story above all stories was told on the screen and the voices would begin to narrate.

“Once, long ago, a Red Man rose from the depths of a stopped-up drain in a big dirty city. Because in those days, drains did things like that, they got stopped up and, well, you can see what the result of that was. A man.”

“A man,” The people say it all together, right on cue.

The townspeople shake their heads in something almost verging on disgust, although such emotions are long behind them. They aren’t even sure exactly what a man is. They just know it is one of those bad words that causes hate. They cannot imagine a time so terrible when the town was so divided by hate.

“Thank the gods we have transcended that nonsense,” the people say.

“Indeed,” say the narrators. “The Red Man had been growing in the dark in the drains perhaps for hundreds of years, feeding off of plague-ridden bats—oops, we mean rats.

“The terrible night came when he grew so powerful he burst out of the drain like a gigantic pustule, raining disease on everyone.

“Now, before the Red Man arrived, people had been, well, not exactly evolved as people are now. There were those who were bad and they generally had red skin. The redders had oppressed the people who had green skin. From the dawn of time they had done this, and there had been no relief from the green people’s suffering. The red skinned people were lords who kept the greeners as slaves. So you can see, it wasn’t a perfect place and something needed to be done about it. And good things were being done—until the Red Man came.

“The Red Man offended everyone except those who had red-tinted skin and they became his followers. But there were many redders who realized how evil they had been and how easily they could tell their evilness because of their red skin. They asked for forgiveness and prostrated themselves before the greeners and promised to do better.

“Now, of course, all the people see, for our eyes are open, how the Red Man divided an already divided town and made people hate one another even more than they already had.”

“Yes, we see!” cried all the people.

Now the voices on the screen said in a commanding manner:

“The Red Man and his followers, what did they do?”

And all the people watching in their houses said:

“They brought a plague upon us! “

“Yes, the plague fell on our town, and began to slowly and inexorably spread throughout the world. But we would not be vanquished. Our magicians and counsellors worked together day and night. And all the people in the town, and indeed in all the countries of the world, came together to fight the plague.

“But what did the Red Man and his followers do?”

The people answered:

“They denied the plague’s existence!”

“Yes, they did. Even so, the plague continued to spread, infecting and killing millions. No longer could people go outside, gather together. We learned to care for all of us instead of being selfish. Still, what did the Red Man and his followers do?”

“They refused to comply!”

“Yes, they did. Even so, we tried to help them, convince them of their stupidity. Turn them from blindly following the Red Man, who was beyond redemption. But he had hypnotized them by his evil spells and they could not be saved. Then, miraculously, our magicians found the perfect potion to destroy the plague. The elixir was provided for everyone. Yet what did the evil red ones do?”

“They refused it!”

“What else did they do?”

“They started a war.”

“And what did we do?”

“We killed them all!”

“Yes. It was very tragic. Yet, it was beautiful at the same time. Life is like that. It must be nurtured in order to grow. But it must also be protected. In order to care for the whole, the few must be sacrificed. When the lives of even little people are threatened by war and plague we must do what?”

“Destroy them!”

A heroic theme song now soared from the great screen and then it went dark.

The people got up. They brushed their teeth and went to bed.

But not before taking their varied elixirs and injections, as well as setting themselves up to be recharged through the night.

On a gray morning, just like all the others—because all mornings were gray since the gods had dimmed the sun—a people malfunctioned. They were a grown people and had a smaller people living with them. They didn’t know how the small people had gotten there. Only certain memories remained inside people’s heads. Lots of memories that were of no importance simply drifted away.

So we see that this people had a glitch. They didn’t know why or how it happened. They didn’t really even know they had a glitch. It’s just that on this particular morning they looked in the mirror as they washed their face and they thought, hmmm, what is that? Or…who?

Who?

They looked closer, so close their nose touched the cold glass. They saw brown eyes and skin neither red or green but they had no name for the color they saw so they didn’t know. Words did not actually mean anything, after all, so it didn’t matter. They frowned. What was that crease on their forehead. What was inside their eyes. Was there something inside their eyes? Deep down?

They had never looked so close.

They looked at the little people next to them. They had both been washing their faces, but now, the little people had stopped too and they looked at each other. Then, they looked in the mirror and their eyes went back and forth from one image to the other.

They turned and stared into each other’s eyes, having never really done that before.

Hmmm. At the same moment, they both said, who are you?

And then, they smiled.

But of course, it was a very evil smile. For their thoughts were evil, as they should never have had them in the first place.

Could another Red Man be growing in the drains? But the drains were clean. Everything was very clean now.

The glitch did not correct itself. For whatever strange reason, it made these people think they were perhaps, somehow, not just people but…they didn’t know what.

The messaging running through their bodies was mixed up. Surely, some people would come to fix them soon.

They didn’t want to be fixed. Did they? They did. Not?

Then, for no reason that they could fathom, they took each other’s hand and walked out of the house.

This was now more than just a glitch. It was a serious malfunction.

All the other people who lived on this street were still inside their houses. It wasn’t time to come out. If people left too soon, before seven am, there were bits of plague in the air that could make them sick.

All the other people went to their windows and looked outside. They saw something impossible. People out there. People endangering them all.

Above the town, in the great castle of stone, the gods were watching, too. Just as they always did. Every second of every day and night. Gathering a never-ending stream of information and sending it through the clouds.

The people in the houses had a sudden thought. They must stop the people with the little people from continuing down the street. Everyone had special gear for emergency use against the plague and everyone put it on. They streamed out into the street.

A new thought filled their heads.

They attacked the people who had dared walk in the street before seven am. They tore the people to bits and burned the flesh on a pyre in the town square.

But somehow, in all the ruckus, the little people escaped. Even the gods in the castle weren’t aware until it was too late.

The little people ran and ran.

“I am a person,” the little people kept saying to itself as their little feet pounded on the cobblestones. “I am a person.”

The little people wasn’t sure why they remembered the word person so suddenly. But they still didn’t realize they were something called a “he” and a “boy.”

The more the people said person” (of course they weren’t a person, that was heresy), the faster they ran. They climbed to the top of the wall surrounding the town and gasped at what they saw. Tumbling down before them was a great, grassy hill so green it dazzled their eyes, and beyond, a dark forest.

The people scrambled down the outer side of the wall and ran until they became a little speck in a sea of green. Before long, they reached the forest and disappeared into it.

Now, at night in the town, when the screens light up, the same story is told, no different. Everyone watches and repeats the words they know. They have forgotten how they tore apart the bigger people and the littler people escaped.

But the gods have not forgotten. They have renewed efforts at cleaning the drains. They have appointed panels and committees to test the people and the air, make calculations and corrections. New elixirs and more potent injections are being administered. A world council of the gods has been convened.

To this day, the gods search for the little people who ran away. They know there are others who have escaped. They know their numbers are growing.

But for now, at least, they have made an important correction. There are no more mirrors in the houses.

The End

That is my little woke fairytale.

Almost anyone reading this has, by this point, been programmed by the media to be so polarized, they will either be on the side of the townspeople or the little boy, absolutely and one hundred percent, no question. Some might find the fairytale offensive or ridiculous. The point is, it doesn’t matter how you feel about it. This is what is happening.

Before our very eyes, the minds of our children are being transformed. This has been going on for a while but we were asleep, thanks to medications and entertainment. Now many adults are waking up but it might be too late for our children.

We must fight with every ounce of our strength to save our children. They are being led to believe that everything that was ever right is wrong and everything that was ever wrong is right. They are being told that transcending gender will bring them freedom. That having heroes who are criminals means justice. That faith is stupid. Even while they watch rioters and looter destroy cities and cheer them on, they are being taught to sit passively and experience everything through the lens of those who feed them information.

I remember when my sons were kids they spent a lot of time online. My younger son, in particular played a game called “Knight Online.” It was an amazing game where he was able to connect all over the world. It was started by someone in Turkey and my son even learned some Turkish. While playing, my son learned how to barter and sell, he learned how to form clans and build communities. He learned history, math and communication skills. In fact, kids in the 90s and early 2000s were so much farther advanced than their teachers in school. They were bored with the static learning bestowed upon them by unhappy teachers who had too many students and weren’t paid or respected enough by their overlords. Kids craved interaction. They craved information and now it was all there at their fingertips. They knew how to whatever they were curiosity s about online, more quickly and in a more interesting way, than they could in school. This would have been an amazing beginning if it had continued in this vein. But those who control the money and the power never think like that. They think how they can exploit people and objects to their own advantage.

And parents were behind their kids on the learning curve so they didn’t realize what was happening. That we were all being prepped to become slaves. As little as two or three years ago, such talk would have been in the realm of fantasy or science fiction for most people. No more. It has come upon us with a vengeance so swift we have been left reeling and confused, as if hit with a sucker punch for the first time.

I was in elementary school in the 60s. I was lucky in that, while other kids had Wonder Bread, Twinkies and soda in their lunch boxes, I had “brown” bread, homemade oatmeal cookies and orange juice. When health food became available, my dad was the first one buying it. Honey instead of sugar. Never soda in our house. On Saturdays he made waffles with wheat germ and always some new ingredient, with real butter and maple syrup. At night we always had to eat an apple or an orange. There was no alcohol in our house. While other kids would go to the doctor and be put on antibiotics every time they got a cold, we had to soldier through it. We went on week-long back-packing trips in the mountains and had to carry our own stuff. It didn’t matter how tired I got or how much I wished I could turn around and go home. I couldn’t. If I wanted to live, literally, I had to keep on going, no matter my feelings. Sometimes I hated it but now I’m thankful.

Lots of times, kids don’t know what is good for them. It’s our job as parents to teach them. But it’s become almost impossible and I understand how frustrated and even terrified parents are becoming. Our job has been highjacked by the State. We allowed ourselves to be lulled to sleep while they kept busy.

My parents deeply loved stories. On winter nights we sat around the fireplace in Dad's study and after the inevitable Bible reading, he recited poetry or read to us from Tom Sawyer, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, so many wonderful adventures. Mom read from her favorite books, Les Miserables and The Pilgrims Progress and told us tales of history.

She asked us more than once, always with immense enthusiasm, “Do you know what is the second most read book in the world?”

“The Pilgrims Progress,” we would say.

 “That's right!” she would exclaim. Although I doubt that’s true today. And then she’d open it and begin to read. It wasn't one of my favorites, but it was still a good story. 

 They told us fairy tales, the real ones, like the Brothers Grimm and Andersen, both of them reciting the stories and poems as well as any Shakespearean actor on the stage. When Dad recited Gunga Dyn we sat wide-eyed on the edge of our seats and when my mom read The Lady of Shallot, we cried at the lady's tragic fate. 

The Little Mermaid by Edmund Dulac

Once, I found a book of illustrations of famous fairytales by Edmund Dulac and I fell in love with his art. I would go inside the pictures in my imagination and dream. Yes, those lovely ladies in pantaloons from the Arabian Nights, I wanted to climb into the picture and be one of them. His artwork inspired my own art and I spent hours upon hours trying to paint and draw like he did.

My artwork, The Island of Dreams

In my dad's study were hundreds of books and I was allowed to go there any time I wanted. I loved how they looked lining the shelves, how they smelled, how they felt when I ran my fingers along their spines. I would pick out a book, any book I wanted, stretch out on the floor and devour it slowly or quickly, put it back, take it down again, puzzle over words and sounds, whisper sentences that I particularly liked out loud. Books on history, art, architecture, science, astronomy, the classics, poetry, and of course, a great collection of Bible translations and discourses on theology and the spiritual Christian life.

The first time I read the Little Mermaid was on the floor of my dad's study. When I got to the end and saw how she gave up everything for love, silently suffering in such horrific pain, I felt that pain stabbing my heart, just as the daggers had stabbed her feet. I didn't want the story to end like that, I could hardly bare reading it. I wanted her to marry the prince and live happily ever after.

Tears streaming down my cheeks, I read how the daughters of the air told the little mermaid, who has become one of them, “although they do not possess an immortal soul, [they] can, by their good deeds, procure one for themselves. We fly to warm countries, and cool the sultry air that destroys mankind with the pestilence. We carry the perfume of the flowers to spread health and restoration. After we have striven for three hundred years to do all the good in our power, we receive an immortal soul and take part in the happiness of mankind. You, poor little mermaid, have tried with your whole heart to do as we are doing; you have suffered and endured and raised yourself to the spirit-world by your good deeds; and now, by striving for three hundred years in the same way, you may obtain an immortal soul.”

As I read I fought against that greater good, wanting the immediate gratification of a happy ending. But there was nothing I could do to make the story how I wanted it to be. The telling of it was powerful like religion is powerful. Self-sacrifice is the greatest good, the subject of the greatest stories. It tore into the depths of my being, reminding me that life isn't about self-gratification. It isn’t about blaming someone else for my woes. It isn't about proving I am right or better than someone else. Rather, it is about how I live each day, being true to my faith, no matter the consequences.  Like Dickens and so many other old world authors that no one seems to read anymore because they are too long, too complex, there is no fast action, rather patience is required as the story unfolds.

Life is a road of suffering and when those moments of joy come, they are to be cherished and embraced as if they had no beginning and no end.

That is how to live life. Appreciating every moment of joy, the pain making it that much sweeter. The Little Mermaid brutally, insistently and exquisitely taught me about life, even though I could hardly bear the pain of learning it. 

Years later when I saw the Disney version, the one where the Little Mermaid and the Prince live “happily ever after,” I knew I was being fed a terrible lie. I looked around me at the enraptured faces of the children sitting in the movie theater, staring innocently up at the screen, and I felt incredibly alone. I wanted to stand up and shout out, it's not true, don't listen! But of course I didn't. I sat in silence, watching Disney turn the Little Mermaid into a joke, an empty-headed nothing of a girl who had no character, no spirit, no love, no truth, not even any personality or individuality. She just followed submissively what she was supposed to do. The Disney movie twisted that profound story into cheap, cotton-candy fluff, quickly devoured, but leaving an empty feeling inside.

With every fairytale, when the story ends with “happily ever after,” there is a sense that it truly is the end. Nothing more can ever happen because it is all an illusion. The characters have no soul, they are just robots.

Heroes and villains. What hero has emerged out of this pandemic? Who is the hero of our time?

The tragic criminal, George Floyd.

Who is our savior? The nefarious Dr. Fauci.

Who is the evil madman? The brutish narcissist Donald Trump.

Really, even in the most creative Batman tale, you couldn’t make this up.

“The entire satanic cabal of cultural elites, both white and black, are using George Floyd and other forms of racial division to overthrow a flawed system of governance that has outperformed any other system ever invented.”

So said Jason Whitlock and I couldn’t agree more.

I am sorry for the tragedy of George Floyd’s life and death. I am disgusted at how he has been used to foment hatred between races. No good has come out of what the media has done to him and his memory.

Meanwhile, the media has done the same to Donald Trump. Turned him into such a monster so deplorable that anyone who even dares call themselves a “patriot” is a dangerous white supremacist and worthy of imprisonment.

Our children are being taught to look up to criminals and dismiss the old stories as racist. We are living in extremes and that means there is no way to find common ground. Either you are with us or you are against us. Either we are enemies or we are comrades.

This is what the Gods of Tech and Pestilence want. They don’t want Blacks to succeed. They don’t want anyone to succeed. They want us to kill each other if necessary, while those who comply are being drugged into a stupor, making snarky, hate-filled comments on social media about the outcasts.

Every single Black person should know that the gods and our government do not have their best interests at heart. Every single Black person should be angry that they are being told their hero is a violent, drug addicted criminal. Every single Black person should be angry that they are being told they aren’t smart enough or ambitious enough to get a simple ID.

Every single Black person should be angry they are being fed the bigotry of low expectations.

Every single Black person should realize those in power do not wish them well.

Every Latin American should be angry too. In China, Uighur children are being rounded up into camps and indoctrinated. In America, how is it that much different? In some ways, perhaps it’s worse, since parents south of our borders have been encouraged to sell their children to coyotes to make the long treacherous journey to our country.

We won’t turn a child away. How kind, how loving. How evil. Along the way, just like a Grimm’s Brothers Fairytale, children are raped, tortured and murdered. One little girl, by the time she arrived, had lost her voice from screaming while being raped over and over.

Now we find out these children are being transported by the thousands to unknown locations all across the United States. The hard work has been done by the tortures they have endured. They are ripe for indoctrination.

While these kids are flooding our country, Blacks are being killed on our streets. Every weekend, something like this happens:

In one June 2021 weekend, a mass shooting left four people dead and four seriously injured in Chicago's Southside. Denise Mathis, 32, Rantanya Rogers, 28, Blake Lee, 34, and Shermetria Williams, 19, were killed in the home early Tuesday morning.

But if you dare talk about it, you are told you don’t care that Black Lives Matter. How twisted is that. Think about it.

I saw this starting back in the 90s when I co-founded the creative writing program for incarcerated youth. It was a genocide of inner city youth, especially Black youth. Under the guise of helping Blacks, they are being cut down, to the point where, if they think they don’t have a voice now as a minority, they will never have a voice in the future.

Whites are being blamed for this. But we are all victims of the elite. They control the narrative. They tell us who we should hate and what we should do about it.

Maybe the poor Blacks and Whites, Browns and Asians, should get together on the same team. Poverty is the real enemy, enslavement of us the real goal. And it has nothing to do with the color of our skin.

In every home, every parent should say enough is enough.

No longer will we accept your rules.

No longer can you feed our families foul non-food like McDonalds. No longer can you make us buy soda. No longer can you make us eat sugary cereal.

We can make oatmeal. It’s cheaper and a thousand times healthier. We don’t care whose photo is on the label or if it smacks of cultural appropriation. We care about our health. We don’t care about all the woke words that we are now supposed to use or we are racist.

Our family can drink water. That is the best drink and it doesn’t cost anything. Okay, there are places where the tap water is very unhealthy and that is wrong. Everyone deserves good water out of the tap. But if it isn’t fixed right away, at least there are things that we can do, right now, like cutting out the fast food and sugary drinks.

Every parent should stand up for health and strength. Every parent should stand up for their religious faith, their values. If you are Catholic, you should respect the church’s rules. I’m not Catholic and I have my issues with religion but that’s beside the point. Hold yourself to the highest standard you can. And if your president is so two-faced that he claims to be Catholic yet goes against one of it’s most important edicts, then he is a liar and you cannot trust or respect him. Period. If you are a Christian, then follow the teachings of your faith. And on it goes.

Words do actually mean something because we have bestowed them with meaning. If I say the word “cat,” everyone knows what I mean. I cannot then say, well, I’m now going to use the word “cat” for a dog. Chaos would ensue. And that is what is happening.

If I say to my dog, f**ck you, but in the sweetest, most loving voice, my dog is going to wag its tail and be happy. If I say “I love you” but in the meanest, most threatening voice, my dog will hang its head with sadness. If we stop respecting that words have meaning, our very foundation of what is true and what isn’t breaks down and before you know it, there is no more truth. We float rudderless in a sea of confusion, ripe to be tossed to and fro with every wind and current.

If we cannot set these examples for our children, understanding of course that no one is perfect and we all make mistakes, then we do not deserve to complain about those who are in power because we put them there. It starts with each individual.

Every parent should stand up against the indoctrination of Marxist ideology, communism and what will actually be fascism in the end. That fascism will not come from white supremacists, a bogie man if there ever was one, but from the real supremacists who rule over us and want to cut our population in half and use those left as rats in a lab. These systems have never worked and we should not fall for some woke, upside down words that try to tell us otherwise. They will only destroy what, as Whitlock said is “a flawed system of governance that has outperformed any other system ever invented” into the most corrupt, impersonal and tyrannical system ever invented.

If schools are teaching this garbage, every parent should take their children out of the public schools right now, even if it means their children do not go to school at all, until they are listened to and changes are made.

Every parent should set the example. This doesn’t mean that there is a happy ending and we all go off into the sunset. As with the Little Mermaid, maybe it will take 300 hundred years. Maybe we will suffer and die for what we believe. Are we willing to fight for future generations, not just for ourselves? Because we must stand for our country and our way of life or we die anyways, leaving behind an example of unprincipled weakness for our children to follow.

Every night, read your children a story. There is no better healing balm than this—the power of stories. Just look at how the stories being fed to us day and night in a constant stream of propaganda have turned into reality before our very eyes. Get everyone in bed and open a book. Tell them stories of past heroes. Take them off social media for those precious moments spent together as a family. I am a single mother. It was challenging and I wrote about it honestly in Trouble in Paradise. I fought every step of the way. This is what we must do for the sake of our children.

This is a battle against the overlords of drugs, violence, and hatred, who have pushed these things upon us. A few days ago a bunch of cows escaped the slaughterhouse. They were shown on the news, running down the street. What a heady moment of freedom. They were caught of course, and very easily. All of our movements are known to our overlords. They don’t want us even trying to escape, however. They would rather we happily offer up our children to experimentations in Transhumanism. The slaughterhouse of humanity.

Spit out the lies and propaganda. Refuse it.

C. S. Lewis, who I love to quote, has a lot to say about this in his masterful work, The Abolition of Man:

“The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany: 'Traditional values are to be debunked' and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.”

And here:

“The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses.”

Don’t believe the lie. There is nothing new under the sun. What we are being fed is the same old evil. What we need to remember is there is and will always be the same old good, without which we descend, no only into depravity, but even further into nothingness.

How would it be if we all said, we know what you’re doing and you fool us no longer. You are pushing the same old buttons, just using shinier toys to entice us.

Let’s not play the gods’ games anymore.

I can still hear my dad reciting a poem that always gave me shivers. Little Orphan Annie, by James Whitcomb Riley. Here’s the last verse:

And little Orphant Annie says when the blaze is blue,
And the lamp-wick sputters, and the wind goes woo-oo!
And you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray,
And the lightning-bugs in dew is all squenched away,--
You better mind your parents, and your teachers fond and dear,
And cherish them that loves you, and dry the orphant’s tear,
And help the pore an’ needy ones that cluster all about,
Or the Goblins will get you
If you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

And then my dad would pray and I’d run down the long hall to my room. I’d have to switch off the light before I got into bed, which was terrifying for me after hearing such a story, so I’d do that and then jump into bed so the goblins beneath it couldn’t reach out and get me.

It’s okay for children to worry and wonder. Feeling guilt and anxiety isn’t a disease. It’s natural. We as parents need to be there to tell our children it’s okay. Breathe, exercise. Emotions come and go. It’s natural. Throw away your Xanax.

I learned irrefutable truths. That if I didn’t obey my parents, if I wasn’t polite, if I didn’t cherish those who fed and clothed me and have compassion for those less fortunate—not only words of compassion but a willingness to give up something of myself for them—then there were consequences and I well deserved being snatched to hell by goblins.

There were no low expectations. The standard was high. There were no excuses not to live up to those standards. The moment I moped about, I wasn’t taken to a psychiatrist to find out I was suffering from five different mental illness for which I needed a cocktail of meds. No. If I moped about, I had to get up and do some chores. Unthinkable.

I understand the challenges. I raised three children as a single mother and set the best example I could but I still wasn’t able to give what my sons needed: a father.

There will never be a perfect town. Nor a perfect hero. No enemy is any different in how they feel about their children. United we stand, divided we fall. Our heroes should represent the best of ourselves. We can have compassion for everyone. Yet, for the sake of our children, we should hold our heroes to the highest standard. We should be able to say, “Be like them.”

The story of King Arthur is idealized. The story of King David is idealized. Both were flawed men. But ah, the stories are magnificent! These are the stories that make us dream of something greater and better than ourselves. These are the stories that inspire us to become like that, even if unattainable in this lifetime, we do our best.

At the end of that long ago 1967 musical, Camelot, King Arthur is singing to a young boy, telling him to go far and wide and tell the story of Camelot. That once there was a “fleeting glimpse of glory.” It ended, but once it was there and hope means it can rise again. Hope sustains us even in the darkest hours.

We are being told these tales should be banned. If we cut out our hearts what is left? An empty hole into which anything can be poured. Give our children beautiful dreams. Childhood doesn’t last forever, but it should last. Children should not be treated as “little people.” They should be innocent and wild, running down that green hill to the forest, playing outside with feet touching the earth, connected to nature, not a machine.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this essay please comment and pass it on.

Note: Artwork of the mother and child is by ash_knight17, you can find their writing and art @ Lords, Dukes and the Ghost