The only thing worse than a despot is the people willing to brook him.

Copyright 2020  Tod Howard Hawks

We yaw through life, up and down, side to side, fast and slow. We move from certainty to uncertainity, and then back, if we are lucky. Vicissitudes are our river on which we flow, sometimes when the water's low, sometime when it is high. This sinuous journey is fraught with both accomplishments and heartaches, and we never know for sure which one is next. Would that there were more picnics, insouciance with lots of homemade ice cream to savor after eating lots of hot dogs with mustard and relish. But we do not make up the menus of life;  for the most part, we don't even have a chance to order from one. Ours is serendepity, fortuitous, occasionally most satisfying. There is always night and day, darkness with coruscating stars, a bright sky in the morning with a yellow sun. But the interstices of living are filled with both benevolent breezes and heavy rains of sorrows of sadness. This is our jouney, now peripatetic and wondrous, then stagnant and silent. We yaw through life and do this best we can do.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

My father had his own bedroom, mother hers. That should had told me something, which it did, but I was too young to understand. As I grew up, father remained emotionally distant from me. Through grade school, I made straight A's, but he never acknowledged it.  Only once did he play catch with me in the front yard. In junior high, I continued to make straight A's, was co-captain of both the football and basketball teams, and was president of the student council, but he never said a word. As a sophomore in high school. I was elected president of our class by over 800 classmates, but father remained silent. As a junior, I was admitted to Andover, the oldest and arguably the most prominent prep school in America, but all father could say to me was 'be of good cheer." I chose to attend Columbia instead of Yale and had a great four years, but father forgot to put film in the camera when he took photographs at graduation. When I dropped out of law school the first day of finals my first semester, my father was enraged, but again in silence. When I began to write poetry, he said, "Go buy a rental property." My father never congratulated me, never gave me a hug, never told me that he loved me. At times he would say mean, hurtful things to me, which still hurt today. I wrote a poem years ago in which I alluded to one of Shelley's most famous poems. My phrase was "farther away than Ozymandias." That was my father.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

Everybody wants to feel worth, but something is wrong in the way we hope to experience it. I have written a commentary called PEACE ON EARTH THROUGH LOVE, which I have sent to every one of the over 200 nations on Earth. My commentary is about loving and being loved. I believe love is the only way to save Earth and all the creations upon it. But the love I feel and envision is not romantic, let alone ******. It is has nothing to do with physical attraction or financial wealth or social status or native intelligence. Yet it seems the whole world thinks all the aforemenioned are the pathways to possessing worth, of feeling worth yourself and from others. No wonder there are so many sad, depressed souls on Earth right now. This global notion is false, the diametrical opposite of the locus of worth. The truth is that everyone has inviolable, sacrosanct worth at her/his center. Love and loving are that worth. All of us are imbued with it when we are miraculously created. By loving first ourselves, having been nurtured by others--our parents, our grandparents, anyone in a position to care for us at our earliest of ages--will mean that as we grow older and our self-love increases concomitantly and exponentially, our capacity to love all others will increase ineluctably. For millennia unfortunately, as well as right now, our world has been, and still is, turned inside-out. I wish it to be to turned right-side in. Then all will not only know the locus of our worth--it is at our center--but also feel it and will want to share it with all others. The mansuetude of love and loving will save Earth and all of its creations.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

If you want to know what I looked like when I was 19, google A KID FROM KANSAS LEARNS A LESSON, an article I wrote for the current issue of ANDOVER MAGAZINE. At the bottom of the article is a photograph of a lot of beatiful coeds from Barnard and me. I modeled for ESQUIRE MAGAZINE for a while when I was at Columbia College, Columbia University. I think you'll get a kick out of it. My article, though brief, is apposite.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

I have 7.5 billion friends on Earth. The problem is just that I haven't met them all yet.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Some live in houses that their love turn into homes while others live in mansions empty but for silver and servants. Some hear voices angelic, transcendent, while others listen to lies of presidents and pretenders. Some feel love so deeply for those of us who suffer silently while others feel hate for all because they hate themselves. Some touch tenderly those they love while others hit with words and fists. Some will give a helping hand while others simply step over homeless bodies on sidewalks in December's cold. What all should know is that we are one, and as Donne once wrote many years ago, when one dies, we are all the less.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks