Ethics, Honesty, and T-Shirts

Years of watching and interacting with people taught me that most of us are made up of certain basic character traits that stretch and bend but don't go away. For me the constants are my sense of honor and ethics and my belief that with enough effort I can make an impact on the world in a positive way.

One set of traits leads to another. For example, I tend to see the world through the prism of what is fair or unfair. This is tied in to my sense of honor and ethics. Fair is treating everyone equally. Unfair is having one set of standards for one person and another set for another. I've been known to leave friendships, relationships, mailing lists, discussion groups and communities when that standard has been upset in any way.

One real life example is a situation that occurred recently between two of my friends who are going through a divorce. A so-called neutral situation was set up in the home of a mutual friend where it was described as presenting a chance for both parties to vent and get their issues out and just be heard. Sounds good and fair, right? Wrong. One of them was able to select whatever friend they wanted to be their silent witness and she chose her friend who agreed completely with her on every issue. Her partner, on the other hand, was told he couldn't bring his choice because he was biased toward him. He was given a choice of people he could bring--all who had openly stated they were on "her" side.

When you take this kind of thinking a step further you can see how people in this country believe it is fair to attack another country for their oil, destroy their infrastructure, install a puppet regime, kill innocent people and then accuse other countries of being undemocratic and tyrannical. It's a mindset that grew from thousands of situations like my divorcing friends because nothing appears from the air. It has to grow from something and that something is usually a situation that is fair to one side and has different standards for the other.

My sense of honor is legendary among my friends and acquaintances. Even those who don't know me well know that if that gets messed with in any way, I'm no longer in their lives. I live my life the way I want others to live because if I didn't I'd have no right to criticize them when they live dishonorably. If I give my word that is unbreakable. It's my personal lie detector. If I give you my word, you know it's the truth because I couldn't live with myself if I went against it. In the same sense if someone doesn't have that standard then I can't trust them...ever. If they question my word I immediately know that their own means nothing and the relationship, no matter how small or large ends at that moment. In my mind and heart there is simply no point in going further with it. It's dead.

In the same vein, I look at this country and what has happened to its sense of honor. America was once seen as a country of honorable men and women who helped the poor, the hungry, the underdogs in their fights against the power hungry who would devour them for their weakness. Now it is seen as a country of liars, of greedy and unethical people who take what they want, trample over the weak and insignificant, and then hypocritically criticize others for doing the same thing.

Where did this start? How did we go from being a country most of the world admired and respected to one where people hate and disrespect most everything about it? From us, of course. When a structure rots it's usually from the inside out and we are the inside. We are the ones who easily took sides without questioning why someone wanted us to. It happened in countless situations like my divorcing friends where being fair didn't matter as much as winning. It happened when this country began deciding important issues with legal hair-splitting and expensive lawyers instead of a jury and community of their peers. We are no longer a country of people. We are a country of lawyers. We have sold our honor to those who could argue the best case against ethics and honesty and integrity. One of these days maybe we will remember that winning in a court of law is not necessarily the best result for a person or a country.

So there you have my sense of ethics, my sense of honor, my sense of fairness as a small part of a bigger whole. And in the end it does come down to why I sell t-shirts for a living. I want to change the world. That ingrained sense of idealistic fervor is as much a part of me as that sense of honor, ethics and fairness. In fact, you can't separate any of it from me anymore than you can separate me from Nature, from life, from my relationships with other people.

But I am also a realist. I know that I as one person am limited in my power to create the world I want to live in, the world I want to pass on to future generations. But I also know I have this talent, this ability, this stubborn streak that allows me to put what I believe on a t-shirt and sell it all over the world. When I make a design that educates people on the danger of Global Warming, of Overpopulation, of the destructive results of war and hate and then sell it to other people I am planting seeds to create my perfect world. Everyone who sees that shirt sees my message. They talk to the person wearing it. They learn something. They share it. They spread it around. They buy their own shirt and continue the process.

And by doing all this they enable me to both live ethically and honestly also feel as if I am doing something to create my ideal world. I work for myself, my ideals and my dreams. No one owns me or my thoughts. And because of this I am free to think and speak and believe as I am instead of how someone else wants me to be. That to me is true freedom and if I can spread that message around the world with my art and my words then I have not wasted my time on this planet and will leave it a better place than I found it.

Raccoon Christmas card available at My holiday store

Ethics, Honesty, and T-Shirts

The Seeds of Self

Today is the anniversary of when my life changed. I mark it each
year as if it were a grave tended by my careful hands. I remove the
weeds lovingly, one small blade of grass at a time and relive a
quiet moment in a time I thought I'd never leave behind.

But leave it behind I did. I call that period of my life "The Cruel
Time." Everything about it was a stripping of my soul in order to
bind new wounds that grew daily from loving a real bastard. He
almost destroyed me. He almost took away everything that made me who
I am. He almost made me scratch my own eyes out so I would never
have to look at him again. He almost made me throw myself from the
highest building I could find so I could die screaming his name on
the way to my death with only the wind to hear. He almost made me
leave everyone and everything just to escape ever hearing his name
again. He almost destroyed my belief in the power of love, in the
eternity of friendship, in the unbreakable bond of my word. Almost,
but not quite, because in the end I was simply the stronger force.

The reason for this is simple. I value people and he never did. He
would be surprised and even insulted to know this about himself and
appalled that I would think of him in such a way. It was the worst
curse you could place on him, on me, on others like ourselves who
grew up believing everyone was bad and the only people you could
trust were the ones in your small circle of confidants. Everyone
else was dangerous.

He was dangerous. It's what drew me to him. He had that dark soul of
a man who'd destroyed so many lives that he no longer wore the guilt
of that destruction anywhere on him. He would swear he never
intended to hurt people, he never intended to lie to people, he
never intended to cheat people. He was just incapable of living any
other way. His way was the only way he knew.

I'm a stubborn woman and I also have this questionable ability of
being able to see past the outer crap and cut straight to the inner
meat. This has caused more trouble for me in my life than any other
thing because as I've learned, that outer crap is supposed to keep
people like me out. It both disturbed him and intrigued him that I
found a way in.

I saw in him what I see in everyone who becomes my friend: deep
wounds, excuses, rationalizations, fear, and a restlessness that
remains a lifelong unfulfilled hunger. Where he differed was his
inability to see human beings as anything other than objects to fill
whatever needs were the most predominant. He didn't discriminate. No
need was better or worse than any other. They were just needs.

It gave him an aura of being a free spirit who was tied to no one
and no thing. We spent a lot of time outdoors among the trees and
rivers and mountains because it was his natural element, the one
place where his animal nature found a comfortable home. This was the
man I came to love and cherish and need with all the depths of my
soul. But the moment the stink of city assaulted our lungs he became
a sort of urban werewolf, a blood-sucking creature who drained
everyone until they shriveled up and disappeared.

I didn't disappear. I have an overdeveloped loyalty gene. Once I
give my friendship, it is for life because whomever wins it fought
for it with honor and sincerity. And once I love, nothing the person
does can kill that love in me. Once given is forever beholden.

But he didn't deserve this kind of devotion. He treated me badly. He
treated the women he dated and married badly. I befriended them,
picked up the broken pieces and he hated me for this. He hated that
I took home and healed that which he discarded. He told me once it
was embarrassing, almost as if he caught me rummaging through his
trash for bread scraps.

And he loved me. He loved me with a passion and sincerity and depth
that surprised both of us. It was the secret I carried with me, that
he was capable of deep and overwhelming emotion, that he felt to the
point of madness, that his skin was sometimes a barrier that he
wanted to rip away so he could feel more.

But it wasn't enough to have this with me. It wasn't enough to heal
him, to show him a better way of being. He saw it as an anomaly, an
aberration that he grew to hate me for bringing out in him.He began
to try and prove it to me that he really was the bastard everyone
thought he was. He insulted me. He challenged my ethics, my honor.
And he questioned my love, my friendship, my devotion.

That is when I left him to fester in his own world. I learned that
moment that I had limits, that I had self-respect, that I had honor,
and integrity, and a healthy sense of self that I refused to turn
over to someone who didn't deserve it. I walked away.

Five years went by before we saw each other again. He was dying. He
had stomach cancer. All those cigarettes, all that vodka, all that
rage, and anger, and hostility, and most importantly lack of love
for himself and others, was killing him. Cancer was just the
convenient name for it.

I still loved him and told him. He was astonished. He was
incredulous. And finally, he believed me. In that moment he learned
what it meant to love.

He died six months later. It's been seven years now and I still
grieve for him, for the life he could have lived but didn't. I
grieve for the person I knew that no one else could see. I grieve
for him as as anyone would grieve for a precious friendship.

But I also mark this day as the day I learned that you can still
love someone and not let them abuse you. You can still love someone
and walk away and not look back because my love and anyone who knows
what it means to truly love, understands it lives on its own. Love
is its own entity. If it depended on a person, if it depended on
being valued, if it depended on being received, then it would be
called something else.

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The Seeds of Self