Honored Sentinel Tester Ikumi Hane has served her country for decades without fail. Her greatest challenge has been the weather and her aging bones. Until now.
Who ever thought one little girl could cause so much trouble?
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It’s challenging to go on with the process of writing stories and trying to sell them while terrible things are happening in the world. Part of me wants to hide under the bed and write about fuzzy things with happy endings until the bad things go away and my friends stop arguing with each other about guns and mental illness.
The rest of me is aware that such behavior doesn’t make anything better. I’m not here to open up a dialogue on difficult subjects, though. Other people are better at it than me, and they’re doing an admirable job.
What I can do is make a few statements that I hope aren’t terribly controversial.
- It helps no one if we continue to paint mental illness as dangerous. Most mental illnesses do not make people violent.
- Mental health problems are not shameful.
- Our culture in the US has serious problems and not enough willingness or courage among our “leaders” to face them.
- No matter how much we may disagree on something, you and I are not so very different.
- Nazis are bad.
- Institutional racism is also bad.
- Failure is not bad. Not learning from failure is bad. Repeating mistakes and expecting things to turn out differently is also bad.
- Worrying more about blame than solving problems doesn’t change anything.
- Consent is good. Enthusiastic consent is even better! Learning the difference requires interacting with other human beings and sometimes making mistakes, and then learning from those mistakes.
Go forth and be excellent, my friends.