It’s that time of year again, but this time it’s more meaningful than usual. I know this year hasn’t been kind to the country I love. Between a global pandemic and an attempted insurrection, this has been a rough year for America. As an American, I’ve felt it. I’ve groaned, cringed, and lamented more than once this year.
At the same time, I remain hopeful.
As bad as the first part of this year has been, we can objectively say that things are better now than they were at this time last year. Thanks to a change in leadership, as well as the development of effective vaccines, America has been on a road to recovery. There’s still plenty of room for improvement, but we’re still progressing and that’s a good thing.
That’s very much in line with the story of America, itself. This country was founded on high ideals, but operated by flawed, misguided individuals. There’s no denying that we’ve made mistakes, as both a country and a society. Some were so bad that we had to fight a war over them. We should acknowledge that.
At the same time, we shouldn’t let those flaws and mistakes stop us from celebrating America’s highest ideals. Those ideals still matter. They’ve always mattered. They’ve been a driving force for generations of Americans, going all the way back to the founding. Let today be both a reminder and motivator.
We’ve come a long way, America. We still have so much further to go. For today, though, let’s celebrate the 4th of July as only Americans can. To get you into the patriotic spirit, here are some Sexy Sunday Thoughts. Enjoy!
“Sometimes, sexual taboos end up being potent lubricants for elaborate kinks.”
“An impotent man with a skilled tongue can still satisfying many women.”
“A couple achieving simultaneous orgasm during sex was probably classified as the first miracle.”
“When you think about it, dildos and toy guns have a lot in common.”
“An arranged marriage a family’s way of telling someone they don’t trust them to use their genitals wisely.”
“There’s a good chance you know someone who put something weird up their butt at some point.”
“Premature ejaculation is nature’s way of telling a man he’s not ready for a threesome.”
I’m a proud American and I love my country. In that respect, I do consider myself a patriot.
I’m also a big romance fan who genuinely appreciates the power of love.
As a result, my understanding of love has an impact on my understanding of patriotism. You can look up the definition of patriotism and love to get a basic understanding of the concept. However, a basic understanding will only take you so far. It’s also shallow. It only scratches the surface of a much deeper feeling.
Now, in the spirit of the 4th of July, America’s most patriotic holiday, I thought I’d take a moment to share my understanding of what it means to be patriotic and to love your country. I feel like it’s an important message to send, given the events of the past year.
I won’t bemoan those events or the people, politics, and ideology behind it. Love and patriotism go beyond all that. This is me, a proud American, seeking to share my perspective with my other fellow Americans as we get ready to celebrate the country we so deeply love.
To love your country is like to love your family. You didn’t choose the time, place, or circumstances of your birth. You came into it vulnerable and unaware. You grow up in it with the support, guidance, and values of those around you. They seek to protect you and you seek to learn from them.
It’s not always ideal. Nothing ever is. That doesn’t stop you from loving your family, nor does it stop you from loving your country.
Later on in life, you seek a different kind of love with another. You look for that special someone who you can love with all your heart and who will love you back in return. It’s not an easy search. You’re bound to endure loss, heartache, and disappointment along the way, but you keep searching. You endure because that feeling and that connection is just that powerful.
When you find that love, you sense that power. It fills you with energy, passion, and resolve. You come to cherish it. You’re willing to fight to protect it at all costs. We admire that kind of drive in others. We cling to it, as it becomes part of our identity.
This kind of love is very similar to patriotism. Our love for our country is very much an extension of our love for our family. The same energy that drives us to love, cherish, and protect our loved ones drives us to do the same for our country. Many Americans share that feeling. However, like with the love we have for families and spouses, it can blind us.
There’s a fine line between love and obsession.
By that same token, there’s a fine line between patriotism and blind loyalty.
One is healthy and productive while the other is toxic and damaging. A big part of loving someone is not ignoring their flaws. When they’re wrong, you point it out. When they’re doing something destructive, you try to stop them. When they’re wounded, lost, or angry, you try to help them. That’s what you do for someone you love. That’s also what you do for your country.
The United States of America is a wonderful place, but it’s not perfect. The history of this country has has many dark moments. Both the government and large swaths of its citizens have been wrong, unjust, and misguided on a great many subjects since its founding. Ignoring that isn’t an act of love or patriotism. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.
You don’t let someone you love keep doing what you know is wrong.
You don’t let someone you love descend into toxic, self-destructive cycles.
You don’t let someone you love forget their mistakes, thereby never learning from them.
The same applies to your country. To love it is to love its flaws, too. To love it is to want to see it get better. Like with those we love, we want them to become the best version of themselves they can be. Again, it’s challenging and even daunting at times. However, we endure because that’s what we do for someone we love.
As a patriot, you want your country to be the best it can be. That’s exactly what I want for America. That’s what I seek to celebrate every Fourth of July holiday.
I understand that not everyone has the same vision for this country as I do. Some actively pursue a vision for this country that’s utterly antithetical to the ideals it was founded upon all those years ago. Those are not patriots because they aren’t guided by love. They’re guided by selfish agendas.
In both love and patriotism, you can’t be selfish. You can’t be guided by hate or malice. You have to be willing to do what’s right and difficult over what’s selfish and expedient. You and those you love will make mistakes. Everybody does. We’re all flawed, imperfect human beings. Every country, including America, is made up of those same beings.
That’s why we keep striving to be better. Like any good loving relationship, you encourage those you love to be better with you. You work together, but not by always agreeing on everything or avoiding conflict. True love is a willingness to take the bad with the good and confront both.
This is a perspective that has always been crucial for patriotic Americans, but never more so than recently. After over 200 years, we’ve had plenty of time to grow and mature. We’re not a young country anymore. We’re one of the most powerful nations on the planet. With that power comes responsibility and we must never forget that.
Keep that in mind as you celebrate your love for your country, as I will be doing in a few days. Each year brings a new challenge for us all. Let’s be willing to face it, but let us do so while remembering what it truly means to love our country as true patriots.
The following is a video from my YouTube channel, Jack’s World. In the spirit of the 4th of July, I decided to do a deep dive into one of my favorite movies of all time, “Independence Day.” Given it’s timely, patriotic themes, I’m sure many will watch at some point in July. However, I believe this movie has more to offer than rousing speeches and alien battles.
I believe this movie presents us with a unique scenario for first contact with extraterrestrial aliens. While it’s a dark, destructive scenario, it may ultimately be the best scenario we can hope for. That may sound strange, but I try to make that case in this vide. Enjoy and have a wonderful 4th of July!
You’re at a prestigious awards ceremony. The nature of the ceremony and the award aren’t important. The only factor that matters is the awards are granted to only a few individuals who have achieved feats that few human beings have achieved. It’s an honor just to be nominated, but an even bigger honor to win.
With that in mind, imagine two different winners for two different feats. The first winner comes up onto the stage, accepts their award, and gives a heartfelt speech that’s something along the lines of this.
“Thank you so much for this incredible honor. It was a long, hard road to get to this point, but I’ve been so blessed with wondrous gifts and amazing support. To them and to the higher power that blessed me, I am eternally grateful!”
Chances are you’ve heard a speech like that before. We hear it all the time with athletes, celebrities, and major public figures. They achieve something spectacular and their first inclination is to say they are blessed. They don’t always thank a god for it, but it’s such a common refrain that most come to expect it. Some even joke about it.
That being said, try to imagine your reaction for the second winner. They come out on stage with the same immense joy as the previous winner. They also give a heartfelt speech of their own, but it goes like this.
“Thank you so much for this incredible honor. It was a long, hard road to get to this point, but I was just really lucky to be born with talent and amazing support. I like to think I’ve made the most of it. This award is just part of it. For that, I am so proud of myself and those who helped me!”
I doubt a celebrity has given an acceptance speech like this before. If they did, chances are it would either be a joke or an elaborate act of trolling, which some celebrities are known to do. For the sake of this little thought experiment, imagine the person was sincere. How would you feel about them? Would be different than the first?
I crafted this scenario as a way of illustrating the difference between being blessed and being lucky. These terms tend to get used interchangeably. In common language, they’re somewhat synonymous. Even though dictionary definitions have somekey distinctions, the standard usage of these words carries a particular meaning.
Part of that meaning stems from the general discomfort we feel about the universe being so chaotic and meaningless. We’re wired to seek patterns and surmise order. It doesn’t even matter if the patterns or order is real or an outright trick. When people can make sense of the world, we’re better able to function. It’s a big reason why humans have been able to adapt and survive with such success.
The ideas being lucky and being blessed reflect opposite sentiments of a similar principle. We see luck as a fluke. There’s no meaning behind it. It just happens randomly and without any defined goal.
A kid is randomly born with talent that makes them a great athlete.
A person randomly picks the winning numbers to win a big lottery prize.
A person just happens to be in the right place at the right time to meet the love of their life.
None of these situations are inherently right or wrong. That’s part of what makes it so distressing on some levels. The people who benefit from luck do nothing to deserve or warrant their good fortune. It goes against that innate sense of fairness that most sensible human beings have wired into their brains.
Being blessed, on the other hand, carries a very different connotation. To be blessed implies that some person, deity, or sentient force chose to grant someone such benefits. It’s not random. It’s part of a larger plan. It may not seem like one on the surface. It may even be an outright illusion. That ultimately doesn’t matter. The semblance of a plan is enough.
To be blessed also carried with it a sense of humility. Someone who just says they’re lucky doesn’t come off as moral or gracious. Even if they’re entirely ambivalent about it, they won’t inspire respect or admiration for acknowledging their luck. If they say they’re blessed, though, it changes the context.
A person who is blessed with talent means their achievements have a greater meaning.
A person who is blessed with picking winning lotto numbers means their good fortune is part of some larger plan.
A person who is blessed with meeting the love of their live means their love is somehow pre-ordained by fate.
The difference lies within the meaning. Being blessed conveys influence from a source greater than the person receiving the blessing. To show gratitude to that force is to accept that it’s not just about you. There’s a larger plan and you’re just part of it. That sounds humble, but at the same time, it detracts from the true extent of an achievement.
Luck or no luck, it takes effort and dedication to achieve something of value. Whether it’s an award for world’s largest nose ring or setting a record for most pop tarts consumed in a day, an accomplishment still requires work. Even lottery winners have to go out of their way to pick the numbers, get the ticket, and claim their prize.
To call that process a blessing is to dehumanize the actions involved. It undercuts the countless other factors in play. Some are entirely controllable. A champion of any sport usually has talent, determination, and a willingness to refine their skill. Others are simply beyond their control, from the conditions of an event to just the general randomness of a particular moment.
To assume these factors as part of some over-arching plan is to assume there’s a governing force that consciously cares about these random happenings. Whether that force is a deity or some idea of conscious fate, people will consciously devalue their own worth to believe they’re part of something greater. It might not be real, but that’s beside the point.
It helps us wrap our brains around incredible achievements and improbable events. It shows in how people can resent those who are just deemed lucky. Again, just look at lottery winners. Those who have enjoyed that rare level of luck can attest that they are generally looked down upon by those who gained their fortune in other ways.
This isn’t to imply that the whole concept of being blessed is inherently wrong. There may actually be a higher governing power behind certain peoples’ fortunes, be it an all-powerful deity or the shape-shifting lizard men of the Illuminati. There’s no evidence of it now, but as believers and conspiracy theorists will often point out, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
That said, I believe the dehumanizing aspect of blessings over luck does more harm than good in the long run. Humility is an admirable trait, but there are better ways to encourage it that don’t involve assigning some arbitrary meaning to random events. In addition, saying someone or something is blessed has some indirect implications that are even less desirable than a random universe.
If one person is blessed, then that implies other people were deemed undeserving.
If one moment is blessed, then those that came before it are nothing more than prelude, no matter how much they meant to those involved.
If a people or society are blessed, then that basically declares that everyone else is somehow beneath them and that mentality rarely brings out the best in people.
Human beings are capable of remarkable feats. Many of those feats don’t require a higher power or some conscious force. They simply require an opportunity and a willingness to strive for something greater. Granted, opportunities can be random and there’s only so much anyone can do to control the luck they get. However, I submit that gives it even more meaning in the grand scheme of things.
I’m a firm believer that when you love something, you can combine it with damn near anything and make it inherently better. If you love chocolate, then it’ll make peanut butter better. If you like watching baseball, then watching baseball while naked will make it better. There are plenty of other examples I could give, but I’d rather not get too personal about what I do on a Sunday afternoon.
With comics, I’ve learned over the years that you can find many combinations to enhance the experience. I’ve woken up at 4:30 a.m. to read comics with a nice cup of coffee while sitting in my recliner. I’ve slept in, gone outside, and read comics on my iPad in a swim suit while I got a little sun. I’ve even read comics with a glass of whiskey before bed. I can safely attest that both experiences were enhanced considerably.
Now that we’re in the middle of summer and pandemic lockdowns are ending, we have an opportunity to enjoy things in new ways. If you love comics as much as I do, you’ve got a lot to work with, especially on Wednesday mornings. The only limit is your imagination, decency laws, and how your willingness to spend extra money on things that may seem wasteful later on.
Dare to be creative.
Dare to be a little crazy, even.
Comics give you that flexibility. With the 4th of July just a few days away, I have a few ideas as to how I’ll supplement my comic reading experience. I won’t share all the details. Just expect them to involve beer, hot dogs, and speedos. I don’t know how much that’ll inspire you. All I can offer is my pull list and pick of the week. I hope that helps. Enjoy!
In general, I’m a pretty optimistic person. I have an overall positive outlook on life and the future. I’d even go so far as to say I’m excited about what the future will bring. My posts about sex robots should be proof enough of that.
However, I wasn’t always optimistic. In fact, anyone who knew me in high school or middle school probably saw me as the antithesis of optimism. I was always so dire and bleak with my outlook. I rarely had anything good or positive to say. I put myself down all the time and tried to bring the rest of the world with it.
It was not a healthy mindset, to say the least. I’m very glad I got out of it.
At the same time, it has given me some perspective. Having been on both extremes, I know what fuels that kind of thinking. I know and understand, to some extent, what leads someone to have that mindset.
Overall, I feel like having a positive outlook is more beneficial. That’s to be expected. When you’re more hopeful and optimistic, it tends to bleed into other aspects of your life. Optimism tends to attract optimistic people and those people are generally good for you. I certainly wouldn’t have the friends I have now if I’d remained so negative.
At the same time, there is a limit to optimism. There does come a point where being optimistic can be damaging, in the long run. I’m not talking about the kind of optimism that’s outright delusional, either. I’m more referring to the kind of mindset that makes someone too oblivious to the world.
I think that’s something people do struggle with. That might be a hard thing to say in wake of a global pandemic, but even before that dampened everyone’s spirits, it was easy to get caught up in that mindset. It often goes like this.
If everything seems to be going well, then why bother changing anything?
If things stop going well, then you try to get back to that particular mentality.
If what you do doesn’t work, then you double down and try even harder.
What made you happy and hopeful worked before. Why wouldn’t it work again?
This is a mindset I can attest to. When I was in college, my overall outlook improved. I got a lot less negative about the world. I got better at making friends. I even dared to be hopeful about the future.
Then, I faced some challenges. It was often small or minor. A girl I liked didn’t like me back. A class I took didn’t go well. My favorite team starts losing or I get into a fight with my roommate. It was very stressful, but I thought just maintaining a positive outlook would help work things out.
It didn’t. I won’t say it didn’t help at all. It just didn’t help as much as I’d hoped.
The same thing happened when I got anxious about my health and body image. As I’ve noted before, I did not have good health habits in my youth. I didn’t start regularly going to the gym until I was almost 30. Before then, I thought I just needed to rebuild my confidence and remain hopeful. I now know that was incredibly short-sighted.
Just having the right mindset is barely the first step. At some point, I had to make a more concerted effort. I had to work, grind, and struggle to get to where I wanted to go. If I had just stayed entirely within this positive mindset, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to where I am now, health wise. In that sense, being too positive worked against me.
This is the trap of overly positive thinking. Sometimes, if you’re too positive, you’re less inclined to put in the extra effort and make a meaningful change. Whether it’s about your health, your social life, or your politics, too much positive thinking can become an excuse to not change or do anything different.
That’s rarely healthy. That’s also why a little regular introspection can be a good thing. It’s something that’s encouraged by professionals who are far smarter than me on matters of psychology. If you need further details, check out this piece I found from Psychology Today.
When we suffer pain, rejection, disappointment, loss, disease, or another catastrophe, happy talk, whistling in the dark, or putting on a happy face do not work. Every cloud does not have a silver lining nor is there a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow.
Because the world is filled with all sorts of unhappy events, from not getting that dream job to losing a best friend to cancer, thinking only positive thoughts is delusional. Trying to maintain a happy face while tragedy engulfs us is unnatural, akin to trying to laugh when our hearts are breaking. Like Pagliacci, the clown who was intent upon making others laugh while tears streamed down his cheeks, we shortchange ourselves when we fail to deal with negative events and emotions.
I’ll sum this up by offering one last bit of insight.
Life isn’t easy, but it’s worth the effort. Things do generally get better and assuming the worst tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, just being positive is never enough. At some point, you have to make the effort. It’s often strenuous and frustrating, but it’s wroth doing.
Certain kinds of progress are so overdue that when it finally happens, even in part, we’re just frustrated that it took so long. That’s certainly how many people felt when it took until 2017 to get a proper “Wonder Woman” movie. Those sentiments aside, we should still celebrate such progress. Overdue or not, it’s still progress.
For the “student” athletes who have been playing under the NCAA for over a century, progress has been harder to come by than most. I put “student” in quotes because in many cases, a “student athlete” is an empty term.
These are not student athletes in the literal sense of the word. These are athletes who go to certain schools to play a sport. They’re just called “students” so they can be compensated with a scholarship rather than actual money. Even if you value higher education, that scholarship rarely translates into a proper study.
See the 2014 UNC scandal that exposed just how little energy is put into the student part of student athlete. Keep in mind, that’s just the scandal that got exposed. There’s a good chance there are far more egregious cases that were better hidden.
I also have some personal experience with student athletes. I went to a college that had a nationally ranked football and basketball program. I met some of these student athletes. I can attest that they were not there for class. They were there to play their sport and that scholarship was the only thing they were getting in return.
I vividly recall classes in which basketball players slept in the back of a lecture hall.
I recall classes that had football players enrolled, but they rarely showed up for any classes.
This is not a fair system. These young athletes are generating millions for the school, but getting little in return beyond their scholarship. On top of that, the value of that scholarship is questionable when you consider some of the classes that athletes take.
That’s why I’m very much in favor of reforming this system, if not completely tossing it aside. It’s basically a quasi-plantation system that’s meant to compensate athletes as little as possible so that their efforts can generate the most amount of money for the schools and the NCAA. There have been past efforts to change this, but they rarely result in anything substantive.
Now, after a long string of legal battles, that might finally change. Recently, the Supreme Court of the United States made a ruling that opens the door for NCAA athletes to seek greater compensation. It’s not a massive overhaul of the system, but it is a very overdue first step.
Faced with the prospect of reshaping college athletics, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a narrow but potentially transformative ruling Monday in a case that pitted college athletes against the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
At issue in the case were NCAA rules that limit educational benefits for college players as part of their scholarships.
The athletes maintained that the NCAA has, in effect, been operating a system that is a classic restraint of competition — in short, a system that violates the nation’s antitrust laws. The NCAA countered that its rules are largely exempt from antitrust laws because they are aimed at preserving amateurism in college sports and because the rules “widen choices for consumers by distinguishing college sports from professional sports.”
On Monday, however, a unanimous court ruled that the NCAA rules are not reasonably necessary to distinguish between college and professional sports.
Writing for the court, Justice Neil Gorsuch said that the NCAA “seeks immunity from the normal operation of the antitrust laws,” an immunity which Gorsuch said is justified neither by the antitrust law nor the previous opinions of the Supreme Court. Noting that big-time NCAA sports have turned into a multibillion-dollar business, Gorsuch said that a couple of sentences from a 1984 opinion did not declare then or now that there is some sort of immunity based on the concept of amateurism.
Without getting too heavy into the legalistic elements of this case, the court finally told the NCAA that they cannot operate as the sole arbiter of college supports. Doing so puts them at odds with anti-trust laws. Unless they change their practices, those laws will be applied and there’s nothing they can do to avoid them.
Again, it’s frustrating that it took this long for someone to sanction the NCAA in a meaningful way, but it still counts as progress. You don’t have to do much digging to see how the NCAA exploits student athletes. It’s such an open secret that South Park even did a parody of it.
There’s just no getting around it anymore. College sports are making billions off of branding and TV deals every year, but very little of that ever gets to the athletes. They’re the ones putting their bodies on the line to produce the spectacles. They’re more than deserving of fair compensation and a scholarship just isn’t enough.
I don’t claim to know how to structure a better system. Plenty of people far smarter than me have offered some ideas. We won’t know which actually work until we start trying. Until this ruling, the NCAA never had a reason to try. Now, they have to do something.
I sincerely hope that whatever they do benefits these young athletes. Having known more than a few, I can attest that these are wonderful, talented young people. They have a rare gift that allows them to compete at a high level. They should be able to get compensated for that gift in a manner that helps them, as well as their families.
It may take time and any subsequent reforms will also be frustratingly overdue. That still counts as progress and that’s something that college sports desperately needs.
I hope everyone has been having a good Pride Month. In addition, I hope those who regularly whine about pride month and denigrate the ongoing challenges of the LGBTQ community have used this opportunity to either educate themselves or rightly fucked off. After what happened last year, I think we’ve all earned the right to be a little extra fabulous this time around.
I proudly support the LGBTQ community. I am a straight male, but I have friends and relatives who are LGBTQ. I’ve also known people who have struggled with their sexuality. It’s hard to overstate how difficult and damaging it can be. Even though there has been considerable progress over the past 20 years, many still face immense hardship.
There’s an entire political party in America that actively seeks to roll back the progress the LGBTQ community has made.
The struggle is far from over and we should all remain vigilant moving forward. For now, though, let’s use Pride Month as a chance to celebrate how far we’ve come. Whether you identify as gay, queer, non-binary, or transgender, use this month to just celebrate who you are. I will gladly celebrate with you and so will many others.
In that spirit, here is a round of my Sexy Sunday Thoughts in honor of Pride Month 2021. Enjoy and keep being fabulous!
“Patience is a virtue, but only to a limited extent when you’re horny.”
“Logistically, giving and receiving oral sex requires good negotiating skills.”
“For better or worse, our tastes in porn will never be as revealing as our browser history.”
“Aspirin is to headaches what orgasms are to depression.”
“Like it or not, only a dominatrix finds weakness sexy.”
“To some extent, every repressive society tries to make people content with having boring sex lives.”
“Drunk sex isn’t much of an accomplishment, but a drunk threesome definitely is.”
The following is a video from my YouTube channel, Jack’s World. It’s another thought experiment about superheroes and what makes them effective. It was an extension of sorts of an article I wrote years ago on how to be an effective superhero. However, this video is a bit more open ended in that it takes a big picture approach to heroics. To all that check it out, I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments. Enjoy!
I’m a straight male. I don’t deny that. I’m also a strong proponent of LGBTQ rights and will gladly side with them against all those who would undermine, alienate, or denigrate that community. In honor of Pride Month, I’d like to make that clearly and proudly.
At the same time, being a straight male means I can only do so much to understand the plight of LGBTQ individuals. I can never fully understand the feelings they feel or the thoughts they think as they live their lives in a world that’s still very hostile to them. Even though I have close relatives who are openly gay, my perspective is still limited.
Having said all that, I’d like to make another small contribution to Pride Month 2021. It’s not much, but it’s something I hope adds to the greater perspective of others, regardless of their orientation. During times like this, that perspective is more important than other.
Like it or not, our lives have been profoundly affected by people who identify as LGBTQ. You may not realize it, but you wouldn’t even be able to read this, nor would I be able to share it, were it not for one prominent member of the LGBTQ community.
His name is Alan Turing. He’s the reason why we know how to make the computer or smartphone you’re using right now. He may also be the reason why some of us aren’t saluting a Nazi flag.
The life of Mr. Turing may have been tragic in many respects, especially towards the end, but few men have affected the modern world more than him. He was more than just a brilliant mathematician, computer scientist, and philosopher. He practically laid the foundation for our modern world through his work.
The fact that he was a gay man living in an era where being gay was considered a mental illness only makes these accomplishment more remarkable. However, his sexuality was still often secondary to his brilliance.
Alan Turing had a genuine gift for math and science. That gift earned him diplomas from universities like Cambridge and Princeton. It also earned him a role at Bletchley Park during Word War II, the home of Britain’s efforts to break the seemingly unbreakable German Enigma Code. It’s not unreasonable to say that this effort wouldn’t have succeeded without Alan Turing.
You also don’t need to be an expert in alternative history to know that breaking the Enigma Code played a big part in ensuring World War II ended the way it did. Even if you believe the Allies were always going to win, that victory came sooner and saved more lives because of Turing’s role in breaking that code.
The breadth and details of that effort are vast. It would take too long to go over everything he did to help the Allies in World War II. Thankfully, others with more expertise than me have done so. Check out this YouTube video to get a better feel for how Turing did what he did in cracking Enigma.
It’s also through that same effort that he laid the foundations for modern computing. He is largely credited with creating the fundamental structure of things like algorithms and computation. He may not have built the first modern computer, but he created the model by which all future computers were built.
Without Alan Turing, computer technology would not be where it is today.
Without Alan Turing, the internet as we know it would not exist.
Without Alan Turing, the modern world as we know it simply would not be possible.
That’s a hell of an accomplishment for anyone, let alone someone who was gay. It is a great tragedy that Turing had to spend most of his life hiding his sexuality. He did marry a woman who knew his secret, but that was only a cover. He still had to live a lie day after day for most of his life.
It only came crashing down in 1952 when Turing was arrested in Manchester for the “indecency” of admitting to a sexual relationship with another man. As a result, Turing lost his various security clearances. All that work he’d done to help the world was suddenly an afterthought. On top of that, he was forced to take hormones to “treat” his desires.
I put “treat” in quotes because what this did to him was nothing short of unconscionable. I won’t go into the disturbing details. I’ll just say that this “treatment” played a major role in him eventually taking his own life in 1954. It was a sad end to the life of a man who gave us so much through his brilliance and his work.
Now, to be fair, the British Government did eventually apologize for the role it played in destroying Alan Turing’s life. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen until 2009. I’d usually say better late than never, but that’s really pushing it.
It’s hard to say how much we lost because Alan Turing’s life was cut short. Who knows where we would be if he hadn’t been persecuted because of his sexuality? Even if we ended up at the same place, Turing deserved better. This is a man who served his country and contributed immensely to the knowledge of mankind, only to be ruined by bigotry.
How many other brilliant men and women suffered a similar fate?
How many of those individuals had something to contribute to mankind, but never got the chance?
How many had to live their entire lives hiding this part of themselves, suffering in silence out of fear of enduring a fate like Turing’s?
We can never know the answer to those questions. The answers are probably as distressing as they are tragic.
If nothing else, the story of Alan Turing should give us pause in how we see the past, present, and future of LGBTQ struggles. It’s true that we’ve made a great deal of progress since the days of Alan Turing. In more recent years, awareness surrounding the struggles and accomplishments of men like Turing has grown.
There are still challenges to overcome and we should be ready and willing to face those challenges. Despite how it ended, the life and accomplishments of Alan Turing should inspire us to do better. The fact we can make those efforts through the very machines he helped create is a fitting tribute. So, in honor of Pride Month 2021, let us take a moment to remember and celebrate the life of Alan Turing. He contributed immensely to our modern world, despite living at a time when his very identity was criminal. That’s an accomplishment and a strength that’s worthy of pride.
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