Larry Benjamin. Wordsmith. Writer. Author.

I'm sure this will lose me a bunch of connections, but I've had enough. You cannot call yourself my friend, my neighbor, describe yourself as someone who wishes me no harm AND support Donald Trump and his administration. You can't say you're not a racist and support the policies of this racist administration. You can't say you're an ally and support this homophobic administration. You can't say you're "Pro Life" and support this administration when they are doing THIS to children. Black children, brown children, are still children and equal to your precious WHITE children. I am not a parent and this breaks my heart. YOU would die to protect your children if this was happening to them. And you know what? So would I. Most likely YOUR forebears were immigrants and faced discrimination, yet you set yourself above and beyond AND BETTER THAN, more DESERVING than, today's immigrants. You are a disgrace and unChrist like. I am embarrassed ...

I am troubled by the times we are living in. We have a Trump-driven, GOP-supported tax “reform” bill that is nothing short of a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class, who comprise 99 percent of the U.S. population to the richest one percent. Over the weekend it was revealed Senator Bob Corker changed his “no” vote to a “yes,” after a tax break that would hand him a windfall of millions was snuck into the bill. As I ponder the current climate, a season of excess, a world where greed is its own reward, and robbing the poor and middle class to enrich the already wealthy drapes the robbers in gilt-edged robes of glory, I am deeply disappointed. And afraid. Reagan White House China Sure we’ve seen this before, most recently in the Reagan area (who can forget Nancy Reagan wearing red and ordering 4,370 pieces of Lenox china (enough place settings of 19 pieces for 220 people) at a cost of more than $210,000?  Who can forget the halcyon days of “Dynasty”...

This post is an open letter to John McCain—usually this blog is dedicated to the “Writer’s Life.” To an extent it still is since writers are people and, so I tend to write about my experiences, even those unrelated to writing because those experiences are a part of this writer’s life and often influence my writing which though I write fiction, that fiction is, more often than not, informed by reality. So here goes. Dear Senator McCain: I am begging—yes begging , and normally I’m too proud, too arrogant to beg but in this instance, there is too much at stake, too many people at risk to stand on pride—John McCain to change his mind and vote against Trump's tax bill. As Mr. Spock said in one of the Star Trek movies, “The needs of the many outweighs the needs of the one.” We lost our father, a veteran, and a good man to cancer on November 8. He had access to healthcare. And, we did not have to worry about the cost of his care—even if we had to pay out of pocket, we h...

Recently, a friend of mine called me“bougie.” In case you’ve never heard the term, Urban Dictionary defines bougie , a hacked truncation of the word Bourgeoisie, which refers to the middle-class in Europe, as “aspiring to be a higher class than one is.” Now, this wasn’t the first time I’ve been called bougie. And generally, being called bougie doesn’t offend me because it calls me out for daring to dream, for striving to accomplish something. I have, after all been called other, worse things. And I don’t particularly care much what other people think of me. But being called bougie does rather irritate me because it inherently asserts that I have no right to dream, to achieve, that who I was at birth is who I should be at death. The word bougie seems to stem from a screwed-up thought process that defines a place for everyone, a place they must always remain. I remember as a kid, when I talked back, I would be told I was “out of place.” And that was often a punishable offens...