Writers and Other Scoundrels #1 - Dana King
I’m inviting some folks in the fiction business to take over the blog on the third Saturday of each month. The only rule: they can’t talk about their books or their job in the biz. Hopefully, we all learn something new about them. This week’s guest is crime fiction author Dana King. You’ll find a short bio about Dana at the end of this post. - Colin
John Adams (allegedly) said it first: “If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no head.” I know better than to disagree with the dead—there’s no way to win the argument—but John missed the boat with that one, at least as far as I’m concerned.
When I was young, I believed there was a set order to the world. This is not unusual in children. Where I was different was that I rarely, if ever, questioned it. Things were as I found them and damn it, that’s how they were supposed to be. I was nine during the Watts riots and twelve when Martin Luther King was assassinated and assumed summer riots in major cities were the natural order of things. JFK was killed in 1963, Bobby and MLK less than two months apart in 1968, so I assumed political killings to be the cost of doing business.
This extended into my personal life. If something was scheduled for 7:00, it had damn well better happen at 7:00. Didn’t matter if it was a Boy Scout meeting or a backyard baseball game. I’m a little embarrassed now to say I was a prick about it.
My attitudes about people who were different didn’t kick any ass either. I grew up working class in a small exurban city that was at least 98% white. The high school had over 900 students my senior year; six were black. I don’t remember any Asians or Hispanics. It wasn’t like I lived in an exclusive neighborhood; there just wasn’t much diversity outside of urban areas in Western Pennsylvania in the 60s and 70s. I said and did things—out of ignorance, not malice—in those days I’ve love to have back.
The Army helped square me away. My basic training company at Fort Dix was mostly Black and was my first exposure to not being in a distinct majority. I don’t remember any discomfort about it, quite possibly because I was focused on keeping the drill sergeants off my ass.
My permanent duty station was Fort McPherson, Georgia, where I played in a band that was about 60-40 white to Black. There were some racial issues I only became aware of after I was inadvertently involved in a controversy that brought them to the surface. I will always be grateful to Arnold Leslie for spending more than an hour to discuss the band’s history in this regard with me.
My living quarters also helped. I lived in a low-rise apartment complex in Southwest Atlanta of more than 150 units. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only white face there. At no time did I feel uncomfortable. Everyone I encountered accepted me as I was; I did the same for them.
Author Dana King
What did all this teach me? We are all more the same than we are different. At our core, we all want the same things. A safe place to sleep. Decent and regular meals. To be secure in our persons. To look forward to better lives for our children. A relatively comfortable retirement. People define each of these things differently, but life usually centers around the same core desires
I also learned along the way that the key to a peaceful and happy life is to make every effort to treat people the way I’d like to be treated. Not because I’m religious (I’m not), or because it’s The Golden Rule. It makes such obvious sense to me I can no longer imagine living any other way, and I have been happier since adopting this philosophy.
That doesn’t mean I’m Gandhi. King’s Corollary to The Golden Rule reads: I find this to be so self-evident I assume everyone does it, so if a person treats me in a dismissive, harsh, or dickish manner, I assume that is how he wants to be treated and it would be disrespectful not to oblige him.
Everything, and I mean everything, has more to it than what can be seen on the surface. No one can know all the subtexts and undercurrents, but we do ourselves and others a disservice not to consider what they might be.
That’s not to say we only need to peel back enough layers to find exculpatory evidence for bad behavior. Far from it. Some people are criminals. Some are racists or homophobes. (Or both.) Some are just assholes. What I’ve learned is not to assess anyone, or any event, at first acquaintance. Let the facts and reasons come out. They almost always will if you’re patient, though you’ll often be surprised when people you thought agreed with you abandon you along the way. The best hope is that you’ll pick up a few you never thought would agree as you learn more.
And that fascinates me.
The best and quickest summary I can think of comes from the philosopher/United States Marshal Raylan Givens: If you meet an asshole in the morning, you’ve met an asshole. If you meet assholes all day, you’re the asshole.
I spend a lot of time each day trying hard not to be the asshole. Unless someone appears to want me to be one. Then I’d be an asshole not to oblige.
Dana King writes the Penns River police procedural novels, of which WHITE OUT is the most recent. He also writes the Nick Forte private investigator novels, two of which (A SMALL SACRIFICE and THE MAN IN THE WINDOW) earned Shamus Award nominations from the Private Eye Writers of America. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and web sites, and he is a frequent panelist and moderator at conferences. You can get to know him better on his website (https://danakingauthor.com/), blog (https://danaking.blogspot.com/), Facebook page ( DanaKingBooks), or Twitter (@DanaKingAuthor).