InFluenza "A Special Report", Part 3

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Thank you for joining the first Special Report of our New Special Report Column No Reed.  Stay connected here with The Beauty Inside-Out Beautician blog for each release.  The plot thickens, its rolled out, glazed over with oil of a certain kind, and it goes into the oven.  

If you're easily turned off by misspellings, put that to the side.  There's a team of people responsible for trying their best to make me look like less of a FLU.

InFluenza (A Special Report) pt 3

Not in a perfect world, but in a perfectly scripted and controlled world lies the ability to test and weigh the components of one's theories before ever having to approach or engage the law.  It's mainly a white privilege.  And not just the race color white, but a white collar privilege.  There's a book titled The International Encyclopedia of Human Rights.  The subtitle is "Freedoms, Abuses, and Remedies".  Within its hard covers, reads the words "In a democracy, freedom of opinion and the right to express opinions are limited by law only when the expression of opinions causes direct harm to others."  It goes on to elaborate.  "A person who states on unfounded opinion that damages another person's reputation or business cannot successfully mount a defense in a resulting lawsuit by claiming freedom of opinion."

So What is opinion?                   

Opinion is when you read a fictional novel, and you are so convinced of its inner workings that you begin to move out without any form of authority or with the undocumented authority of law enforcement to inform, warn, or corrupt the thinking of others against what is known to be true.  Generally there is a term that identifies this behavior when there is a motive other that true civic concern.  That term is called Public Corruption.  The definition of public corruption is the use of powers by government officials or their network contacts for illegitimate private gain.  In the opening of "InFluenza", I used a term Mandala and explained its meaning.  Keep this term abreast.  I also mentioned a set of notes concerning my novel A Better Pair of Shoes.  Here is the point to link together some of the dots in that sea I described.  One might ask.. so when exactly did you realize you were even standing in a sea.  Apparently, the temperature of the water was so close to my own that I didn't feel anything until I was knee deep.  In the late summer of 2016, I volunteered with my church to participate in a prayer drive called drive-thru prayer.  It's where we take large posters onto the sidewalk & usher passerbyers in for prayer.  It was only if not less than a hand full of us anchored on the same side of the road as the church.  We were getting the attention of all of the people who had clear access to the entrance, however on the other side of the road divided by a sizeable median drivers were left unaware.  I thought a simple thought.  I thought to turn around at the point where the traffic on the other side was heavy so they might see the sign.  I do remember some drivers making u-turns.  At some point however, I was approached by one of the members who had been selected to stay up at the church to provide prayer.  His voice was not loud.  His words were not condescending.  But I felt something that day that told me that I was thought of in a way not in line with who I am.  I was asked not to turn to hail the traffic on the other side, and moments later another member went to that side with a sign.  Still, if the water was climbing, I had no clue.  There was no part of my being that could have actually come up with what was brewing.  Not even the writer in me.   Sometime within the same cluster of time, I began to feel a feeling different than the one that I had felt when I had began at the church, and I could feel also that people had become cautious.  Then one Sunday in what was suppose to be an emotional call to the alter, the head pastor began to speak about HIV.  By then I had been piecing some things together, and in every address there seemed to be a very specific or pointed word.  In a place of worship and under the spiritual influences of God this is not something that you would quite take down as a note of any first steps in a public corruption scandal.  Mainly because this is what people seek out; personal signs and wonders.  But more than three years later, and with the dismantling of my business; I now know that there were real signs.  

When one of my clients curiously begun making slight slip ups and calling me Kayla in 2016, I didn't over think it.  I knew that I had been promoting the 10 year anniversary of the release and I had been selling some of my remaining copies to my customers.  Equally, when customers had begun asking me in a suspicious way what was going on with my hair because I had been wearing my head wraps nearly religiously it seemed at times or a wig, I didn't over think it.  I knew that my clients was accustomed to my different hair antics, and though they liked my wigs for the most part... I just thought they wanted to see something more perhaps.  Little did I know all of this was the water creeping up my leg, and I was surely waist deep before any of the flags turned red.

If you've read Renegotiating Kayla, and you're convinced I'm Kayla, then when I write that my newly married character Kayla plans on meeting her ex at a hotel, but ends up with a confession that he is HIV positive... you might believe that this too is part of the truth.  But my book notes are simple.  In fact, I've written here more than was even written there.  I never say that the two have sex.  I never say or state the timeline in which any of this is to take place in comparison to the first story.  My notes are written in 2008, and I don't begin writing the book still for a few more years.  Yet, the "Sneaky Finger" has thrown everything but the kitchen sink into a bowl and has called it me.  In this bowl, I become not just Kayla, but I now become also each of the four characters that I have developed, and rather than having a war of backgrounds going on in the backdrop, the whole mixture is emptied onto a cookie sheet and when the cookie is ready, everyone sits back, breaks off a piece, and enjoys what it has to say.

"You have a right to remain silent".  We all probably know the famous words that reminds us of our right not to be questioned without our consent.  But the words also create a sense of fear rather than liberty.  There's a place in every legal proceedings for Miranda Rights, and it's not in the middle or at the end.  For a group of corrupt vigilantes, silence is the part of the four lines that they hope makes the greatest impression on you.  If it does; you remain silent while they unleash "Total Destruction".  But when the point is not to try you in a court of law, but to tear you down in the public court of opinion; silence is the enemy.  

In this New Special Report "InFluenza", I wipe my ass with Silence.  I smear a muddy consistency of shit in the face of silence, and I say to it rather... When the ingredients of the bowl fall flat and there's nothing in it to help it to rise to the point where the law can actually step forth, but it's tasty enough for the people around you to keep breaking off pieces and chewing; silence is the closed mouth that never gets fed.

Coming up in InFluenza, we pick out the unseen and misunderstood ingredients from the bowl.  Don't miss any part of this!

                                   
Written by: NaTisha Renee Williams
All Rights Reserved except for brief quotations