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<span data-offset-key="21clg-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;" class="">While shamelessly promoting my daughters first novel, I am told by some, as an excuse perhaps," that "they never read fiction." Though all fiction has some base in reality.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="1vk9l-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;" class="">I admit that I rarely read fiction these days, as a political activist I have so much to learn, and so many books yet to read. However, its fiction that made me who I am today.
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<span data-offset-key="50dgo-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;" class="">"Red Badge of Courage" by Steven Crane, convinced me that war is the greatest of all evils. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Hemingway convinced me that resisting oppression, occupation, exploitation
and destruction, was necessary and an identity I chose as my own, even when working for corporations I never backed down from my principles regardless of the costs. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, saved me from the era of "Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll"
though I do see the wisdom in music as long as it doesn't become the "end all" thus a distraction. The opioid epidemic we have now is a result of those years of convincing a generation that drugs whether RX or entertainment were "harmless and cool." More recent
in 2000 the book "Ismael" by Daniel Quinn, about a talking gorilla of all things, did convince me not to be too discouraged with the state of humanity, given we were a "work in progress" and there still was hope.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="2it56-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;" class="">I no longer remember anything I read in those books so long ago, other than the "lesson learned," and there are so many books over so many years, they become lost in memory. However, I
do still once in a while treat myself to a book of fiction knowing that a picture is worth a thousand words and fiction often creates a picture that will stay with me, if only in the abstract.</span></div>
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