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Just the Beginning
We grow up expecting to be enthralled by true love. We grow up watching fairy tales, listening to popular songs, watching romantic movies like “Sleepless in Seattle,” and looking at advertisements such as Eharmony and learn that love is exciting and glamorous, but it often ends up breaking your heart. Some people ask, if love hurts so much, why do I risk deepening relational vulnerability?
Glimmering pictures of blissful love is too often followed by bitter disillusionment and heartache, leaving one feeling like, “How can I get through to you?” Paris feels like she is doomed, never to experience the fairy-tale rapture of true love, and even if she does experience it, she fears that love might vanish instantly like a dream.
The first year of your relationship is supposed to be the best, it is supposed to be full of romance, passion, and good memories. However, I sat down with a couple who has a bad romance, and this is what I discovered. This young lady called Paris was very in love with this guy.
She would go out of her way to write him love letters every day and go out of her way to do things for him, but the first year of their relationship, he allegedly cheated on her several times, and his friends just totally disrespected her, and her husband called Will still hung out with them and made them a priority, over their relationship. And Paris still was still willing to do anything for him.
As their one year anniversary approach, Paris now feels like her marriage to Will is more of a business because he does not really do much for her, and they go months without seeing each other, and he always needs help with his job, so she has to work every day just to make him happy.
Paris says that her marriage and the thing his friends and her friend have done will forever change the way see feels about the people in her life. She still loves her friends, but someone of them said some cruel things, which made her back away from them, and she does not feel the same towards them. Paris also complains that there is no romance in her marriage, it just seems to mechanical.
Nonetheless, Paris sticks with her husband, and loves him, but admits the romance is gone and it seems more like a business deal. As if she is an employee, and he is her boss. Paris and Will fight a lot because their friends are extremely jealous and keep trying to do things to break them up.
This is Paris’s first relationship and it is not at all what she expected. She used to day dream about what her future with Will would be like, but now the focus is looking happy and taking it day by day, unsure of what to expect. Will is often working and constantly taking trips out of town, so they sometimes go a long while without seeing each other.
Many of the obstacles to happiness in loving relationships arise from friends or incomplete solutions. Since people first began pursuing and rejecting their mates, other people have probably been giving them advice about love. Yet with all this attention that we humans give to love, animals seem to be much more successful than we are.
Why do we have such a hard time making love work for us? The most common thing to do to improve your relationship is to communicate and spend time together. Paris says she just want to walk into the sunset where she and Will can live happily ever after.
To improve your relationship, choose fifteen minutes from each day when you will not be interrupted by children, work, nor friends. Talk to each other about your feelings and be honest. Lovingly listen to each other, and find ways to communicate your support for each other.
Paris admits that she loves her husband and she would not leave him for the World and that being with him has made her smarter, stronger, and she looks better than ever. However, there are some deep-seated reasons why they are not as happy as they should be. Through excessive dedication to their jobs and life-styles, Paris and Will live in a state of complete psychological divorce.
She feels like the human companionship and source of love is missing from her life. Loneliness and grief often overwhelm her, and the toll take on their hearts can clearly be seen. As the mortality statistics indicate, this is no myth or romantic fairy tale—all available evidence suggests that people do indeed die of broken hearts.
Real cost of a deep personal love, for another human being, can only be seen in the shattering loss that is felt when that love is suddenly and permanently taken away. A few hundred years ago, grief was openly recognized as a cause of death. However, a broken hear would never be listed as a cause of death in any hospital. So be sure to express how much you love the person you are with.
I must admit that it is true, I go out of my way to do anything for you because baby I want you to know that I have gotten so close and I require you to show me a sign. When it is lobe that is on my mind, I would die for you. I have been dying just to feel you by my side. To know that you are mine. I believe that our love is something pure and true. I see your face every place that I walk in.
I look at other people with blonde hair and blue eyes and stare at the as if they are you. I hear your voice every time that I am talking, you will believe in me and I will believe in you. I will burn for you (like the Christmas roast and pizza), I will feel pain for you. Our love is one iconic like Angel and Buffy. Instead of pulling us apart, they pushed us closer together. I will never let go.
Secrets and Lies—Author’s Files on Ben Crawford
What vibe did you get in your secret heart? I cannot stress enough to parents, your daughters are special, but so are yours sons, and they also require love, protection, and understanding. I tend to erase it, erase it, erase it, keep trying, erase, keep trying, erase, and finally…well, let the observer make up more than I can represent.
My life is about quality. It is all about sweeping away, putting in…struggle, struggle, struggle and poof—masterpiece! Data on many leading causes of death rates from cirrhosis of the liver, among divorced white males and the general increase in death rates from this disease among all nonmarried groups (except single white females) suggest that unmarried individuals in general consume more alcohol.
There are marked increases in death rates due to motor vehicle accidents and “accidental fires,” with widowed men and women having four- to sevenfold increases in death rates from these causes. Suicide increases fivefold in the widowed white male and fourfold in the widowed nonwhite male and the white female, while death and homicide also increased dramatically.
This doubling of cancer of the respiratory system and then tenfold rise in tuberculosis among divorced white males suggest perhaps differential patterns of cigarette smoking had influenced the results.
Ben Crawford reported: I feel like a monster (in a deep voice). I do not really know what kind of monster. My relationships always start out fine, but then I realize it is not right for me. I end up feeling bad about it, but I just have to leave once I realize that she is not the woman I have been looking for. (There was a long pause, his eyes met mine. He looked like a little boy.)
It happens to me every time I get in a relationship. I cannot seem to stay with anyone. Women end up hating me. I hurt one woman after another. I know it is not their fault. There is something wrong with me, but I do not know what to do.
Analysis: Ben had issues of trying to be a perfectionist, someone everyone loved, and wanted to be, and thought was cool. His requirements for perfection made it impossible for him to find the partner he longed for. He told me his former wife is more like his best friend, and while he had a series of failed relationships, he described himself as his worst enemy.
Ben was not happy being a single man, but at the age of forty-one, he was about to give up. Ben recalled being a young and innocent baby-faced blonde, in his late teens. He desperately wanted to fit in with the other guys name make a name for himself in the entertainment industry. However, one night he had an encounter with several older guys at a bar. He remembered being beat up and tossed around like a rag doll, everything else was a blur.
Ben was fearful of others and suffered intense shame about his experience of being rolled. After his traumatic efforts to disclose what happened, he grew increasingly silent and withdrawn. His friends and family blamed him for the assault and even doubted his story, in spite of the bruises and medical bills. At that time there was no free medical insurance, he had to use his hard earned pay check to patch himself back up.
Some even suggested that Ben had been at fault because he had been partying like everyone else at the bar, and that he was a grown man and should have known what he was getting himself into. For years, Ben has complex and painful reactions to the entire traumatic experience, including the sense of betrayal he felt when those close to him blamed him.
Let us face it, Ben is a very attractive young man, with tan skin, blonde hair, innocent blue eyes, a smile to die for and his tan body is on fleek. Many people have never seen such an attractive young man before, he was the American dream, and sources say he had the nicest butt in legs they had ever seen. Some said he looked white, but had the features of a black man, and they found that extremely attractive.
People were looking to get with him or in him or have him in them. He was so hot, he was like the head cheerleader on the Eagles, but a man. Men and women could not keep their hands off of him. They would rip his clothes off of him like he was a rock star.
As he started to get emotional, Ben told me: I genuinely preferred being in a lasting relationship, if only I knew how to achieve that state. I have sets of extreme standards for myself, as well as others. I am traumatized by self-doubt, and a critical insider voice that never allows a partner to be good enough.
I have a hard time staying with anyone and making a firm decision to stay because I am driven by self-doubt and anxiety about making a mistake. A strong sense of fear paralyses me and I rush to judgmental thinking. However, I am longing for the gifts that only intimate relationships can bring. I want a close relationship in which I could give and receive comfort. I do not care about your eyebrows and my feet might stink sometimes, but if we love each other you have to accept that!
Ben continues: Last year, at this very time, I had been a wanderer, hopelessly without companions, and then you came back into my life, with a letter in your pocket, needing my help. I was darkly and passionately thrilled by all this, and I felt those Netflixs and chills again. I found myself in a cycle of initial delight about my beloved son, only to be followed by heart crushing disappointment. He allegedly never stay single for long, craving the hopeful period of the courtship stage and money. He was out letting people rip him. I was outraged! How could this be true?!
As each promising new day deepened, I felt like I was having a heart attack, and became angry, and eventually backed into a cloud of apologetic guilt. I had turned him into a young version of myself. He was drinking heavily, doing drugs, and allegedly having sex with older men for money. It broke my heart! I wanted to end him. I did not want him gassing and dipping out of nightclubs and turning more tricks than that circus act, that Robbery Fee mistral show.
I dealt with this fear by turning to an intensely critical insider voice that found fault with my former wife and my son. Not a masculine thing to do. Then suddenly there was an agitation in me so great that only lying alone, scrunched up on the bed crying, could comfort me.
Matthew Ryan Phillippe is really a hero. He took on the role as the first gay teenager on TV when he played the character of Billy Douglas on One Life to Live. At the time, being gay was not an easy thing to do. Matthew Shepherd was tied to a car, beaten, and then hanged on a fence. He is dead for being gay, and never did anything wrong. So to take on such a powerful role knowing the potential consequences was amazing.
Ryan probably kept others from killing themselves or being killed for being gay. Ryan is such a great actor and some of his best movies are White Squall, Chaos, Stop Loss, Straight A’s, Little Boy Blue, 54, Lincoln Lawyer, Flags of Our Father, Catch Hell, and a TV show called Secrets and Lies. This man should have earned an Oscar by now, he is one of the most talented and diverse actors in the World. Brad Pitt and Denzel Washington are not as talented nor good looking as Ryan Phillippe.
Ryan Phillippe is now started some kind of technology corporation that matches consumers with products, and you can also play games, win cool prizes and even interact with the determined young man. We are sure his new endeavor, called Deedle (TheDeedle.com) will be a huge success. This man is gold.
White Squall of Little Boy Blue in Studio 54
What a small thing it is sometime that makes life’s kiss sweeter than death’s to us. Sometimes people in your relationship will disappear because they are avoiding the intimate relationship, exhibiting a relational form of commitment anorexia. This type of distracted lover is not consciously avoiding your relationship, he or she wants to be with you, but will not let the relationship develop. God often tempers the anguish of our sufferings, till there is a sort of luxury in feeling them. If the course of true love never runs smooth, the course of true matchmaking sometimes does so.
People who run away from their relationships usually want to avoid or decrease possible emotional devastation. This person is using avoidance to escape and defend against loss, rejection, or exploitation. As a result, some will feel lonely. However, because these people are going through some kind of internal drama, in place of their relationship, they will focus on creativity, a brilliant career, dedication to a spiritual practice, get to know themselves as single, an unencumbered person. Nonetheless, in reality, this person dreams of being part of a happy couple. When a man gets a good berth, half the deserving must come after.
Sometimes the most virulent force behind the avoidant patterns of the disappearing distance is the fear of being consumed by their own desires or needs. Spending a great deal of your time alone becomes unhealthy when it keeps one from recognizing, deepening, and even enjoying human connection. To implore help itself the proof of undesert of it. The habit of being alone, when generated by negative feelings toward others, can become a chronic condition of isolation. I was sorry to find more mercy in a heathen than in a fellow Christian. Feeling driven to back away from others is often a base of shame.
You come in by yourself without his direction, and you shall go out by yourselves without his mercy. Isolation, in and of itself, is a by-product of distancing that creates its own problems. People lose confidence in their rightful place in human society. Feeling perpetually outside of life can cause you to feel rejected and defective. Over time you may become increasingly fearful, resentful, anxious, depressed or angry. You were everywhere, I could not eat, I could not eat, I could not get you out of my head. The only constant I had was Caroline.
I was drowning, and then you were there. Whatever I was experiencing, at the time, I had you to hold on to, Matthew. I lost sight of everything, I barely even noticed other people in the town, all I could see was you. I could not get rid of you, I could not stop seeing you, I could not stop hear you. Nothing else mattered, but you. Isolation is self-perpetuating, I had to stop you from haunting me. It is potentially lethal when isolation leads to extremes of depression and hopelessness and can take someone to the point of suicide. Someone like me, who never seems to initiate contact with others, is perceived as aloof, arrogant, or unfriendly. This in turn creates feelings of loneliness and defensiveness.
To look with mercy on the conduct of others is a virtue no less than to look with severity on your own. When I was talking to my friend Andrew, he told me that he was committed to finding a partner, he was very enthusiastic. He told me, “You got it! I am going to be here, no fear. Definitely! I am going to make it to every date with you this month and the next and the next. You have got my word! A reminder that everything is going to be okay. I know what happened.” Then Andrew sailed out of my apartment, seeming to have no cruel intentions, as he was whistling and humming cheerfully, and greeting anyone who happened to be in the lobby.
Inevitably, Andrew failed to stick to the schedule. He knew I was here, it was astonishing. He complimented me on the apartment, and thanked me for lunch. Andrew was very pleasant to us, but during the first few months with me, he missed many dates. When we did meet, his ability to pay attention was too scattered for him to be able to focus on his distancing patterns. I would get hungry and count the seconds until the date was over. It was a party on the Albatross.
Suddenly, by beloved friend, whom everyone adored, could not concentrate on me. We were not making much progress in helping him to identify the specific ways he distances, although I was beginning to spot his pattern. It was hard to help Andrew to focus because of his speedy monologues and his lightning-quick exits before we had settled into a topic. And what if the blonde-haired, tan-skinned guy next to Andrew looked like an angel? How was I to guess that when I met him in the coffee shop, at the hotel, only a day or two later, I realized that Andrew was trying to tell me something, he was trying to tell a story. I closed my eyes and prayed.
Andrew was a complex person, who very rarely felt comfortable inside his own skin. He told me that I help him back from being that monster that he truly is. Generally, he was tormented by being unable to stick to any given plan. He could not follow through, whether it was a plan to move to another part of the country, or go back to school, or even just a plan to get a cup of koffee with a friend.
He was reluctant to make choices, from something a small as choosing what movie to see, to something more significant like signing a lease for an apartment or getting a full-time job. Because of his across-the-board style of restlessness and avoidance, Andrew could not even get close to starting an intimate relationship.
A man must be an idiot or else an angel who, after the age of forty, shall attempt to be just to his neighbor. Andrew had been sober for ten years. And even with his extreme restlessness, he remained determined to stay clean and sober. Most of his friends were in various stages of physical and economical failure because of their active addictions. Andrew’s mother desperately wanted more for her son, and Andrew’s son was the foundation of his tenuous abstinence and he was the reason his son remained celibate.
I understand everything you said. You have been telling me exactly how and why you can keep our secrets and lies. The deep hurt hit my heart and flashed in my eyes, private and almost lonely. Stop abusing your power. Stop forgetting that you have it. Stop forgetting the inevitable limitations of your kindred here! You are dreaming. I am not the wander slut you make me out to me. Remember this is an exposition of souls, a bartering of extraordinary revelations.
You gave me a quick sketch of your heart, a description of your truer self. A loyal Knight, but because there are uncertain times, we are required to be committed to continuing our survival, by whatever means necessary. Be here now. You are an optimistic, loving person who sincerely wants to find relief from running in circle. Be willing and open to new insights and new activities and you will be able to take your first step to do kindness. Consider this…it is very possible that this winter could end up with above average warmth AND above average snowfall.
Remember—you are and will be Loved
I do not know how long I have not seen you. Do you know I am lonely without you! I want to tell you a secret in my heart, and that is—I am missing you now! What you leave to me is a beautiful memory. You remind me of the purity and friendship of my brightest days. I am in love with myself in memory of you.
I always remember the two tall fit trees by the arch bridge in our fields and wonder if the petals of the roses will fall down to my head, shoulders, hands, and my heart, and when I look up I will see your beautiful blue eyes. Our youthful footprints are left of the paths of the rose garden, and the lawns are our joyous songs and hearty laughter. Our friendship and ideals are engraved on every corner of the park and castle.
It would be nice if human life and love could be sustained indefinitely. When we examined the statistics on premature death (deaths not due to natural aging), it quickly become clear that the way we live has a lot to do with our longevity.
Since the 1950s, the leading cause of premature death in American Adults, between the ages of 24 and 65 have been: Heart disease, malignant neoplasms (among males the most prevalent neoplasm at these ages is lung cancer), cirrhosis of the liver, accidents (other than motor vehicle accidents), influenza and pneumonia, motor vehicle accidents, suicide, and homicide.
Pay attention to the ways that people distance. You have the tools to help you identify how you see yourself in a couple, and you can locate yourself—or someone you care for—and relate to their strengths and vulnerabilities. You can transform your life and honor your strengths and gifts, in addition to those difficult areas you are required to change.
Currently, you are going back to the roots of how you have developed your beliefs, fears, and hopes about intimate relationships and that can be both very exciting and illuminating. It can also stir up old memories and emotions that are difficult to process. The goal, however, is a strong commitment to safety, so you will be guided very carefully through the process of remembering.
To avoid an early death, it is important to diet, exercise, and stop smoking and drinking. The heart is a pump, and like other types of pumps, it can malfunction through simple mechanical breakdowns. The heart is a complex regulatory system that is influenced by the subtlest human feelings and social situations.
The presence of human companionship does not work in any simple fashion to prevent heart disease; any more than the mere existence of loneliness directly causes heart disease. If the relationship was that straightforward, it would have been recognized long ago. It is, however, possible that human companionship or love can prevent cardiac disease.
The goal is not to go backward to relive old painful experiences, but to examine your formative relationship to study how they shaped you to become the person that you are.
You will trace the various influences that combined to create your race, ethnicity, class, geographical home, neighborhood, religion, schooling, and even how the media influenced you. This will allow us to take a good look at the relationships you have experienced, in your adult life, to see how our fears, hopes, longings, and even aversions have been determined.
It was painful to know that we were under obligations to a person who could never receive a return. You burn yourself and give out all heat, light, and energy sparing no effort. You are beloved and respected like the most beautiful star in the Universe.
Move toward the action phase, and begin to develop your abilities to create many levels of deepening connection by targeting the changes you feel you are ready to undertake. The little boy blue is ready to be found and loved and respected. No more chaos.
Your thoughts and language are full of poetic flavor and philosophic theory and so magical that they stop loss of cruel intensions. You have aroused so many ripples in the eye inside. Over the years, you have returned to becoming gentle. It has been a gradual process of engaging with others at a new level of intimacy.
This has allowed you to warm up to this relationship, at a safe place, while avoiding slipping back into the all-too-familiar patterns of running and hiding. Much like Gil Martin, in White Squall, you have learned to trust yourself to make the best changes for yourself, at the right pace, with the right people. If time could retrogress to let me go back to the last day I saw you, I would return to the past.
Of course, no transformation can take place without some hard work. Insight may happen in a sudden flash, but transformation take both inspiration and perspiration. The good news is that we do not have to do it alone. Everyone has his astonishing potentiality. I should believe my own power and youth and tell myself continuously that everything is up to me. There are many reasons to share these stories.
Healing generally works best through a process of identification that allows you to see parts of yourself in another person’s experience. These stories also provide you with a connection to a community of other people who have struggled with the same issues you are facing. We are usually stumbled by the stone that exist in our hearts, but always stride over the stones on the way that are real obstruction. Remember, you are loved, and always will be. We will always keep your secrets and lies close to our hearts.
Love Leads to God through Arts or Acts
All-merciful Father, indeed! Why, the Prince of Darkness was angel in comparison (and a gentleman into the bargain). There is no knowledge in search of which people in general are more eager, than that of what others have been doing in the World.
There are people who read books to convince themselves there is a God. Like busts in marble, so does our individual fate exist in the limestone of time. Throughout all eternity, the parts of the past are but parts of the future reversed.
Destiny, it may be,–the most skillful of stage managers,–seldom choose to arrange its scenes, and carry forward its drama, without securing the presence of at least one calm observer. Incidents little in human speculation are great in the eye of fortune.
Chance and change love to deal with men’s settled plans, not with their idle vagaries. All things fulfill their destiny. Reassume your courage, not the courage to die, but to live. I am on another level, can you feel my flow? The God of this World is in the machine—not out of it.
Energy is perhaps of all qualities the most valuable. This was a century in which the fine arts and the higher mechanical arts were not separated by any distinct boundary, nor were those who practiced them; and it was an age in which artists sought and loved one another. I wonder if you are ever feel that zing because it should greater the temptation to supply its place by a ritual? Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
Should this last statement stagger a painter or writer of our day, let me remind him that even Christians loved one another at first starting. Civility should take leave: where nothing is due to love, something is due to good manners. I am naturally civil when I am civilly used. It always remains true that when all the ways of our unintelligible World are the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together. The irony of circumstances holds no mortal catastrophe in respect.
For wise and good reasons, God made the knowledge of Himself scarce any otherwise attainable by us, than that of the existence of other beings absent to sense. The will is placed in the soul, and who can enter there but he that created the soul? What are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
When you would understand of that great Being truly and fully, you must be able to realize the duration of eternity, obliterate the little periods of time and chronology, which require a starting and a resting-place in human minds—soar out the reach of the sickly atmospheres which surround these little planets, and stand erect in the broad and fathomless light of God’s own atmosphere.
People who like any society better than none are, in general, those who know least how to enjoy it. When a man will give it a fair play, common sense will get the better in all cases. There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company. The Angels were created from light and the Jinn from smokeless fire.
Jinn live longer than humans and can take on any form they would like: human, true, car, building. They are able to attracts a person’s great attention. Jinns possess people for several purposes. In some cases, the Jinn will alter a person’s reality because it or its family has been accidentally hurt. Nevertheless, it could be because the Jinn has fallen in love with the person.
When a man has told all he has to say, the sooner he is silent the better. A person dying in a state of great sin may be changed into a Jinn, in the period of a barzakh, separation barrier. Some say they live in the mystical emerald mountains in the celestial sphere surrounding the Earth. Some say they are pagan gods. Jinn have free will.
There was said to be a Jinn in the Garden of Eden with Adam, but he refused to submit to Adam and was expelled from Paradise and called Satan. They are usually invisible to humans, but humans do appear clearly to Jinn. Jinn have the power to travel large distances at extreme speeds and are thought to live in their own communities. The Jinn occasionally assume human form to mislead and destroy their human victims.
There is an intoxication that makes merry in the midst of affliction; and there is an intoxication that banishes affliction by producing oblivion. However, again, there is an intoxication which is conscious of itself through it makes the feet unsteady, and the voice think, and the brain foolish; and which brings neither mirth nor oblivion. A mistaken sense of duty has been the cause of quite one fourth of the unhappiness of mankind, and few have been so bigoted as not to acknowledge this when it is too late.
How shall so young a scholar, in the school of affliction, be able to bear such heavy and such various evils? A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
When it does not lead to spending money, liveliness is a pleasant thing. How will injuries never honorably complained of be believed to grieve us? There is nothing more likely to succeed with an audience than a good history of witchcraft, or something so very marvelous, as to do violence to common sense, before we give it our faith.
Life is full of the saddest and the strongest contrasts. Much more does affliction demand our love when it proceeds from compassion for another’s woes. Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the World. However, his heart assured him that love is faith, and faith is his nature.
Secrets and Lies–Make Your Stories Sell!
He who is in the clutches of the law may think himself lucky if he escapes with the loss of his tail. Nature has created inequalities in men and things, and, as human institutions are intended to prevent the strong from oppressing marginalized members of the human population, ergo, the laws should encourage natural inequalities as a legitimate consequence. Secrets and Lies incorporates subliminal angles of the human psyche—obsessions some aspire to conceal, wickedness many refuse to admit. Detective Cornell acts as a malevolent force to Ben Crawford throughout the mini-series, representing the seduction of evil and the fear and torment within Ben Crawford. Once she realizes that Ben is out there, Detective Cornell becomes compelled with finding him and making him pay for a crime he did not commit, allowing the criminal to walk free, so she can inflict the venom of evil into his soul and turn him into a villain before the eyes of the community. detective Cornell knows Ben Crawford is innocent and feels culpability for the part she played in ceasing a man who has already suffered a tragic lose, and destroying his home, family, career, and life. As long as Ben continues to remain free, not only is it a constant reminder that law enforcement and community members tortured and persecuted and innocent man, but it also leaves the city and aggressors with criminal liability and possibly civil liability as well, and they all regret the decisions they made. However, the thugs keep profiling and trying to convict Ben Crawford because they feel if they can just convince themselves, and others that he is bad, it will remove any guilt or liability they have. However, what is done in secret will be brought to the light. So, detective Cornell and the community obsessively purses Ben Crawford. Detective Cornell probably projects her rage and frustration onto Ben Crawford for other things she has done in the past. Ben Crawford and detective Cornell are opposites, he has the World to live for, he is whole and complete and loved, but detective Cornell has committed some egregious sins, and is cold, fragmented, and lost. However, this villain, detective Cornell helps to bring out the hero in Ben Crawford, the audience sees his true qualities of love, compassion, strength, and perseverance, and he grows in the process—David and Goliath, a biblical example.
Although detective initially appears as an evil villain, there comes a turning point where she realizes that she is wrong and that they are putting Ben Crawford’s life in danger. She realizes that they are no better than ISIS and the people who attacked Paris, France, and takes a real interest in “helping” him. The innocents, determination, and compassion that Ben Crawford conveys, allows Ben Crawford to bring out the true detective in Cornell, to fight her way back to being a righteous detective. Yet, detective Cornell’s rage is one of her more enduring characteristics. She is constantly harassing and stalking Ben Crawford and using her job as an investigator to justify her actions, she allows people to interrogate him to see how she can twist and mangle his words, making him look like he committed a murder, even though her constant profiling of Ben has almost gotten him killed twice. However, sometime detective Cornell feels guilty about the ferocity of the evil she inflicts Ben Crawford and his family. Detective Cornell takes extreme measures to judiciously project her anger onto Ben Crawford by expending immeasurable city resources to try and wrongly convict him, at the expense of taxpayers and potentially putting other members of the community in danger. The resources used to make Ben Crawford look guilty could have been used to hire more law enforcement to protect others and pay unfunded pensions. However, detective Cornell’s interactions with Ben Crawford are slowly changing, she is no longer blaming him for her short comings, but instead feels a sadness and tries to connect with him and even protect him by letting him know his life is in danger. Detective Cornell desperately wants Ben Crawford to be saved, and her ability for good surpasses her ever-present anger and frustration. We see detective Cornell reach a point of clarity as she now is trying to save Ben Crawford.
Through the mini-series of Secrets and Lies, we see that people want to disrupt Ben Crawford’s life, and detract him, with strict authority, to slow down his accelerating movement to adulthood. Ben is accused of murder to keep him from growing and expanding beyond this sadistic cult in the small town. They want Ben to stay suppressed and small. However, Ben Crawford is a force of youthful heroism and is oblivious to danger. While the rest of the community is constantly acting, but rarely thinking about the repercussions of their actions. It becomes more and more easy for the audience to relate to Ben Crawford because we see he is righteous, and the rest of the community, and law enforcement are looked at as the bad guys. They see one person struggling, and instead of helping him, they attack him, without even knowing the facts. Not everyone can relate to Ben Crawford’s desire for justice, or his role as an empathetic hero, nor detective Cornell’s journey for domination and force to salvation. This is a story of good and evil and is meant to open the mind and show people that pack mentality is wrong and often times dangerous. Get your facts straight before acting on your limited vision, releasing your fear and frustration onto others. Unauthorized and abhorrent thoughts will sometime invade the best human heart. Remember, we live in a World, were an African American woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested because she refused to move to the back of the bus and let a Caucasian man have her seat. Now Rosa Parks is a legendary hero for calling attention to civil rights. By standing up for herself, Rosa Parks has protected countless lives from being wrongly stalked and harassed by law enforcement like our hero Ben Crawford is done in Secrets and Lies.
Randolph Harris II International Institute 