Director, Jack Harney

Most often the person who actually writes a book, creates a screenplay, or begins a blog about challenging Human issues is a person who has dealt with those challenges and feels they have something to offer. I’m one of those people. My challenging issue has always been, “Who am I and why do I matter?”

The basis of this challenge, which was once a source of insecurity, lay in my family background. I was born January 7, 1946, the oldest child in an Irish Catholic family of five children with an alcoholic father and a co-dependent mother, living in a tough Irish and Italian immigrant neighborhood in the Bronx. I spent the first ten years of my life there which included attending a Catholic school taught by nuns who I later surmised were likely sent there after “not making it” somewhere else. It was “Dominican Siberia” for nuns like Sister Mary Barnabas who could lift you three feet off the ground with one hand, smack you with the other, and chastise you with street language you didn’t dare repeat at home. There were also other nuns in my life who were excellent mentors for me.

In one sense I was a caricature of this upbringing that even people who have never been to the Bronx or raised Catholic know very well. Being made responsible for too much too soon and castigated for any “mistakes” large or small was tough where the “head of the household” kept all other members in a constant state of imbalance. But East 147th St. was also a block of many aunts and uncles and friends who took me under their wing. This “village” raised me with enough love and caring to always desire both, and lead me to eventually fill the holes in my life and achieve a great appreciation for my place in the universe.

My circumstances precluded the kind of formal education I would have preferred, but a satisfying self education took its place…and of course, lifelong education is critical in a world where sometimes new information is often found to be obsolete measured in eye blinks of time. “Trial and Discovery” (what I substitute for the phrase, trial and error) has been my constant companion along with the writings of many advanced thinking Humans from all of history. I am not the best Human Being I want to be, any new level reached only revealing higher levels yet to achieve…but I am very happy with who I am. I see how my existence has mattered, does matter and will matter. I want to share this with you. I want to help you learn as you help me learn and together advance the Human race in its next steps to the future.