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    Making History with Crosswords and Prozac
    Making History with Crosswords and Prozac
    Making History with Crosswords and Prozac
    Ebook124 pages2 hours

    Making History with Crosswords and Prozac

    By Kent Paul

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    About this ebook

    The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.
    Thomas Jefferson

    According to statistics 98% of racial discrimination cases never get to see the inside of a courtroom. This story takes you there. Go along with Kent as he relates his incredible encounter with destiny. This unique story is from the astounding perspective of one of that 2 %. Despite many odds never let up continued to fight on many different fronts.

    Welcome to the halls of justice where in an instant you can both triumph and plummet, all at the same time. This book will numb the senses and leave you breathless. Does racism still exist? Is our court system fair? Then have a read and decide for yourself. This is the story about Kents first real encounter with racial hostility. With a profound fondness for solving crosswords an unexpected turn would steer him to face his most formidable opponent yeta multi-billion dollar giant.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse
    Release dateOct 25, 2010
    ISBN9781452075129
    Making History with Crosswords and Prozac
    Author

    Kent Paul

    Kent hails from the eastern portion of the Caribbean, from an exotic Island nation called St. Lucia. He grew up playing soccer and as a result has played for two separate Islands. He still lives in the united states with his wife and children which has been much support for him. He now intends to educate and consult in matters pertaining to race and personal wellness, hoping to stomp out racism and discrimination.

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      Book preview

      Making History with Crosswords and Prozac - Kent Paul

      Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Introduction

      The Patchwork of Fate …

      Crosswords and Prozac

      Life is a quilt with a wild, weaving, wandering patchwork of crossing paths, some that intersect by fate’s design (as with meeting my wife), others indiscriminately but with such consequence that you can’t help but feel it must have been for a reason. My story is one of the latter, a collision of ambition and intolerance, a puzzle whose pieces would only fit the sort of metaphysical framework that comes in the form of a crossword puzzle. According to PBS in the book Faith and Reason, Metaphysical studies generally seek to explain inherent or universal elements of reality which are not easily discovered or experienced in our everyday life. As such, it is concerned with explaining the features of reality that exist beyond the physical world of our immediate senses.

      In the series of events that led to me being in the middle of such a huge lawsuit, there were many key words I should have been picking up on but couldn’t because of my naiveté to the existence of racism as a feature of my reality. Nor of the depths of prejudice, which it would turn out were rooted far beyond my immediate sense of just how deep that hatred ran. I grew up on a Caribbean island with very few white people, but we were never raised to think of their absence as a positive or negative aspect to our way of life. Later, when I worked at a resort and experienced my first contact with white tourists, they were wonderfully friendly, considerate, respectful people. The same was my experience living in Houston, Texas. It wasn’t until I arrived in the traditionally liberal Pacific Northwest city of Portland, Oregon, that I had my first exposure to the sad reality of racism as part of American culture.

      I was a young, ambitious, and—at first— a successful car salesman at a reputable local dealership. It was the kind of business that welcomed the type of energetic go-getter I represented in the sales force. I brought 150 percent to the every potential deal I worked, and before long, was making a very good living. I was told I was a natural and would move up fast in the company if I kept my foot to the fire. I had a fire burning inside me, too, a zest for life, with a spirit pushing my sails that began and ended with the mother and children I woke up with and came home to every night after work. A family I prided myself on providing for, along with most of the family men who worked at the auto dealership. We fed off each other’s competitive energy. Even if we were chasing the same sales, it was a good-spirited race where, at the end of the day, everyone seemed to come out a winner because of the synergy we brought as a team to the art of selling cars. Car salespeople are often the butt of jokes on TV, the worst place someone can end up, professionally speaking. But my field was, in fact, a very sought-after one. I was naturally a people person, and I was working at a dealership where the vehicles basically sold themselves. It had seem like the proverbial American dream had come true for me as I completed my first six months of employment.

      Sadly, that dream would quickly turn into a nightmare, first with the news that the dealership was being sold to a much smaller, corporate dealership, which meant new management, and what would turn out to be an entirely alternate reality to the one I’d come to know as home. It began with the hiring of a manager who proudly introduced himself to the sales staff as, a redneck from Georgia with a third-grade education. As the climate worsened, my fellow minority salesmen and I were subjected daily to redneck humor by our immediate and general supervisors, who, when they weren’t paying us motivational compliments like half-black nigger and black slave, were routinely steering sales opportunities with white customers away from me and my minority coworkers. The combination of a loss of dignity and financial stability soon led to stress taking both a professional and personal toll. My fiancée and I began to have regular arguments over the family’s finances.

      It wasn’t until the discrimination began that I turned to crossword puzzles to give my mind a break from trying to solve the confounding riddle of why this dark cloud had entered my life. It turns out I wasn’t the first. As according to Times people "less than two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Lester Markel, the Times’ Sunday editor, dashed off a memo to his superiors suggesting that they consider adding a puzzle to the Sunday paper. The pressures and demands of the war played heavily on his mind. ‘We ought to proceed with the puzzle, especially in view of the fact that it is possible that there will now be bleak blackout hours—or if not that, then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind of other … We ought not to try to do anything essentially different from what is now being done—except to do it better."

      That is the secret science of crossword puzzles: they inspire you toward improvement, first within the context of the puzzle before you in the morning paper, reminding you that there is much turmoil in the backdrop of the coming day. But also providing in the same sense just enough shelter ahead of that storm to get your head into a game you can win if you just apply yourself. Taking that adage into my mind each morning, I was able to grow stronger in both my inner ability to strategize and my mental moxy for resolve—both of which were required to survive the day I faced each morning during those awful months. The conflicting lines that were crossed, the puzzlement my coworkers and I shared over the racist words that were thrown at us in a dizzying hail day after day. After a while, I started framing all that frustration in the context of a puzzle, with many missing pieces that I believed would fit in time as the riddle of why this was happening would eventually be solved.

      Thanks to the challenge crossword puzzles had presented me, which were of entirely different nature from that I faced every day in the workplace. I became reenergized in my resolve to do better at playing the game. As a champion soccer player, you’d think that was something of which I would have never lost sight of. Solving these crossword puzzles spoke to my competitive nature and helped to hone it, as I fought to keep the job that fed my family during a time of ever-growing adversity. I started keeping a log, along with three of my other minority coworkers (who would also eventually become my co-plaintiffs), of the daily incidents of racial discrimination we were put through. That became therapeutic for us, along with the crossword puzzles for me personally.

      The other key to my survival through this struggle came when my doctor finally decided to put me on the antidepressant Prozac, which I have to credit with mentally turning my life around. For those of you needing a crash course, according to the National Institutes of Health, Prozac is used to treat depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (bothersome thoughts that won’t go away and the need to perform certain actions over and over), some eating disorders, and panic attacks (sudden, unexpected attacks of extreme fear and worry about these attacks). Fluoxetine (Sarafem) is used to relieve the symptoms of premenstrual disorder, including mood swings, irritability, bloating, and breast tenderness. Fluoxetine is in a class of medications called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). It works by increasing the amount of serotonin, a natural substance in the brain that helps maintain mental balance.

      Despite any statistic you could show me—when I look at a 2006 Time magazine report that shows a federally funded study found 70 percent of those taking antidepressants along with therapy, experience some improvement in mood—I still had to see it to believe it. At first, I was very skeptical of the whole idea, because I never wanted to be on any pill ever; I’m just that type of guy. My wife is a little different, because when she gets a little headache, she takes a Tylenol or two. I’m more of the type to just tough it out, and say, No, I’m just going to wait a little bit and it will go away by itself. That’s the culture down in the islands, where I grew up, and the same can be said for most men I come across, so you can imagine how skeptical I was to even think about going in to see a mental health professional.

      A bit after losing my job, I lost my apartment, and that loss eventually spread to a general loss of focus in life and on where I was supposed to be heading. At first, I thought I would be able to find employment at another car dealership, but when nothing panned out immediately, I lost hope in that, too. The depression enabled me to not give a damn from there, to throw my hands up completely. I wasn’t even trying to look for a job, to tell you the truth, even though I was on the brink of destitution. I became increasingly depressed because of losing my job and then my apartment, which made me lose all interest in everything exciting to me. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to leave the house as I felt this weight bearing down on me, kind of like I was stuck in a box.

      It got to the point where Josie gave me ultimatums concerning our life together: saying if I didn’t seek help, it could cost me my family. I had lost interest in a lot of the basic routines we had as a family. We hadn’t had sex for a long

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