I feel bad because I don't know how long it was there and I only noticed it when I stepped on it with bare feet, but somebody left a yellow flower at my door a few days ago. Such a vague little gesture that I can't even guess at its meaning, and yet it must have one because its placement was clearly premeditated because my door is separated from the sidewalk by at least two meters and a fence. Nobody could have dropped the flower there by accident. They could have flung it, perhaps, if they were walking by with it and something startled them, but that seems contrived. Only like five people still in Logan are supposed to know where I live, and I can rule out three of them, leaving one or both of my next-door neighbors who hate me as the most plausible candidates. Maybe I have a stalker, but I couldn't begin to guess who that would be when there isn't currently a single woman at work or church that I've ever had a conversation with. If someone is stalking me based on my looks alone she's in for quite a disappointment.

Of course, I'm not assuming any romantic intent behind it since I don't know what intent was behind it but that would still be weird if a guy did it so I'm assuming a guy didn't do it. I looked up the symbolism of yellow flowers specifically: joy, sunshine, friendship, new beginnings. But was that level of thought put into the color scheme, or does all the intended symbolism rest in the plant genitals themselves regardless of detail? Anyway, I put the flower in a bottle of water and left it outside but it died quickly. I laid it to rest on the concrete lip around my doorway. It disappeared. Either an animal that eats dead yellow flowers but not grass wandered through, or whoever gave it to me took it back. I've kept a casual eye out for that type of flower growing anywhere around here with no success so far. It was either purchased somewhere or plucked a considerable distance away. Since I didn't have the foresight to get a picture of it, you'll have to take a leap of faith and trust me.

A few days later, someone left me cookies, and I reached a logical conclusion and got all excited that my stalker was stepping up her game. But then one of the five people still in Logan who are supposed to know where I live admitted to leaving them just as a random nice gesture. How was I supposed to know? Who does that? So the mystery of the flower remains. Dear flower giver, if you read this, I was just kidding when I called you a stalker. Don't be hurt by my lack of reaction or response, as there was really nothing I could do when I have no idea who you are or what the little yellow flower was supposed to mean. Please feel free to keep leaving stuff or doing whatever else you have in mind, unless you're a guy. It's fine if you just want to be friends but it would still be weird if you're a guy.

An even more surprising but more easily explained surprise came in the form of an email from Debbie, whom long-time readers of this blog will remember from a long time ago. I've been thinking about her periodically since she is in large measure responsible for the direction my life has taken and it just makes me wax philosophical about how events build on each other and how God brings things about and so on. During the summer of '16 she often texted me in the evenings to say I could come over, so I dropped everything and rushed over and we sat on the balcony outside her apartment and talked. Then her neighbor Steve usually came home from work while we were talking and she invited him to join us. I kept my feet propped up on the third chair hoping he would take a hint, but he wouldn't. As things turned out I remained friends with Steve long after Debbie and I parted ways, and he stayed in the same apartment complex, and last year when I found out someone was selling his contract here I jumped at the chance to be his neighbor, changing wards for the first time in seven years and embarking on a fresh start that so far has been an epic disaster. But I know God wanted me here for some reason.

Anyway, the email was full of feedback that I had long ago accepted I would never receive for the book manuscript I sent her fifty-six months ago, back when I used to send it out to people who said they would read it and then didn't. I hadn't actually asked for any feedback but she gave me some for the first chapter and it was so brilliant that I knew I needed her to critique the whole thing before I dared try to publish it. And then she just got busy and stopped. And then almost a year later when she broke my heart she tried to cheer me up by telling me she'd started reading it again, and that was the last I heard of it until just the other day. My first reaction to the email was "Holy crap" and my second reaction was embarrassment that she read such an old draft. I've learned a lot and done plenty of revising since then and compared to my current draft, the one she has in her possession is garbage. I'm not even sure how much of the feedback is still applicable. Do you see, Debbie? I moved on. I got stronger. I don't need you anymore. In all seriousness though, it was great to hear from her.

Fifty-six months. I had to check the math again because I couldn't believe it.

This is a nostalgic time of year already, even more so than usual for me, because today I've been in Utah for nine years. Nine years is almost ten years which is a sacred number to humans. Usually 7-Eleven celebrates the anniversary of my arrival by giving out free Slurpees but it's canceled this year because I've written one too many controversial things. As ridiculous as this will sound coming from one who just turned twenty-seven, the passage of almost a decade makes me feel very old. Because in human terms, not getting into the geological timescale where our existence as a species represents only a couple minutes, a decade is a freaking long time. For the overwhelming majority of us it's more than a tenth of the time we have on this planet. Often much more. In my case, I've felt for a long time like I'm going to die in my early forties, and that may just be wishful thinking on my part but I do know I haven't got a chance in hell of making it to ninety unless medical science advances sufficiently to replace every organ in my body. Which it probably will, but I won't be able to afford it because I live in a country that thinks healthcare is a privilege.

Barely out of high school, I embarked on the nightmare, I mean adventure that is adult life. I wasn't nearly as afraid as I ought to have been. As year after year has gone by I've experienced more pain than I could have imagined, much of it caused by my own mistakes that I still get to suffer from long after I've learned from them. I've grown into a different person and all that jazz. If I could go back and speak to that naive little boy, I would offer the following advice:

- Don't procrastinate.

- Don't stay up until two in the morning just because you can.

- Don't seek unhealthy coping mechanisms when you feel isolated.

- Don't isolate yourself by withdrawing from the people who actually care about you.

- Pay attention to your bank balance and email inbox.

- Don't be so dogmatic and inflexible about politics.

- Don't fall in love.

- Always pay rent on time.

- Talk to your academic advisor regularly.

- Avail yourself of the counseling services on campus that you already paid for.

- Don't be afraid to talk to the registrar's office, professors etc. when you screw up and need help. That's their job. They're not going to yell at you.

- Don't be afraid to stand up for what you believe in.

- Don't be so dogmatic and inflexible about religion.

- Seriously, don't fall in love.

- Participate in as many clubs and activities as you can before, I don't know, a global pandemic cancels all of them. Hypothetically.

- Communicate with people who are pissing you off instead of harboring silent resentment.

​- Don't work at a call center in a misguided attempt to boost your confidence.

- Don't eat too much candy.

- White privilege is real, and racism in the United States is much worse than you think it is.

- Be patient with yourself even when it seems like nobody else is.

- I'm not kidding. No matter how hard it is, don't fall in love.

Wow. I can't believe I just wrote something like that without being sarcastic. But the real treasure was the friends I made along the way. And lost. I've lost a lot of them, too. Most of the Facebook friends I met in the dorms my freshman year have unfriended me by now. But the random girl who politely declined to be kissed by me at True Aggie Night has stuck with me for all these years, and that counts for something. The girl I actually did kiss unfriended me after a few years though.

Nine years from today, I hope to be typing away at my latest upcoming bestseller, watching my dogs play in the surf beneath the glorious sunset over Bora Bora, Tahiti, a smile on my face as I think of all the money in my bank account. My wife Felicity Jones is half a world away making another Star Wars anthology spinoff prequel Disney+ exclusive series, but that's okay because one of the few things I love more than her is Star Wars. Though admittedly it's been a little less interesting ever since we made contact with actual aliens and learned the secrets of interstellar travel. At first they tried to annihilate us, but it was just a relief to finally face enemies we could actually see instead of another global pandemic, and then they apologized and we let it go because we were screwed if we kept fighting anyway. Felicity's and my adopted alien children have all grown up (they have a short life cycle) and dispersed to three far-flung solar systems which we rotate between for Easter, Christmas and St. Zarquon's Day. Most of Earth's tourism is now siphoned off to the improbable single-biome tropical planets, which is how I got this prime piece of real estate in Tahiti for so cheap, even though I could have paid a lot more because I'm loaded.

Mid-May marks the five year anniversary of this incarnation of my website, hosted by Weebly, after I moved it from the terrible company Webs that I had used since late 2010. I recently went back to my Webs account to try to recover something I had uploaded there, and they wanted me to take the exact same survey I already took twenty times when I used their company. I kept telling them how dissatisfied I was and they kept not making any improvements. But I took the survey again just to give them another piece of my mind.

Previously, I wrote blog posts whenever I felt like it. When I moved here I set a goal to write one every week, to be consistent so I could (in theory) build up a following. This forced me to adapt a little since I was now forcing myself whether the muse had hit or I had anything in mind to write about or not. The first two years of posts are juvenile garbage in terms of finding my writing voice and political philosophy, but at least I can track my progression and at least they're still better than most of the posts on my old site that are lost to time and won't be missed. The rest of my posts have ranged from occasional garbage, to mostly average, to the occasional gem that I know would have gone viral if anyone besides me had written it. My page views and search ranking have ebbed and flowed and consistently remained nowhere near where I'd like them to be after the countless hours of work I've put into this site. Has it been worth it? No, but if I quit now all that previous effort will have been wasted. So I'm here to stay unless I get hit by a truck or something.

On my home page I introduce myself as an

And now seems as good a time as any to unpack that statement and how each piece of it was carefully chosen.

Autistic - For most of my life, like everyone else in this country and probably several other countries, I've been bombarded with the loud and clear message that mentally ill or otherwise "weird" people should be feared, hated and ridiculed. So one of my highest priorities is to tell this country and probably several other countries loud and clear where they can stick that message. I hope that future generations of kids on the autism spectrum won't have to wait until their late teens or worse before figuring why they're different, that they won't face constant bullying at school for being different, that they won't be hit and yelled at by parents who think their differences are an "attitude problem", that their dating lives won't be absolute hell, and just in general that they won't learn to hate themselves for being different. I'm contributing to this shift in my woefully limited way by refusing to be embarrassed about the way God made me.

I got in an argument with my parents once about how I present myself to the world, as they subscribe to more of a "Just have a positive attitude and nobody will notice something's wrong with you" line of thinking. They felt that I was holding myself back by making such a big deal out of it (as if I'm the one who decided to make a big deal out of it?). They also didn't understand the distinction betweeen lower and higher functioning autism and didn't believe that I have the latter because I didn't match their understanding of the former. I disagreed with just about everything they said, but I did make the concession of changing "Autism" to "Aspie" in my blurb to reduce the potential for such confusion. I had used the terms interchangeably for some time anyway, alternately trading off diagnostic accuracy with name recognition. At first I resented being lumped in with the lower-functioning autistics but then I decided to take on their stigma and their struggle in addition to my own. But the term "Asperger's" and its derivative nickname "Aspie" remained in use despite no longer being a thing since 2013, and like many others, I had some irrational fondness for them.

But then just recently - and in my defense I believe this has only been known for a couple years - I learned that Hans Asperger actively colluded with the Nazis by essentially signing the death warrants for several non-neurotypical children. I don't particularly care whether he was a believer in the Nazi eugenics program himself or just yet another spineless piece of crap who cooperated with what he knew was wrong. In either case, the only way he deserves to be remembered is by pissing on his grave. So I removed the word "Aspie" from my blurb and elsewhere on my site. I'm fully autistic now. I'm not sure what this means yet for the deliberately provocative title of my planned memoir Ass Burgers but I don't need to worry about that yet. On the plus side, I can take satisfaction in the fact that my existence is a living "Fick dich" to Adolf Hitler and everyone like him past and present.

Latter-day Saint - This trait is one that I chose, kind of, but it's not really much of a choice. Because I know that the Book of Mormon, the gift of the Holy Ghost, and the power of the priesthood are true, my integrity compels me to stand by those truths and affiliate with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Choosing to leave, regardless of the reasons, would require me to pretend I don't know those things are true and would be dishonest. Of course the term I originally used here and in most cases throughout my site was "Mormon" - the nickname that most people know us by and which, for some time, the Church was spending millions of dollars to promote. But a couple years ago President Russell M. Nelson announced an unprecedented institutional moratorium on said nickname and I sacrificed a great deal of my already meager Search Engine Optimization to follow the prophet. I was kind of hoping God would bless me for my obedience by increasing my site traffic anyway, which didn't happen, but whatever.

I used to have a boundless enthusiasm and grand dreams of more or less converting the world through the internet, which were kind of trampled into dust when I realized how few people actually give a crap about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. But it remains a major part of my life and who I am and I'll keep writing about it even if I'm essentially talking to myself. Being a Latter-day Saint makes me slightly less of a jerk than I would be otherwise. It gives me a reason to keep living and hoping when everything I see in the world around me compels me toward nihilism. I have no faith in humanity. I have no faith in society. I'm confident that our species, left to its own devices, would be extinct less than two centuries from now. Placing my faith and basic human need for a larger cause and higher purpose in some cheap secular alternative and pretending it was adequate would be laughable.

It's a frequent source of frustration that I still haven't figured out how to simultaneously cater to members of the Church and those who know little about it. I want to discuss the intricacies of history and culture and apologetics and philosophy and whatever, not re-explain the most basic stuff I've been hearing since I was five. And doing the latter as a hasty introduction to the former just feels lazy and inadequate. Nowadays I more or less operate on the assumption that both of the people reading any given post are Latter-day Saints or at least former Latter-day Saints. If I were Catholic or something similarly entrenched in the popular consciousness, I wouldn't have this problem. Hmmm...

Author - I write stuff, so that technically makes me an author even though I haven't yet published anything except one reused blog post in "Magnets and Ladders". In addition to weekly posts, I've put a bunch of the stuff that I've written over the years up on my site where it's consistently gotten not much attention at all. I have to wonder what I'm doing wrong when scores of people, friends as well as teachers and professors from third grade on up, have praised my writing and made it known to me over and over that I have exceptional skill, and then I upload it to share with the world and the world ignores it. I had hoped that by the time I get around to actually publishing books for money, I would have a substantial online following and I could tell them "Hey, I'm publishing books for money and you should buy them" and they would, but by now it's obvious that strategy isn't going to work out. So whatever. *hums Jordin Sparks' "One Step at a Time" to myself until I feel better*

Child of God - I added this after President Dallin H. Oaks said in General Conference last year, "Most important, each of us is a child of God with a potential destiny of eternal life. Every other label, even including occupation, race, physical characteristics, or honors, is temporary or trivial in eternal terms. Don’t choose to label yourselves or think of yourselves in terms that put a limit on a goal for which you might strive." This is a legitimate caution and similar to the concern my parents expressed. (It's not that I disagreed with them about the danger of labels so much as whether it applied with the way I was/am using mine.)

Of course, President Oaks would surely acknowledge that labels are a necessary evil for human beings to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. In God's eyes my autism may indeed be trivial, but in my current mortal state it's the exact opposite of that. So I use the label and I won't apologize for it. I imagine in the next world the label will vanish while the benefits remain. I regard the majority of people who get to decide how the world works as fake, shallow and stupid (no offense), and I'll have some choice words for God if he decides to "fix" my brain to match theirs. But I digress. I added "Child of God" to my blurb to balance out the other labels. In my church we also use the more specific terms "daughters of God" (which in practice, thanks to our chronic putting of women on pedestals, is often shorthand for "perfect angels who can do no wrong") and "sons of God", but of course this latter runs the risk of being confused with "the Son of God", and that would definitely be the case with the capitalization in my blurb so I didn't use it.

Pretty Okay Guy - I don't expect that anyone has ever gotten this reference. If you have, congratulations, you're a cultured genius. It's actually a mashup of two quotes. One from Strong Bad narrating a flashback about himself in Strong Bad Email #100: "Everyone loves Strong Bad. He is an okay guy."

And the other from the song "So They Say" in "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog":

This is perfect for me
So they say
I guess he's pretty okay
After years of stormy
Sailing have I finally found the bay?

I like this statement because it's so obviously tongue-in-cheek, yet legitimately self-affirming, yet too modest in scope to be boastful (which I also find more amusing now in juxtaposition with "Child of God"). I do think I'm a pretty okay guy. I make no claims to be a great guy. If anyone wants to think I am, they're welcome to, but I haven't set the bar that high for myself. "Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips." (Proverbs 27:2) I just think I've done as well with the crap I've been given in life as anyone could but, and this will come as no real shock to anyone who's read many of my posts, I have plenty of room for improvement. It's a good thing I'm still young and have plenty of time for said improvement unless I get hit by a truck or something.

In case you missed the memo, I got accepted to graduate school at the best university of all the one universities I've ever attended. Now I would like to add that a couple days after I accepted their acceptance, they offered me a graduate instructor position, which was part of my hope and intention all along but not guaranteed. If I accept this offer I will be teaching introductory English courses to freshman for a salary that covers the graduate degree. And I intend to accept it, but I haven't yet because I have until April 15 and I don't want to look desperate. Maybe this is a test. Maybe if I respond too quickly they'll be like "Sorry, we don't want desperate people on our faculty. Actually, we don't want them as students either. Try your luck at BYU-Idaho next time." That's not a risk I'm willing to take.

Not long ago there was no way in hell I'd seriously consider becoming a teacher of all things. Public speaking meets grossly underpaid babysitting gig? No thanks. But God has basically told me to become a teacher. My father has said more than once that he thinks I would be a good teacher, specifically at relating to the students who don't fit in. Charles Waugh, the professor who urged me to consider graduate school, also specifically mentioned the graduate instructor thing and that he thought I would be a good fit. Okay, so I'm a phenomenal writer, but communicating these things verbally to a roomful of people is a different skill set altogether and I have no clue what any of these people see in me that makes them think I have it. In theory I'll find out.

All I've taught so far in my life are a handful of Sunday school lessons and, more recently, a couple of Come Follow Me discussion groups. And my first attempt at a Sunday school lesson was so abysmal that I hate myself every time I think about it, but I do much better now because I don't do much at all. With the Come Follow Me lessons I basically spend half an hour jotting down questions and discussion prompts, and then use them to make everyone else do most of the talking, which creates an enjoyable experience for all but mostly me. On the rare occasion that nobody responds immediately, I'm not afraid to wait them out. Awkward shmawkward. As Alanis Morrissette once queried,

English classes at USU are also very discussion-based, so much so that many of them are limited to twenty students and very difficult to get into. But nonetheless I'll have to do a lot more preparing and a lot more talking. There's a specific amount of material I'll have to cover and there are actual curricular criteria I'll have to prepare these kids for. And despite my best efforts to be a fun, laid-back teacher that everyone loves, I'll have to grade them honestly and give them Ds and Fs if that's what they've earned, and then they'll hate me and try to get me fired. And at the end of the semester all of them will anonymously fill out evaluations of information including but not limited to all the ways in which I suck. Also, it will probably take me at least a month to memorize all their names and preferred pronouns. I forget so many names sometimes I could swear I have dementia.

I can't say no to this opportunity, yet it terrifies me. I try to comfort myself by thinking of all the times I moved past my fears and it was totally worth it. But then I can't think of any and I remember that actually most of the times I moved past my fears, terrible things happened to me. It's almost as if fear is a normal healthy instinct programmed to protect me or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So I remind myself that I worked at a call center for nearly four months so I can definitely do this. I mean, yeah, I got progressively worse at the call center job as my sleep and will to live decreased every week, and I would let everyone I love starve to death before I'd do it again, but I did it. Yay me. I'm so strong. (You know it's time for a career change when you catch yourself thinking If I jump in front of that truck, I won't have to go to work today.) Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt that this will be better than working at a call center. Clearing an elephant's bowel blockage with my tongue would also be better than working at a call center.

Probably the first couple weeks will be stressful and awful and full of no sleep whatsoever, but then they'll get better and my silly little worries will evaporate and I'll be so good they'll beg me to stay on and I'll get job offers from all over the country. Who can say? One way or another it will be an adventure. With any luck it will be an incredible opportunity to indoctrinate young, plastic minds with my worldview, instill them with a passion for the written word, and become too absorbed in a fulfilling and rewarding career path to ever be bored or fall in love again. It's not going to make me rich, but that's what my books are for. In theory. (Memo to future tenured self: assign your students to read your books so at least somebody will.)

Keen-eyed readers will note that my site looks a little different now. Weebly stopped updating or supporting my previous "theme" so it started to have annoying problems like the menu icon being invisible on the mobile version that most people use. This theme is working out better but will take some fine-tuning to get exactly the way I want it, or as close to exactly the way I want it as I can get without the bother of learning to code.

I am profoundly fatigued from my eternal sleep deprivation, which has robbed me of the stamina to complete the much better post I had planned for this weekend. Nonetheless, yesterday was the first truly happy day I've had since the incident that I keep going on about. The weather here in Logan, Utah was so gorgeous that it felt like a sin to not spend every moment of daylight outside, so I, limited by my unusually tired legs, took several brief walks punctuated by resting on benches and in grass. I also learned two very welcome pieces of information: that I've been accepted for graduate school here at USU, and a family matter that I suppose isn't my place to publicly announce at this time. The graduate school thing comes as no surprise because a. God has been pushing me to do it and b. honestly, if I wasn't good enough to make the cut, they'd only have like five graduate students at most. But having it confirmed gives me one fewer thing to worry about until the reality of what I've gotten myself into sinks in.

With higher brain functions and meaningful accomplishments like my Indiana Jones fan fiction off the table for the time being, I've lapsed into one of my music addiction phases. During these periods I rarely take my headphones off except to charge them, but even more so than listening to the songs I already know and love, I become obsessed with acquiring more and building playlists. The Spotify playlist I'm on now, "Gimme Some Space" - a spacelist if you will, a love letter to astronomy and science fiction and pretentious crap like the yearnings of the human heart - is, for better and worse, easier than some to expand. This list is arranged by topic rather than genre. Obviously it leans a lot toward electronic music that people associate with space but I try to make it as diverse as possible. So at any time I can search out more musical candidates by entering keywords associated with astronomy and/or science fiction, listen to each one time, and if I don't hate it then onto the list it goes. I spent more time than I'd care to admit on this pursuit yesterday.

As of this writing, without consciously setting out to do so, I've ended up so far with eleven versions of David Bowie's magnum opus "Space Oddity" - the original version and ten covers. I also have sixteen versions of Peter Schilling's unauthorized sequel "Major Tom (Coming Home)" - the original German version, two remixes of the German version, a cover of the German version, the official English version, two remixes of the English version, four covers of the English version, four remixes of one of the covers of the English version, and a French cover. I'm way more excited about this than I should be. Probably the only song on the list that outnumbers those ones is the Star Wars theme, which comes under so many different titles ("Star Wars", "Main Theme", "Main Theme from Star Wars", etc.) that I can't be bothered to quantify it scientifically. But I could do worse than to keep replicating three of the best compositions in the universe.

The major downside of these phases is that I go to bed after a day of being obsessed with music, and my brain is like a radio that I can't turn off. One song after another after another. It makes getting to sleep even more difficult than usual and as a result I'm even more fatigued today than yesterday. Of course I know this will happen and try to be responsible and limit myself, but I am weak and subject to all manner of temptations of the flesh. Especially when I'm tired. Which is always. I've loved space stuff for a very long time and I think I've latched onto this playlist because of the spirit of escapism it embodies, which is also something I wrote about in my declaration of intent when I needed some pompous academic language to explain why I should be accepted for graduate school, and it worked. Anyway, here's the playlist in case I've sufficiently piqued your curiosity.

To say that Hitler's Nazis killed eleven million people doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how evil they were. Murder is bad and all, but in my view, there are many, many things worse than death, and the Nazis did most of them to people. I assume most people have learned at some point in detail about the atrocities of the Holocaust, yet it seems to me that in American popular culture we typically represent Nazis as one-dimensional stock villains who just want to take over the world for vague unspecified evil reasons. This glaring discrepancy is why Steven Spielberg could no longer use Nazis as Indiana Jones villains after making "Schindler's List", and in recent days has also caused me some discomfort as I'm revisiting an Indiana Jones fan fiction based on a rejected screenplay that I started over a decade ago. The truth is awkward. I don't believe all my suffering in the past decade, considerable though it is, would measure up to even a week in a Nazi concentration camp.

And of course, the Nazis' atrocities against the Jews should never ever ever be downplayed, but they do tend to get all the attention, with other persecuted groups who together constituted their other five million victims all but forgotten from our collective memory. This week an excellent op-ed appeared called "Why Nazi Atrocities Against Gay Men Must Never Be Forgotten". (Specifically men, yes, as the author briefly notes that "they viewed lesbianism as a temporary condition so they suffered less", and I in turn note an interesting parallel to what I've read about medieval views of homosexuality, in which female same-sex crimes were given much more leniency because women were stupid and emotional and less responsible for their actions. Yay for misogyny?) Ironically, given how little attention this subject has received, the first time I heard the word "homosexuals" (though I'd already been called "faggot" several times a day for a few years by that point) was in sixth grade when a teacher listed off groups of people that the Nazis persecuted.

Alan Keele likewise noted in his review "Mormons and Nazis", "While visiting in 2007 the Villa Wannsee, outside Berlin, site of the infamous planning meetings for the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Problem' presided over by Adolf Eichmann, I was intrigued – and, frankly, shocked – to learn from a display there that from within Germany proper – not counting places outside its borders like Poland with much larger Jewish populations – the Nazis actually murdered more homosexuals even than Jews.

"I am convinced that the sobering fact of the existence and extent of such homicidal Nazi homophobia, if more widely known and better understood among Mormons today, could have an important tempering effect on current thinking about how disciples of the Prince of Peace should speak about and behave toward members of the LGBT community, especially recalling how homophobia was falsely viewed in the Third Reich as a lofty moral position, the taking of a righteous religious stand against sinful monsters portrayed by Fascist hate-mongers as an imminent danger to society....

"This is by no means an abstract concern. I have witnessed several things, some quite recently, that both shocked and horrified me. In my High Priests’ meeting in early 1994, a retired Seminary and Institute teacher, a man I very much admire, a war hero seriously wounded during the Battle of the Bulge, worked himself into a rage over the fact that President Clinton had invited gays to march in his inaugural parade. Growing more angry by the moment, he opined that gays should not be allowed to take employment or find housing. When someone asked him how he expected them to live, he finally sputtered that all queers should probably be taken out and shot."

In fairness, taking them out and shooting them would be much nicer than what the Nazis actually did to them.

An older but very educational article that also came to my attention outlined "In Germany’s extermination program for black Africans, a template for the Holocaust". Besides showing how the "Final Solution" for Jews and others directly evolved from Germany's genocide against black Africans in what is now Namibia, it explores the intertwining with eugenics and the civil rights movement in the United States. The concept of exterminating "undesirable" types of people really was born in the United States from brilliant minds like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, but it was mostly about not letting them reproduce, and Germany watched these developments with interest and decided to improve on them by adding unspeakable torture and mass murder. When the United States saw that, they were all like "Woah, guys, we're as racist as the next country, probably more so in fact, but too much is too much." It forced more than a little bit of soul-searching.

Tangent: The United States' history of forced sterilizations is not ancient history. The article notes that in North Carolina they "continued into the 1970s, long after Hitler fell", but I also remember less than seven years ago when doctors in California were exposed for sterilizing at least 148 women in prison between 2006 and 2010. I was immersed in right-wing Facebook pages and news sources at this time and I remember well that this was pretty much the only thing California ever did that they agreed with. Typical comments from self-proclaimed conservatives ran along the lines of "I don't see the problem here!" and "They should sterilize the men too!" A self-proclaimed conservative myself, it nonetheless made me sick. There are few times when it's okay to compare people to Hitler, but this was one of them.

Hitler said a few nasty things about black people in his book. But the Nazis themselves, unlike their predecessors in Namibia, never got around to an orchestrated campaign against black people because there weren't very many in Germany or nearby. They had a relatively low number of young mixed-race people in the Rhineland (descended from black French troops) whom they sterilized in 1937, and as horrible as that is, it remains one of the least of their atrocities. And when black American athlete Jesse Owens totally humiliated them in the 1936 Olympics, they were nonetheless PR-savvy enough to treat him better than the United States did. Though by no means oblivious to the Nazis' animosity toward him, he famously opined, "Hitler didn’t snub me; it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send a telegram." If the Nazis had won World War II, though - which was never much of a risk given Hitler's incompetence at military strategy, but if they had somehow, it wouldn't have been long before they swept over Africa and added a few tens of millions more mutilated corpses to their resume.

This actually has some relevance to my aforementioned fan fiction which, as per the screenplay it's based on, has Nazis as the villains and takes place in black Africa in 1937. Back in tenth grade or so I made a point of playing up the racism aspect that the screenplay completely ignores (and adding a bit of American racism as well, because they don't deserve to get off the hook either, though the protagonist himself is canonically established as way ahead of his time on racial equality). But revisiting it now, I still feel uncomfortable because that still doesn't come close to adequately conveying how evil Hitler and his ilk truly were. It's even putting a bit of a damper on my longtime love for the Indiana Jones franchise.

It bears repeating that if there is no God and no afterlife, Hitler and his Nazis won, and their victims lost in a very big, very permanent way.