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In the Presence of Evil… Run

My problem is I always ran towards it

Thomas Plummer
Blue Insights
Published in
3 min readJan 2, 2025

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By author on Canva

My preacher told me if I found myself in the presence of evil… run!

And run I did, but usually toward whatever bad choice enticed me at the time, and I was pretty fast back in those days.

This was back in the day when girls wearing red lipstick to the high school dance were called out in church, the days where boys with hair long enough to hang a little over their collars were shamed by teachers. The magazines showed women in dance clubs in New York and London, skinny as twigs my mother said, but the girls in my school were made to kneel on the floor, and if their dresses didn’t touch the floor, they were sent home to change.

The late sixties were the days of radical change in America, slowly seeping into the small farm towns of Southern Illinois, where the elders clung to the 50s, but the kids whispered about topless hippies wallowing in the mud and we cut yards or babysat to buy albums of longhaired bands from England in leather vests and torn jeans, music which would define our lives in the lost years of the 70s.

I couldn’t understand why red lips, long hair and short dresses were evil and I wanted to dance with it, offer it one of the beers I stole from my dad’s garage refrigerator, and maybe one day kiss those lips, but I was…

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Blue Insights
Blue Insights

Published in Blue Insights

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Thomas Plummer
Thomas Plummer

Written by Thomas Plummer

A simple life dedicated to leaving the world a little better than I found it. Long career in the business of fitness, writer of books, speaker, personal coach.

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