This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

And we continue with our American stories.

Up next, a listener's story from Brent Timmons, who listens to us on Spotify in Delaware.

Today, Brent shares with us a story called Under My Thumb.

Take it away, Brent.

35 years after I'd spent the better part of a summer in Louisville with my Uncle Bud and Antinca,

we sat at her dining room table with my wife Tina.

Our four kids played in the adjacent room. We listened to music from 1969. A black woman,

Nina Simone, sang haunting songs about the mistreatment of African American women in 1960s society.

Uncle Bud talked about the glory days of sitting on his front porch

with Tinka and her friends in the early 70s,

discussing how they were going to make the world a better place to live,

a world where everyone respected the rights of everyone else.

All they would need was love. We talked about Abe

Lincoln's depression, and how ironic it was that such a depressed man would take on such a

depressing job of leading this country through a war, ironically, to attempt to save it. We talked about

how he must have laid in bed at night and wept as he thought

about Americans killing Americans in an effort to forge a united country. We talked about Tinka

crying upon hearing the news of Kent State, learning again about Americans killing Americans

in an effort to define themselves as a country. We didn't discuss the things that an

eight-year-old and a 31-year-old spoke of during that summer in 1969. We had matured 36 years.

...