Hello, I’m Mark Arnold.

Born in 1951 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised from a very young age in a south Seattle suburb, I’ve loved sports from the get-go; especially the all-American games of baseball, basketball and football. As a kid growing up through the 1950s and 60s my sports heroes were Johnny Unitas and “Hammerin” Hank Aaron, and I lived and died with their exploits, as deciphered from the Seattle Times sports page box scores, or as rarely witnessed on the old family, rabbit-eared black and white TV.

I played those sports too, and I had some talent, especially as a pass receiver and as a hitter of baseballs. By my teenage years basketball had superseded, however, and I developed a helluva fade-away jump shot while playing on my Junior High School and High School teams. In ‘67 the Seattle Supersonics hit town and I took full advantage of the cheap seats at their Seattle Center Coliseum venue to watch the great NBA stars of the day; players like Bill Russell, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson and Wilt Chamberlain, with doses of Willis Reed and Earl “the Pearl” Monroe thrown in for good measure. 

The fall of 1969 inaugurated my college years at the University of Washington, and with it my inculcation into the New Left politics and protest movements of the times. In those days I could often be found, when not on the streets demonstrating, skipping class in favor of playing basketball at the Intramural Activities Building, further developing my anti-war jump shot, so to speak. I was as opposed to the Vietnam war as anyone, but by 1972 I could sense something amiss with the New Left movement. The more extreme aspects, SDS/Weatherman et al, were inclining towards violence in their protest, to me a fact hypocritical on its face with being “anti-war”; and other aspects of the movement had begun to factionalize, as the feminist, gay rights, and Black power groups gained steam.

Thus, in the summer of ’72, I simultaneously dropped out of college and left wing politics for good. After spending that summer hitchhiking around the country and living the “counter-culture” hippy lifestyle, I came back to Seattle, got a job and, after a fashion, “went straight.” I suppose another way of saying it is that I “got religion,” but not in the fundamentalist Christian sense, though I have nothing against that. What I mean by that term is that I came to realize our spiritual nature as beings, and our mutual responsibility for each other and for all of life. 

And I’m not being glib in saying that–from the mid 1970s on, for nearly 50 years now, I have devoted my life to helping others achieve their own awareness spiritually; to survive better, and to reach their potential in all aspects of their lives. Paralleling that career, and after confronting some of the mistakes of my youth, I became concerned about the direction our country has taken, especially since World War II, and have devoted many hours to researching history, politics and lately philosophy in an effort to understand and ultimately explain what happened.

A few years ago I created this website, “From A Native Son,” as a logical adjunct to research. I took the site’s name from the Steve Goodman song, “City of New Orleans,” which Arlo Guthrie had a hit with back in the early ’70s. One of the main lines in the song , “Good morning America, how are ya? Said don’t ya know me, I’m your native son?”, captured the sense of alienation many of my generation felt in our youth with respect to our country. The line always resonated with me, in a way motivating my search to discover what happened. Where did we, and our nation, go off the rails? And so, the purpose of “From A Native Son” is to provide an outlet for my writings and insights gained from that research; to function as my tool to help assert my keenly felt responsibility to assist our nation, the United States, to chart a better course; one more conducive to survival for ALL people. Along the way it has become increasingly obvious to me that the biggest challenge we face as a people is the preservation and continued assurance of our natural Human Rights as beings, which are part and parcel to our spiritual nature; inalienable and intrinsic to that nature. 

Founded primarily, as Thomas Jefferson said, to secure those rights, I believe the TRUE narrative of the Unites States across the last 250 years has been its struggle within itself to make those rights manifest for ALL people. It’s a struggle that continues to this day, and if we are ever to achieve the long sought goal “Peace on Earth,” it’s a struggle we must win. Acknowledging this, in his famous 1963 “Peace Speech” at American University, President Kennedy said:

“All this is not unrelated to world peace. ‘When a man’s ways please the Lord,’ the Scriptures tell us, ‘he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.’ And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature provided it—the right of future generations to a healthy existence?”

Thus, though I will always write about sports from time to time, or other subjects as they interest me or are fun, most of what you will see on the pages of this website from here on out will be dedicated to the preservation and restoration of Human Rights for ALL people. It is my wish that you learn from what I provide here, and ultimately join me in the fight.