From the Edge of Darkness 10: Gun Gal 4

Charley Freiberg photo

When January 1 rolled around, I thought maybe I’d make a list: how many shootings take place in New Hampshire in the Concord area every week? Barely into January, there were more than 10; and then there was a school shooting elsewhere; and now, six weeks into a year that’s new enough that folks are still sometimes writing the wrong date on their checks, there have been a whole lot more local shootings, and four school shootings around the country.

I can’t tell you how many people have been shot in New Hampshire so far this year. I found that I couldn’t bring myself to write them down. I don’t have the constitutional or emotional capacity to do it every single day. I can tell you that during the short time I tried, there was at least one shooting reported at least every other day, and those were only the ones that happened in the Concord area, not in our bigger cities, not up north, not on the coast or in western NH. And I can also tell you that the shootings weren’t part of a bigger crime – not part of robberies or kidnappings, for example. They were people who knew each other shooting at each other, because apparently, that’s how many gun owners solve disagreements. One struggles not to wish they were better shots, to start solving the problem through attrition.

This past week, once again, we had to listen to our clueless leader intone “we all grieve with you” words at the families who lost loved ones in the latest school shooting. “We’re all one family in the US, united in our grief,” he said, or some such thing. Once again, he’s wrong. We aren’t one big family, and we aren’t all grieving with the families whose child or spouse or friend was murdered. We’re two families, and we’re of two completely different minds about the gun violence that’s tearing us apart. We’re families at war with each other, and it’s a war that’s literally killing us.

Members of one of those families, hearing about the latest massacre, want more fire power, more easily acquired, faster, more deadly, with fewer and fewer limitations on who can own it and where they can wield it  and what kinds of weapons  are available – the better to get the bad guy before the bad guy gets them is the disingenuous justification.

You can be pretty sure that many members of that family spent the weekend in gun shops and on line buying more weapons, while funerals for murder victims in Florida were taking place. The other family tries vainly to batten down the hatches, to make our public buildings more impervious to attack - which of course is impossible – the equivalent of buttressing up the fort during an extended siege by an enemy which is not only armed to the teeth, but is mostly invisible and living with their arsenals undetected amongst us. Besides that, we keep our fingers crossed tightly and knock wood a lot – haven’t been shot at yet!

I don’t want to hear any more about how this latest shooter is insane. Of course he’s insane – sane people don’t pick up a gun and go out shooting at other people on purpose. The same can be said about all the local gun nuts who shoot at each other or other people they know – they’re out of their right minds, too, sometimes caused by too much alcohol, or too many drugs, or too many out-of-control hormones, or too easily fired-up tempers. We don’t need to talk about what anyone knew or didn’t know, or suspected or didn’t suspect about the most recent shooter(s) – it doesn’t help to know, and it doesn’t change anything.  Shoot someone else on purpose and it’s a given – you aren’t mentally competent, and you shouldn’t have had access to a gun. Maybe you were sane yesterday, but the day you went hunting humans, you definitely weren’t. Maybe it makes people feel better if they think someone else recognized the insanity but didn’t say anything about it before people were murdered, but it shouldn’t. The whole nation is culpable every time someone shoots up other people, because we’ve allowed it to happen, over and over again, and we do nothing – nothing - to put an end to it.

The insanity we need to talk about is our own. The insidious insanity that enables us to make mouth noises about the horror of it all, and not actually do something about the problem. The group insanity that allows us to no longer be shocked that only six weeks into a new year, we’ve already had FOUR SCHOOL SHOOTINGS and all we’ve done is pledge to make schools harder to get into – more locks, more bullet-proof glass, more metal detectors, more emergency drills. The incomprehensible insanity that keeps us from putting some serious hurt on our other family’s ability to get and hoard more weapons; that doesn’t do something big and terrible to people who own guns and don’t keep them well locked up; to people who put weapons in the hands of strangers in exchange for a few dollars and a nose-thumbing at the concept of responsibility; the insanity of encouraging commerce and manufacture of weapons for private citizens without any requirements for safety and competence. The incomprehensible insanity that lets us go along with the status quo when we know for a fact that there are many more of us than there are of them, and we all agree we want to make it stop, and yet, we don’t make it stop. How many more years, how many more politicians, how many more pay-offs, how many more threats, how many more dead children, dead neighbors, dead family members, dead friends and neighbors, before we snap out of it and act like sane people?

Are we totally stupid? Have we forgotten that there are some things about which we shouldn’t compromise? Have we lost the ability to weigh a human life against the right to own any and every gun one likes, and see that the human life is far, far more precious and worthier of preserving?

Our respect and value for human beings has been seriously eroded, replaced by an undefined we. We have the right to own guns; we are being threatened by Muslims/Mexicans/foreigners/gays/liberals/you name it. We need to hold onto every little bit of what we’ve got, and the individual who is consequently being terrorized and damaged beyond repair be damned. 

We need to snap out of it, before it’s too late. I was reminded recently of a line from Angels in America (by Tony Kushner): the Angel says “Before Life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible/ It will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.”  

We’re there, in most areas of our national experiment. And if we continue to act like the fixes are impossible, we’re going to exist for a very, very long time in the completely unbearable.  We need to howl like wolves, drowning out the snapping and snarling of the dogs who shout about gun ownership rights. We need to be loud and we need to howl daily and publically, with letters and votes and money and public shaming, until we force a change. Putting serious restrictions on weapons owned by just folks isn’t going to make any of those people’s lives impossible, but it will cut down on how many other lives have been made unbearable. 

Thank you, from the heart, to the gun-owner in Florida who voluntarily surrendered his semi-automatic weapon to the police and encouraged other gun owners to follow his lead, saying that he enjoyed his gun, but that no civilian needs to own such a thing: that man is a true American hero, and possibly the most sane amongst us. Now, how about the rest of the gun owners – are you sane enough to man up and follow his lead?


Published in the Concord Monitor, February 21, 2018, as "Stop the Carnage: Unbearable days in a gun-infested America."

Lunar Yuks

Lunar Yuks

Our whacky lunar shenanigans this year are completely charming me with their ironic humor and outright hilarity. Best jokes ever, and boy, have I appreciated the excuse to laugh, for a change.

First up: Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day, this year, is also Ash Wednesday, which is the first day of Lent. Lent, for those of you who don’t know, is the period of many weeks that precedes Easter, and it’s a very somber time in the Christian calendar. We, as a human group, have been very, very bad; and one of us is going to save all of us from ourselves by becoming the ultimate sacrifice.

Catholics, and maybe Episcopalians, go to church on Ash Wednesday to get their foreheads smeared with an oily mix of ashes, in the shape of a cross. “Remember, Man,” the priest intones, looking deeply into their eyes as he makes the ashy symbol on each church members’ forehead, “that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Bummer! Modern translation: Okay, bub, here’s the truth – whatever you like to think about how great and worthwhile you are, actually, you’re nothing - just dirt. Not only that, but you’re going to die, die, die, dirt eternal!

During Lent, many Christians make some sort of sacrifice to honor the ultimate sacrifice the Saviour made. Many of those Lenten sacrifices are to give up something that’s a luxury, or enjoyable – like chocolate!  (When we were kids, my mother the pope gave us special dispensation to take a single day off from our Lenten dessert fast on St. Patrick’s day, so I could eat a piece of my friend Wendy’s birthday cake.) 

So today, after being reminded in pretty basic terms that essentially you’re a worthless clod of dirt, this year you then show up for your Valentine’s Day date, still wearing your ashy cross (because you aren’t supposed to wash it off). Your honey looks deeply into your eyes, and tells you that you’re the most important thing in the world and a cherished gem…and presents you with a lovely, specially-made heart-shaped luxurious dessert that you can’t eat because you just gave up sweet things for Lent!

This year’s celestial layers of irony about one's essential worthiness, and what one gives up and what one is given (remind anyone of a particular Christmas story about haircombs and watches?), have had me giggling all day. But the better celestial joke is yet to come.

Easter is the day the Saviour rose from the dead, saving mankind from – well, from being nothing but an eternal pile of dust, essentially. Through his mercy, we become cherished children of God again. And the Easter Bunny shows up with basketloads of chocolates to reward us for our long Lenten sacrifice.

Except this year – April Fools!

Lunar Strangeness

January was a blue moon month –two full moons; and that February is, consequently, a no-moon month – how often does that happen, and what is it called? And that means that March will also have two full moons. Checking The Old Farmer’s Almanac ahead for the rest of the year, there are no more blue moons scheduled, and certainly no more missing-moon months. Checking the Space.com website – which is a kind of nifty website, it turns out – they call January’s second full moon the “Super Blue Blood Moon” and inform us that there will also be a total lunar eclipse of it. 

There are a couple of other interesting juxtapositions in the first quarter of this year: Valentine’s Day is also Ash Wednesday, which means some folks who get chocolates from their sweetie on Valentine’s Day won’t be able to eat any because they gave up chocolate for Lent; and my favorite – Easter Sunday is also April Fool’s Day! There’s cosmic commentary for you!

The critters get kind of whacky around full moons, and last month was no exception. The Barkie Boy nightly delivered a squeaky toy that he dropped at my feet so I could toss it down the hall, over and over and over, making it squeak dementedly as he raced back with it in his mouth. Not bad for a mostly-deaf 16-year-old hound. Catman was in full, overloaded coon cat mode: shredding whatever caught his attention with his extra-large paws, in an elegant long stretch taking up more than half the critters’ side of my bed and daring the Barkie Boy to do anything about it, leaving the dog to curl up in a tight, nervous ball at the foot of the bed; and demanding attention and hissing when he doesn’t get enough. 

Winter Lace; Deb Marshall photo

Beastreau Biscuit, besides doing a rocket-speed race around the house every so often for no apparent reason, has renewed her dedicated mousing night-time activities – that kind of stimulation I can happily support, unless she brings another live one up from the cellar to join the fall kitchen mouse in the pantry, where it seems to have moved and has wreaked havoc with a bag of peanut butter cups I forgot was stashed there.  

I think I’m happier with the mousie hiding somewhere in the pantry than I was when it was doing a nightly dance across the top of my kitchen counters. The ripening tomatoes have been safe, and I’m not constantly cleaning up mousie poop, but I haven’t managed to discover where pantry mouse is nesting, yet.  Many bags of strong-smelling mint have been scattered about the pantry shelves, hoping to discourage Mousie, and I just hope that doesn’t drive her back into the kitchen. Some day soon (after I’ve finished the tax prep, after I’ve gotten a few other important items scratched off the to-do list) I’m going to have to haul everything out of the pantry and see if I can find Mousie’s lair.

Full moons affect people, too. I can guarantee that more than half my patients will find themselves more sensitive to needle insertion for the week surrounding a full moon, and when I was teaching t’ai chi, there would be a week when no one could remember moves they’d done for a decade, they’d lose their balance, and it was hard to keep the class’s attention. Students who are psychiatrists or psych nurses have told me they dread full moon nights – their patients will have exacerbated symptoms, and whoever’s on call is sure to be called, over and over. Policemen also tell us that full moons create interesting work conditions.

People are animals, deep under the skin, no matter how sophisticated we think we are. The full moon pulls on the sea that is us, as surely as it changes the size of tides in the ocean. We may not notice that we’ve been affected, but we should just assume we are. 

Which makes me extra nervous about our current state of affairs. We have a man-child sitting in the President’s seat, who has proven over and over that he has little sense about what’s appropriate and no filters; and he’s surrounded by advisors – and maybe a few keepers who must be frustrated, irritated, and who are only partially successful – who are as tone-deaf or as self-centered and sociopathic as the man-child himself. Congress, which is filled with more patron-sensitive lackeys than patriots, has proven itself incapable of doing anything that it bipartisanly agrees on, much less the things it can’t agree on – it’s not going to save us if the man-child throws a dangerous tantrum. Alas.

I’m not sure what ancient peoples did to calm the waters during crazy times, but maybe we should find out and try it. Nothing else seems to be working.

And just in case keep your fingers crossed for the next few months, don’t walk under any ladders, don’t cross any black cat’s path, and don’t read Twitter rants.  A little salt tossed over one’s shoulder wouldn’t hurt, especially if it happened to disable a certain someone's technology toys.