Our Future

Our Future

Here’s what I remember.  A time when I could run to a plane five minutes before it took off, disembark onto a Florida tarmac under balmy skies and waving palms to pick my bags off an outdoor carousel with no one watching.  Entebbe changed that.  I’ve learned to deal with taking off my shoes and throwing out my 4 ml bottles at security, standing in front of a machine to be body searched and standing in line, sometimes for hours to have my ID inspected. 

Here’s what I remember.  Going to Washington DC and visiting the White House, the Capitol, the museums and memorials without walking through metal detectors or standing behind barricades hundreds of yards away.  911 changed that.

Here’s what I remember.  Watching Sesame street and Mr. Rogers (actually I never liked him) or Howdy Doody (yeah really.)  My violent show was Rin Tin Tin who was so cute you couldn’t really hate when he bit somebody.  Now I visit my grandchildren to find them spending multiple hours a day with their friends from all over the country, engaging in social network war games where they kill the enemy and splatter his brains and guts all over the tv screen with as much emotion as they would swat a fly.  Sandy Hook will change that.  

This is the choice.  If we don’t step up and control our guns, we will do something.  William Bennet, conservative former secretary of Education suggested that it might be appropriate to have an armed guard in our schools.  That won’t be enough.  We’ll need barricades too, metal detectors, and preferably towers at each corner with machine gun nests to keep watch on all incoming traffic.  Our children won’t be able to carry back packs.  They’ll take their shoes off and God forbid they forget their ID.  They’ll enter school having transmitted their homework over secure networks, (hopefully no child pornography hackers will get a hold of that) ready to sit down and concentrate on the wonderful world of learning, trying not to look at the guard towers.  We as a country will be secure in knowing that our children will be better equipped to form “well regulated militias’ than our founding fathers ever would have imagined.  And if a bad guy enters their school and gets past the guards they’ll be right there to blow him away with their own guns.  Because, by then you know there will be plastic guns that they can get through any metal detectors anyway.

Gun Control

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre we had best wake up from our collective coma or we will surely perish from it.  It is time for thinking people to acknowledge the peril we face from the unchecked viral proliferation of mass killing machines.  Guns have become our e-bola virus, highly contagious with a 90% mortality rate.  (Only one victim out of 27 survived the Sandy Hook shooting.)  E-bola wipes out families and villages and if, God-forbid, it breaks out into the mainstream, it would be like the opening of Pandora's proverbial box.  But guns have gone viral, and they are killing our society.  There are so many arguments and arguers against gun control that it seems impossible we will ever agree on limiting them.  But I would like to address the ones I've seen and then make a proposal.
1)  To limit the ownership of guns in any way is a basic infringement of our second amendment rights.
              Let's look at the second amendment.
      A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
              What is a well regulated militia today?  Is it the United States Army Reserve, an organization set up to perform only part-time duties, but that has been a mainstay of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan during the longest uninterrupted period of war in our history?  That militia is armed by our government.  Or is it the Aryan Nation that claims no allegiance to the United States and arms themselves?  The concept of private citizens protecting themselves from our own military with their own weapons as a guarantee of a secure free state is ludicrous.  Will our assault rifles secure us against drones and tanks?  Or maybe we should be allowed to own those too.  The founding fathers bought and sold slaves and wrote that into their Constitution.  Times have changed.

2)  Guns don't kill people.  People kill people.
               Wrong.  Guns do kill people.  It has been shown that the animal kingdom is divided into two broad categories of "predator" and "prey." (On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz.)  Predators are aggressors with natural weapons of sharp teeth, talons and muscles.  When predators fight within their own species the fight to a ritual death, (a dog clamps his fangs around the jugular vein of his opponent, but the fight stops there.)  There is an innate neurological tabu against killing a member of its own species.  That makes sense.  Predators are skilled at killing and prey are skilled at escaping.   If predators had no innate mechanism to stop them from annihilating their brothers, it would portend the end of that species.  Prey are not so prone to those same inhibitions.  Their skills are defensive and so they have not developed those biological fail-safe stop gaps to the same degree.  Humans are prey.  We have no natural weapons.  Our teeth are vegetarian choppers.  Our eyes are relatively weak.  Our nails are short and we aren't very strong or quick.  We've survived because we have a brain that presumably is more ingenious than our predator foes.  We can think and evade.  We still do have an inborn resistance to killing our own kind, but it is relatively weak.  When confronted with the option of killing another human being face to face, one on one, or running away, most of us would do the latter.  (The peer pressure of an army is enough to change that equation for most human beings.)  But as the killing distance between us increases, the biological imperative becomes weaker, and killing becomes easier.  Guns allow that distance to exceed our genetic balance, to say nothing of bombs and drones.  So yes, people kill people.  But they kill far more with guns than they ever would with fists or knives.

3)  We need guns to protect ourselves from the bad people out there.
                 Yes, there are bad people out there.  There are angry people, violent psychotic people, violent depressed people and psychopaths.  What would save more lives, arming everyone to the teeth (as we are now,) or removing the vast majority of those weapons from our society.  In 2008 and 2009, 5,740 children and teenagers were killed by guns and 34,387 were wounded.  Those are just the children!   If we live in a world where every single person needs a gun to protect his life from someone else with a gun, then it is a psychotic world we live in.  In the 30 years since statistics were first gathered in 1979, 116,384 children and teenagers were killed by guns, 42.7 times the number in a group of other high income countries!!!  What is wrong with us.?

4)  Gun control wouldn't stop the problem.
                  There is no rational argument for automatic weapons at all.  Self protection, hunting and target shooting, the three reasons that gun advocates have for owning weapons, can all be satisfied with revolver pistols and bolt action rifles.  The only reason to own an automatic, or semi-automatic gun is because "it's fun" or because it kills easier.  Well excuse me, but shooting a rocket propelled grenade may also be fun, but too bad, you can't do it legally.  Buy a Wii.
                    And isn't it a little nuts that you can't drive a car without passing a written test and a driving test, but a 5 year old can use an assault rifle if his parent lets him.

So, what do we do?  There are enough guns in the United States to arm every man, woman and child!  And anyone can get them.  Let's make them illegal.  It might take years.  It may take decades to save 10,000 children.  But what if one of those children were yours?

Please sign my petition and pass it on.  Maybe there is a silent, sleeping majority out there that is as outraged as I am.  Maybe it just takes one voice to wake it up and make it go viral.  And maybe that virus will defeat our e-bola.

Petition by iPetitions

Gun, guns, guns...our we out of our F**King minds?!

Is it possible that we are all just crazy?  Can there be a sane person in this country that doesn't think it madness that any insane or evil person, terrorist or murderer, can lay hands on an automatic weapon as easily as he does a bottle of water?  Can anyone possibly believe that the second amendment continues to give each citizen the right to arm himself with a modern day gun?  Where does it stop?  Should we all carry bazookas, or maybe rocket propelled grenades?  By God, the founding fathers would have insisted that we be permitted to each own a ground to air missile in order to protect ourselves from the tyranny of government, wouldn't they?  What makes us think that home of the free and land of the brave means killing our children with 50 clip magazines?  Why should anyone be permitted to purchase a killing machine with less paper work than it takes to get a park permit?  Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality that includes delusions (false beliefs about what is taking place) or hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that aren't there.)  What is it called when an entire country has lost contact with reality and the people believe they need to arm themselves against a government trying to enslave them?  (Maybe it's called the United States of America.)  It's not guns that kill, it's people, right?  We need to arm ourselves for protection against the crazies.  Well then let's give a handgun to each of our children for his or her fifth birthday, because it looks like they're going to need it. 

Politics as usual

Does it seem as ridiculous to everyone else as it does to me, that our presidential candidates are embroiled over the question of when President Obama declared that our Libyan ambassador was killed by terrorists or by an angry mob?  I was going to ask "who cares?" but obviously there seem to be a lot of people that do.  But why should we care?  Is it really important that we called the killers terrorists?  And what if, in fact, the government messed up with security arrangements in Benghazi?  Someone obviously did, but then again, someone caught a young terrorist (or was he just a crazy madman?) about to blow up the federal reserve in New York, before he did it.  Do we assign blame for everything that goes wrong to the President of the United States but ignore his obvious non-participation in an operation that is successful.  There are at least twenty layers of individuals and divisions at work before any plan actually gets seen by the President.  Probably 90% of those get signed off on before they ever get to him.  Of course he's in charge of the ship and responsible for putting in place the directives for those people, but who in their right mind can believe that every thing will always go perfectly?  There will inevitably be failures, and they will end up, by virtue of their violence, getting all the attention.  But there will hopefully be many more successes, most of which, we will probably never get wind of, no matter who is President of the country.  It is a very short sighted policy to criticize the President for not plugging the security holes in advance, because it is highly unlikely that any President will see out one term without occasional failures of his system.  Someone, well below his pay grade, will ok some stupid plan, like selling guns to Mexico to trace where they go, and have them end up killing Americans.  By the way, who ok'd giving weapons to Osama bin Laden to fight Russia in Afghanistan?  And why is Mr. Romney suggesting giving weapons to rebels in Syria when we're not sure where or to whom they would really be going?  So much rhetoric to convince people there is an easy solution to a nearly impossible problem.  All that we can do is try our best, and expect the worst, for someday it will surely happen somewhere.

God plays dice

     A friend of mine died this week.  He wasn't a close friend, but I knew him for 32 years and I wish we were closer.  He was a pretty incredible person and it would have been nice to know him better.  Besides being incredibly talented he was just a really nice person.  My first memory of him was when my son was joining his little league baseball team right after we moved to Florida.  He had no friends and Mark introduced him to his son, another incredibly nice and talented person.  The two of them took my son under their wing and he was immediately incorporated into their community.  For all the great talents he had, I am most enamored by his generosity of spirit.  I think your children are a reflection of what kind of person you are and he has four wonderful children who are medals on his wall of achievement.
     At the funeral his dearest friend and constant companion Jack, gave a moving and inspirational eulogy for Mark.  He noted how everyone's first thought when describing him was "renaissance man".  It's true.  He was a scientist, a writer, a musician and on and on.  He went on to recite two quotations from one of Mark's books, "God doesn't play dice with the lives of men," (Albert Einstein) and "I am what I am," (Popeye the sailor man.)
     But sitting in church and reflecting on life I had to disagree with Mark (and Al Einstein.)  God does play dice with the lives of men and with every molecule and muon in the universe.  People were looking for a reason at that funeral...a reason Mark had died two weeks shy of his 65th birthday...a reason why they wouldn't.  I looked at the stained glass windows around me depicting Christ's stations of the cross, and realized that all religion exists because people want to believe that God doesn't play dice.  But what's so wrong with believing there is no reason, that it is all just chance?  Jack related that Mark's son picked up his car from the hospital after he died and drove it back to his home.  As he parked the car he noted the odometer said 100,000 miles...exactly.  And Jack said...'there are no coincidences.'  But there are... precisely because we don't notice the hundred thousand times the odometer was off.  So what?  So what if there is no greater reason to live than to live the life Mark did, to create and to procreate.  I may disagree with Mark about God and dice, but I definitely think Popeye got it right.  We are what we are and whether we choose to make the most of it or to believe there is some higher reason, some greater reward is a very profound choice.
     It is the very reason for what I think ails our society...our world.  When mankind was young and knew nothing about the world it lived in, it is understandable that they invented gods and myths to explain it all.  And when science emerged about 500 BC and we began to learn, it is also understandable that those gods were rejected as useless crutches.  It is not surprising when mankind began to unravel the mysteries of the universe but was still fearful of death that one myth prevailed, the dream of eternal life.  But that fear and that dream have resulted in terrible things.  That fear has resulted in the dark ages, in crusades and war, in killing, in persecution, in bigotry, in hatred, in all the things religion claims to disclaim. 
    As I sat in that church I admitted (for the zillionth time) that I am frightened too, and I am jealous of those who put their faith in a higher being and feel so comforted.  But so what?  I am what I am and isn't it better to face that fear than to hide from it?  Wouldn't the world be so much better if we weren't trying to tell each other how to live, what to believe and trying to build bigger and better bombs to kill each other?  The bible did get it right.  We just don't listen.  Now that mankind has unlocked the keys of the universe it is time we let go of the myth of fear.  "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me."
    Mark had it right.  He was what he was.  I don't think it's so bad to live every day as if there were no tomorrow, every moment as if it were your 100,000th.  Goodbye my friend.  Even though I hardly knew you, I will miss you.