The Subtle Landscape

If you don’t know what that building is and the role it played in the shaping of our country, you should be ashamed of yourself and in a way are partially responsible for the antics of the morons currently ‘governing’ us from television studios in Washington DC.  As Jefferson wrote: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be”.

It is Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the place where the Declaration of Independence was debated and signed and where the incredible compromises were wrought that became our constitution.  Imagine what careful deliberation and contention and resolve must have characterized those proceedings.  And oh yes, compromise.

The Founding Fathers – a bunch of farmers and shopkeepers – decided to declare their independence from an empire upon which the sun never set and figured out how to craft governing principles upon which all could agree.   Sure there was (and is) imperfection of terrible sorts only some of which have been ameliorated by amendment.  Still, the Constitution that we have today is largely the same document as the one adopted September 17, 1787 in the space you look upon above.

Why am I all worked up about it?  Well, I just returned from about ten days in Philadelphia and my hotel was not far from Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Betsy Ross’s house, and all the rest.  School’s in session so most of the guests in the hotel, and most of the tourists visiting the sites were foreign.  Sort of visiting the sites.  They weren’t open.   Imagine.  Imagine!   These educated people from around the world had chosen to take the time and go to the expense to visit the cradle of our democracy – in admiration – only to find it closed.

I watched a variety of displays of incredulity, dismay, and disappointment.  Imagine if you were from a newly democratic country on a pilgrimage anxious to genuflect and sing hallelujah only to find that the wealthiest nation on earth might not pay its bills.  Bills representing expenditures upon which there had already been agreement!

The religious metaphors in the previous paragraph are additionally apt for a reason likely not to have come immediately to mind.  I listened to several tour guides addressing different groups from disparate parts of the planet all using, one way or another, the word jihad to describe those who would let our government close for business and default on our debt.

You know what?  I’ll bet the only thing that comes to the minds of those f***ers when they hear ‘Philadelphia’ is cheese steak.

  The official NRA reaction to school shootings in general and Sandy Hook in particular, announced on December 21, was that there should be an armed guard in every school.  Apparently noting that this proposal was made on the last day of the Mayan calendar, sports team owner Mark Cuban tweeted that the NRA recommendation was what the Mayans had in mind when they predicted the world would come to an end on that day.

  A bit oblique, but I wish I’d thought to say that.  Why just public schools?  How about private schools, day care facilities, uh, movie theaters, churches, malls, factories, businesses, and oh ya post offices? Everyone should have at least a sidearm, no, a brace.

  Really, more guns are the answer?  According to Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center (and a former NRA member) more Americans die every year from gunshot injury (acts of will, emotion, accidents, and self infliction) than have from incidents of terrorism – in total – that have ever been recorded.  Every year.

  Furthermore, more Americans die from gunshot wounds every year than do citizens of the whole rest of the planet from acts of terrorism.  Yet nothing has been done to even attempt attenuation of all this carnage while, since 9/11, the search and seizure and self incrimination protections provided by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments have been reduced to a degree legal scholars would have previously thought not possible.

  It is important to acknowledge that there is no short term solution, but helpful to understand the origin and nature of the problem.  There would be no gun violence without guns, obviously.  Hunting weapons are involved in a small portion of these incidents while handguns comprise the largest.  And the industry is on record as having appealed to our “inner soldiers” by making available to the public high capacity semiautomatic pistols and ammunition originally procured by the military.

  I have hunted, own a shotgun, and have many friends for whom hunting is an important part of their lives.  Tellingly however, “there has been and continues to be a decline in hunting.  “Young people are much more interested in electronic games…”  Thus, sales of traditional sporting weapons have also been on a decline.  The arms industry has rejuvenated their markets by “heavily marketing not just semiautomatic, but military derived semiautomatic guns”.  Sales to governments are advertising and loss leaders.       

  Incredibly, there is abundant data available about what types of guns are used in what types of crimes, but both the ATF and CDC have been precluded from distributing it by acts of Congress which were initiated by the NRA.  “The data is in the files of the ATF, but it cannot release it.  [They are] forbidden by law from releasing it…. There was … peer-reviewed research about gun death and injury… but there was a funding restriction which essentially says that the CDC cannot do any research related to gun control”.

  Like I said, there is no short term solution, but that’s no excuse for not getting started.  The magnitude and complexity of issues related to the eradication of smallpox were overcome.  No reasonable person will suggest we suspend a similar effort aimed at polio because of the murder of three clinicians in Pakistan by a few misguided backward fanatics.

  The Second Amendment was written when a musket was the most lethal firearm of the day and there was in the land taxation without representation.   Even Justice Scalia says that there is room for federal gun control regulation, that: “We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons”

  If I looked out the window of my home to see a bad guy approaching with a ‘modern sport rifle’, would I wish I was armed?  Sure, but is that an answer to the right question?  How could it not be a good thing if, a generation from now, there had been a significant decrease in the number of those weapons designed specifically to kill people and lots of them? 

  In most states it is illegal for duck hunters to use a gun with a magazine holding more than three rounds.  Let’s give ourselves a sporting chance.  Write your congressman.

*Some of the material above was paraphrased and/or purloined from an interview by Terry Gross of Tom Diaz on the December 20^th edition of NPR’s Fresh Air

*Men and Guns?  cf October 9, 2009

  For me, it is not about the war in Iraq.  The decision was made to go, we went, and we’re still there now.  Arguing about whether or not we should have and who voted how is even worse than pandering, it is a waste of time.

  That region – Istanbul to Calcutta – is the locus of the most grave threats (those of a political nature anyway) facing this planet today. All sorts of scenarios can be constructed wherein throw-weight is an important consideration and zealotry and sacred values make for scary hair triggers.  An escalation by either side for whatever reason could lead to a level of turmoil heretofore unseen. 

  Amazingly, contemplation of the situation took my mind back to my youth.  In the early sixties my mother drove my brothers and me through the deep south on our way to visit our grandfather in Florida.  Didn’t really have to get that far from home to find the restrooms at gas stations labeled Men, Women, and Colored. 

  First time I saw three rooms so labeled we battered Mom with questions.  Why separate?  If they have to be separate, why aren’t there ‘Colored Men’ and ‘Colored Women’? Why is the ‘Colored’ sign hand scratched and the other two, well, regular? Consciousness raised, we looked around and asked other questions such as: “why are all the men in the chain gangs ‘negroes’?” 

  When Dad joined us at Grandpa’s house, there were adult conversations discussing race related protests, Rosa Parks, segregation, lynchings, and murders.  The phrase: “there’s gonna be a bloodbath” really scared me.  When we got back home I began to notice the similar if more subtle disparities.  Took longer to realize that I wasn’t ‘lily white’ myself.

  Didn’t think about it in 1968 but there was momentous paradox, incredible irony during those years in which we should all find hope. For while it was white European men who forcibly, violently enslaved black Africans several hundreds of years ago – thereby sealing a cruel fate for them and as well as for the continent left behind – the figure most associated with the mostly peaceful passing of the era was a black man.

  There is hope again today.  What must the leaders of non western nations, as well as the dispossessed, think when they see that a black man, with the middle name Hussein, has an excellent shot at being the president of the United States of America?  I am about as far from being a statesman as my dog (no offense Sauger), but I think it matters big time.

  Perception and words make all of the difference.  We do have an embarrassment of riches in the back stories of both major candidates.  But who, walking through the doors of difficult foreign capitals would be the most, well, disarming?   How could it not be the articulate son of a white mother and black immigrant from Kenya?