of guns and fathers...

Okay, it’s happened again.  Another disaffected college youth from a good and loving family has murdered in the name of his YouTube’d angst.  In the coming days we can look forward to a bevy of suppositional theses to float our way like brown torpedoes in a punch-bowl. 

The anti-gun crowd, as usual, will blame the easy and legal access to firearms as the culprit.  The usual pundits will be called upon to regurgitate their takes on the toxic concoction of disaffected youth and easy access to firearms.  The young man will be vilified as confused, deranged, antisocial, sick in the head, bent, misunderstood, in-crisis, spoiled rotten, and/or just plain crazy while the victims will be canonized as exemplars of the species whose lives were shorn short of their normal expiration dates. 

All our hearts are broken. But let’s hold off on the crazy moniker for a sec.  At times in my own life, I might have been thought of as crazy; the crazy artist, crazy in love or crazy from the heat.  So let’s not settle on crazy just yet.  Instead, let’s agree to THINK about the causality and reasons for the recent mayhem in south Cali.  That’s what sane people do.

One commonality is, few of the victims saw it coming.  Even though the parents had warned the police, the man-child reasoned with the police and dissuaded them from further action.  In the words of the local police spokesman, “the officers cleared the call.”  Then the young man went and murdered friends and peers.  As always, the hue and cry from the emotionally governed is, “It’s the guns!” 

Que crazy.  Crazy is blaming the inanimate object.  Blaming the tool for being misused.  Of course we all want to blame something; the sick mind of the murderer, the gun and bullet manufacturers, the NRA, right-wing politicians, my third grade teacher, the parish priest who touched my peepee, or the reclusive neighbor down the lane.  Anyone and everything is suspect.  Especially those who, as our forefathers did, cling to their guns. 

Instead, what is needed is a conversation about what it means to be safe in an otherwise unsafe world.  Armed with that knowledge, and ultimate responsibility, we can only sling so much blame without soiling ourselves in the process.  Yes, yes, t’is a sad commentary on our civilization that we cannot prevent such incidents.  Or is it?  I believe it to be the price of freedom.  If I were the parent of a slain child, I might think otherwise.  But I hope not.  It’s how he lives that matters, not how he dies.

When my first child was born, I realized that he would be subjected to all that life has to offer.  That he could be laid low even unto death by disease, war, accident, the short sighted chicanery of friends, lightning, too much alcohol and possibly at the hand of some deranged individual.  In that moment, I found it humbling to have had him in the first place.  That this small being would be in my care and keeping only for a short time, and that I would endeavor not to fail him.  He’s grown and gone now and thriving on his own with a brand new bride.  Still, I worry.

It’s not a stretch by any sane reasoning person to conjure that we cannot remain free if we seek only to make life a safe and easy process.  One that GOD herself has deigned otherwise.  How else can we truly cherish what we have until it is threatened, or we lose it outright?  How else can we feel the emptiness of the dark without having felt the warmth of the sun?  How else can we truly celebrate life without knowing full well that death waits for no one?

At the news conference, the grieving father’s lament sounded reasonable enough, blaming craven politicians and the NRA as if they’d done the deed themselves.  I don’t blame him for faulty logic, the man lost his boy and I can only thank heavens that I do not know that pain.  In time, he and his family will move on but they will always have a hole in their heart where once was a good and able son. 

Without evidence to the contrary, I can only surmise that the killer was once a good son too and that his father is just as heartbroken, if not more so.  My heart goes out to all the fathers who lost someone that weekend in California, but especially to him.  His burden will forever be membership in an exclusive club for fathers who have born sons who commit murders in multiple.  A club no one wants to belong to.  A club whose membership grows by the year.

He might have to move from his home, suffer the looks of neighbors who conjure that he did something or didn’t do something to his son and that he is somehow responsible for his child murdering other children.  He might have to change his last name and leave his profession.  The one that fed, clothed and supported his family, and sent his son to college.  God forbid he bought those weapons for him.  Again, my heart aches for them all, but especially for him.  His horrors have just begun.

Check your default settings…

This is something each of us rarely do.   Why would we?  They’re default settings.  No muss, no fuss.  Doesn’t matter if they’re set by a software provider or our own prejudice.  The end’s the same.  No muss, no fuss.  Just the way we like it.  Don’t mess with what has worked in the past.  If it ain’t broke, no need to think about it.  Therein lies the rhubarb. 

We like it when we don’t have to think about things like our beliefs, our haircut, our diet, or our significant others.  But time and time again it is precisely these things that sink us because we ignore them in order to avoid the hard work of introspection.  A smarter man than me once said, “People don’t want to be edified, they want to be rallied.”

Too many of us fall into that latter category.  Preferring to let someone else do the thinking.  Let someone else lead so that all we have to do is follow.  Knowing this, Adolf Hitler was able to set Europe ablaze, murder millions and taint his people in the minds of the rest of the world—forever.  This is the singular burden of Germany, as well it should be.  We can never forget, lest they forget, and doom us all again to needless slaughter.

This is the single most important reason I can think of that we, as Americans, as human beings, must ALWAYS question authority.  To not ask questions, to go along with the flag wavers, to bury our heads in the sand because someone told us that doing so was the way of patriots, is to play into the hands of tyrants and worse—to be made willing accomplices in their crimes. 

Come, pick my lettuce, now go home!

I am lucky.  Lucky enough to be the umpteenth grandchild to a family with roots planted here over one hundred fifty years ago.  Lucky enough to qualify me as native.  But where’s the cutoff?  How much time in-country does one have to spend to be considered native?  Most of us were born here and that usually suffices.  Ask a real native American and you might get an education. 

Suffice to say, we all hail from somewhere.  Might as well be where we were born, right?  Nowadays some say that’s not enough.  Think: birthers and the funny-haired rich guy behind that particular bowel movement.  Fun fun.  Think: renewing your driver’s license even after living in your state for the past forty years.  More fun.

How many of us really believe that in order to quell the touted tsunami of undesirables into our fair land that all we have to do is build a barrier between us and the more southerly regions of our shared incontinence.  Really? 

France tried that after World War I.  The wisdom of the French was to plant a line of big guns in the ground and point them at Germany.  Quite an imposing sight, I imagine.  If you enjoy grand symbols of massive FAILURE!  When the time came, the little corporal and company ignored the Maginot Line altogether leaving the lonely Frenchmen to polish their big guns while they goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées.  The Nazis simply reached around through Belgium to the north and through the Ardennes in the south.  What were the Frogs thinking?  That their language-in-common friends to the north could wave off Stukas with what—dark chocolate?  That trees wouldn’t yield to fifty-four ton Tiger tanks?

It took me five minutes on Bing to illuminate our situation.  We have over 82,835 miles of coastline guarded by satellite surveillance and the Coast Guard.  With only 41,000 members, that means every uniform in the service would have to patrol two miles of coastline each, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, with no smoke breaks.  This fact alone makes the über fence along the 1,869 mile border with Mexico a colossal example of American duplicity.  I mean, I really do enjoy my fruits and veggies on the cheap.

For many ‘Muricans, the complaint is, “They’re here to steal our jobs.”  Maybe a homegrown worker has been displaced by an illegal immigrant but I’ve never seen one.  But then again, I have never seen a unicorn either but my eight year old daughter assures me…

The self-righteous always pound the notion of legality but I wager no law ever filled an empty belly and no electrified razor wire topped fence will ever keep a good parent from trying to feed their hungry children.  The people that come here are not the bomb toting job stealing bad guys we imagine, but rather people who’ve heard of a place where they cannot only survive but thrive by the sweat of their brow if they will only make the crossing.  They don’t want state welfare, they want a chance, and who are we to deny them? 

Immigrants, that’s who.

… that’s not how we do it…

How many of us have, or at least heard, the forgoing phrase? When was the last time you heard it uttered? Was it in a public place? An online forum? Maybe somewhere in the Twitter-verse? Or maybe, just maybe, it leaked from your own gob like butter from a warm biscuit at the announcement of some new innovation at our workplace?

That people fundamentally prefer inertia and tradition over movement and innovation is a given. Niccolo Machiavelli described the situation in The Prince over five centuries ago, “The innovator has as enemies, all those who have done well in the old order.” We believe that any innovation that threatens the norm is a full frontal assault on the common good, and to do so, is to invite responses that tend toward the Biblical. Remember how the powers-that-be in 1st century Jerusalem dealt with a certain Nazarene’s brand of innovation?

Innovation begins where old ways end. The Luddites failed. The machines replaced them and they, and their families, suffered for their unwillingness to change. Change is inevitable. Change is the juice of innovation—the perception by someone that a thing, a process or an institution can be made more efficient, more effective, and just plain better. Those things that need to be left alone are those that already represent a zenith of something. Like a Rembrandt or Pez dispenser. Moving on…

So what’s an innovator to do when there’s so much against them? Easy-peasy. Just know all the current stakeholders and understand what they’ll gain, and more importantly, what they’ll lose by embracing your innovation. Remember, they are not your friends until you are successful. So go and make the next big thing; the next Ipod, the next Nike, the next WalMart, or maybe just a better mouse trap. Preferably one that vaporizes them. That way, I won’t have to bag or bury the buggers.