Trouble trouble trouble in the capitol city...

Just today I received a forwarded letter via email from a frustrated airline pilot.  It's probably another fake one but it did aptly describe a lot of folks frustration with the Muslim world. People on the right favor nuclear annihilation while the left offer platitudes and placation. Somewhere in between lies the answer, but damn, that's a spread with a lot of possibilities.

I feel the frustration. A reckoning is coming and it will take ALL of us, Jew, Gentile AND Muslim to vanquish fanaticism. ALL religions have had their zealots who willfully divorce themselves from reason fearing what they BELIEVE is threatened by non-believers. Intellectual laziness is the well-spring of our shared malaise. It is a sad fact that the Islamic religion appears hijacked by the most vociferous and violence indoctrinated adherents. Their ignorance is everyone's burden.

History is littered with the bodies of the innocent murdered at the hands of well-meaning men believing they were doing God's bidding. Dressed in robes and toting AK47s, the fearful in the faith are easily cowed into compliance. Gutenberg knew this and printed the Holy Bible so everyone could get a fair shake at salvation. Papal polity be damned! I'm thinking that Islam needs a Gutenberg to blow the lid off.  Having their own home-grown Martin Luther wouldn't hurt either.

When examined from an analytical point of view all religions are flawed. Even my own. Too few of us do the hard work of analysis or take the time to gain a proper perspective of our chosen faith with it's incongruities, inconsistencies and contradictions. We'd rather trust some cleric or priest or mullah or group or parent or favorite holy man to tell us what is what, and once thoroughly indoctrinated, we hardly ever question again out of fear of ostracization, stoning or worse--a change of heart.

Our forefathers understood this and shied away from codifying religion into our new civilization. They would 'make no laws' with regards to the establishment thereof. Ancient Rome understood this too and kept them distinct and separate. What we are witnessing now in the Islamic world is one where the lines are not just blurred but obliterated. If they do not reform, and soon, the world at large will turn against them and a whole lot more innocent blood will be needlessly spilled.  Allahu Akbar indeed.

Someone to blame...

It's happened again.  This time in San Bernardino.  Why are we so surprised?  A free society is always a messy business.  Is it any wonder that the anti-gun crowd is foaming at their collective pie holes again?  They peruse the same flawed logic table that blames the sun for a sunburn, water for drowning and gravity for broken hips.  They are an ambulance chasers wet-dream.  I get it.  Really, I do.  We gotta blame somebody.  Blame the inanimate object.  Blame the jihadist.  Oh, and the NRA.

If you lose someone to a senseless act, every neuron in your brain wants to know WHY.  Just as every cell in your body cries out for revenge.  But nothing will salve the feeling of loss and bereavement.   In our anger we are pitiful creatures with clenched fists swinging wildly at the unrelenting frustration over our inability to prevent tragedy.  But we should guard against the demonizing of a segment of our society for the misdeeds of a few.  Our loss is their loss too.  When we give-in to blood-lust we are all diminished.

Hatred doesn't need facts or reason to exist, only heat.  The kind of heat created by the friction between what we know and what we do not.  We know the loss but we don't know why.  Only when we believe we know why, can we move toward catharsis.  And we all need catharsis.  Problem is, we'll kill for that too.  Just give us a target.  Just give us some THING to kill and we will all feel better in the morning.  This is the fecund soil in which tyrants sew the seeds of genocide.

Justice is a concept we hold above revenge as a forestalling of the bloodletting we crave.  A poultice for our wounded spirit.  Whenever the perpetrator of our anguish is dealt with, we rejoice or at least breathe a sigh of relief.  Only then do we realize our folly--that no one is spared from hatred.  Everybody loses.  There is little sport in the rendering of justice.  Nor should there be. Don't get me wrong, I am for justice and a righteous bloodletting when it is warranted. 

Unfortunately, the deranged, like the poor, will always be with us.  They will take many forms and they will always demand our best efforts in order to prevent tragedies both large and small whenever we can.  Stripping access to guns from the law abiding is simplistic and foolhardy at best.  We all have a part to play and it involves caring for each other.  That is where understanding and  healing awaits us all. 

After all, we are still our brother's keeper.

Bad Moon Rising...

Politics are akin to maneuvering through a maze with one eye blinded while nursing a severe head cold.  Some do it better than others.  Politics are inextricably linked to life itself.  People use politics in everything and whether they believe they do is irrelevant.

Politics is the art of affecting advantage for your particular interest and at the epicenter of effective politics lies the art of compromise.  However, what we see nowadays is a race to the former while condemning the latter as heresy.  Sure-sure, we all hate compromise--we hate feeling like we left money on the table.  That someone else in the deal may have benefited more or at all.

Politics, when wielded well, is more about getting the best for everyone instead of only for your clan.  When we leave something on the table we are trusting someone else will put it to use in ways familiar or even unfamiliar. Instead of a yacht, they might need to feed someone who can't feed themselves.

Ah, but I heard what you said just now under your breath.  You said, why don't they use their own damn money?  And there it is again.  The dirty little habit that infects us all--greed.  That is the stuff that we have all been baptized in and at the heart of the American mythos.  You know, the one about the rugged individual raising up civilization single handed while thwarting impossible foes with six shooters, bull whips and Hallelujah.

We need to stop drinking before noon.  We need to take a chance on each other counting that some will indeed take advantage.  So what?  The pendulum always swings our way at least half the time.  So let it go, the clock won't tick without it.  Time only goes in one direction for us all.

We need beneficence and magnanimity to be our cornerstones.  Charity in spirit as well as largess.  How about we start with the least of these as the Christian ethos states?  After all, we will be judged by how we treat them and not our friends, nor our families, not our possessions and certainly not our enemies.

I'm not advocating dropping the stick and handing out the carrot.  There should be a string attached.  But all stick and only the picture of a carrot means something else entirely.  Carrot and stick should always be in balance.  And always attached to one another.

To me, the American story should be an unending one.  The Grand Experiment is not over.  We are the sum of the choices we make.  We are the chances we took and lost and learned better how to take chances.  But we should never stop.  Shouldn't we all stake a claim in responsibility for one another?  And not in the Big Brother way, smartass!  If the need is there, can't we fill in?  We're a America for Christ's sake.  It's a chance we need to take.  Someone needs us to win for them.  Politics be damned.

To vaccinate or not to vaccinate...

Funny how some folks need only a little bit of info for them to go off half-cocked tilting at windmills and vaccinators.  BTW, have you ever heard the phrase, salting the mine?  Joseph Goebbels knew that a lie told well and often enough will eventually be accepted as truth.  Beware, my friends.  We all need to keep our bullshit meters turned all the way up.  The bastards are out there and they only have to set us against each other to fulfill their evil designs.  Let us stand together and deny them any room to do so.  Freedom is never free.  It might be a right but it exacts responsibility and sacrifice.  And the proper application of gray matter.

They killed Clarence...

No, actually it was a real lion not a pretend talking one on TV.  The truest kind of beast, head of his pride and the pride of a nation.  It took $50,000 U.S. dollars, a couple of greedy guides and one idiot with a crossbow and a spot light to end Cecil's kingship.  And we are all made poorer for it.

Now but a few days later we hear of the death of Cecil's brother, Jericho.  Counter to what many believed, he had become the protector of Cecil's offspring behind which the pride had united.  Now, again, the hand of man moves across the landscape.  Ever lusting for blood masquerading as sport.  Be they beast or man, there is no hiding nor escape.

Perhaps an overpaid Minnesota dentist might learn something from all this.  One where he gives up his blood-lust for more useful pursuits.  Like opening a free dental clinic for the poor.  Perhaps he could own up to his mistake and pays for his sin like the decent sort we hope him to be.  Or perhaps he will not surprise us and continue defending the indefensible.

Not the indefensible fact that he hired bad guides who delivered Cecil up on a platter, but the fact that someone of our kind, from our heartland could perpetrate such an act in this day and age.  And defend it as LEGAL.  Perhaps we are not so enlightened as some may conjure.  We all have blind spots.  Some more than others.

We are all tender creatures.  We are the broken inhabitants on the Isle of Misfit Toys.  We are first gods to our children, and remain their lifelong tormentors long after our superpowers have faded.  We are meat and purpose to our dogs while cats are merely amused by us.  Because we are known by our deeds, all tremble when we pass.  Except for lions. 

How will the young Masai prove himself a man?  Perhaps he may still.  Perhaps by proudly wearing the skin of a dentist or some other poacher around his shoulders when he returns to his village.  His shield festooned with the shiny implements of his trade; the picks, probes, rubber wedges and a pair of opposing spit siphons.  Perhaps a poacher's own teeth can be made into a necklace?  But I digress.

From all this, one can wonder, one can still hope, but we can all do something.  Something other than this.

As a confession, I have been an avid shooter most of my life.  Except for that time in kindergarten... anyway, suffice to say, I don't kill Bambi but if I had the shot and was truly hungry, I'd take it and wait for his mom to come looking for him and... never mind.

But killing for sport is another thing, isn't it?  It should be.  It's not like hunting for meat.  It's not like killing in self-defense.  It's not like anything other than blood and the sport in taking it.  But even so, I don't see ANYTHING sporting about killing at night using high intensity spot lights and bait.  It's something else entirely and just like the Stars-n-Bars, should be relegated to display in museums and dangling from the tailgate of a redneck's pickup.  You know, so that we may know them by their deeds.

We can get past this and do better.  We have to.  There's no shortage of wealthy dentists and stupid rednecks, but we are running out of lions.

Hide the dog...

Yet again we are treated to the wanton slaughter of innocents.  This time a deranged young white man infiltrated an AME congregation in Charleston, SC and showed the world that we are still an experiment in democracy.  Tenuous at best.  Tender in the least.  

I think of the tragedy as a balloon payment on the debt we all shoulder in maintaining a free nation.  Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."  We should add the runny red stuff of innocent citizenry too.  Isn't theirs as precious as any other?

I would rather process it that way rather than blather on about too many guns, too many bigots, too many gunshow loopholes, too many Kardashians, too many GOP hopefuls...  I ignore 99% of gun rhetoric and only pay attention when it looks like the knee-jerks are gaining traction.  And the slaughter of innocents is better than a new set of Pirellis. 

However, I'm a bit of a pragmatist.  Guns are here, I am armed and likely to stay that way regardless of legislation.  I am "out" with my gun fearing friends and have won many over by explaining that it always comes down to the issue of fear.  If you have NO experience then you SHOULD be afraid.  Be very afraid.  

I tell them that fear is a base reaction to the unknown and as such can only be quelled by enlightenment.  Then I take them shooting.  Afterward, their fears relieved, many have gone on to lead happy and fulfilling lives.  Some have even purchased their own weapons.  

The same thing goes for WHATEVER it is you fear; blacks, queers, neo-Nazis, pitbulls, fried foods, gluten, spiders or naked horny elves.  Get to know that which you fear and the fear will diminish.  Except for them elves.  Better hide your pitbull.

Christians in Nero's garden...

Christians have a PR problem.  Even though billions are dumped into the passed plates at least once every seven days, the brand is fading.  Could it be that too little of that largesse is making it back into the community?  Maybe.  Maybe it's because of too many instances of pederasty, lechery, buggery, wartime profiteering and oh-my-gosh that Hitler guy really was a bad guy.  Wise men and women know that the maiden-form of the faith is flawless even if its many derivatives and their acolytes are not.
 
To wit, Christian fundamentalists are as exothermic as any madrasa-boy.  Think: abortion clinic bombings.  It only takes a perceived crisis of Biblical proportion for them to bare their teeth at all enemies both foreign and domestic.  In the past, they would have sent an army of their own to quell the infidels.  Ahh, the good ol' days.

Warmed by their cloaks of denial and conjoined by their pinhole view of the world, it seems modern Christians are bereft of perspective and what it is to be human and more importantly--humane.  Think: English laundries staffed by unpaid Irish unwed mothers presided over by semi-celibate nuns?

Western civilization owes everything to the Mother Church's measurable sins of omission.  Everything we enjoy in our American culture of unchecked avarice we owe to the Church's dictum of controlling access to the hereafter.  Need forgiveness?  That'll cost you.  If you can pay, you can play.  Otherwise, clasp your hands together, step right up here on this pile of kindling and you wouldn't happen to have a light, would you?

The current paradigm of Christendom is nothing more or less than the normal accretion of faith into hereafter insurance.  Thus the PR problem.  Other competing brands of salvation have dulled the once shiny facade of Christianity.  No more clear broth for the faithful, only a hearty stew of ideas on what it is to be alive in a world full of heretics.  No more looking up in wonder at some grand medieval cathedral without thinking, "This must have cost a fortune?"

If we are to abide in a faith as written that all are precious in His sight and if we are to lay claim to Jesus' example, follow his deeds and heed his words, shouldn't we all be in full possession of the skill-set to love one another for who we are warts and all?  Didn't they teach us that in Sunday school?

If Christianity is to survive, it has to stand right-wise to the sword of truth.  There simply is no other way.  Science is not our enemy.  The only thing ever lost to science is ignorance.  Science reveals while religion obscures via the epithetical notion of God's will as yet unrevealed.  Gimme a break.

The truly faithful have nothing to fear from the truth.  They welcome it.  But, to continue with hatred for others paraded and parroted as a righteous mindset is to consign Jesus to the league of arcane and archaic deities along with Zarathustra and Baal.  Just sayin...

The Worst Government Money Can Buy...

I love this country.  I believe in it still.  There has never been one like it and it would be a shame to allow it to slip from our collective grasp for a return to feudalism. Or worse, a theocratic ultra-nationalist regime whose strings are plucked by a cabal of point one percent-ers.

Until direct contributions to individual politicians are banned by Constitutional Amendment, I fear America will join the list of once great empires that either forgot or ignored the need for a moral compass and the will to follow it.  Perhaps it is us and not those that seek their own advantage over the common good.   I have seen many of them in the mirror.  Just behind the eyes, the thing that dwells there to serve but one god--avarice.

George Orwell was correct in his notion about Big Brother excepting that it is NOT the government but rather corporatists and their brain-washed minions that owe fealty to the company.  

It is a sad short stretch of the imagination that neighbors will put each others children on spits to save their paychecks and the tchotchkes afforded thereby.  Corporate America, nay, the corporate WORLD wouldn’t have it any other way.

A Crisis of Confederates...

I am a Southerner and an American. I am white and a male. My home is near the geographic heart of the U.S.’ continental pudenda. A collection of sandbars connecting an archipelago of high spots now inundated with what passes for civilization. I say that without intending irony.

Florida, like so many places where the water meets the sea seems always in crisis. A crisis in the economy, a crisis in education, a water crisis, crisis ad infinitum and still a crisis over Confederates?  The war between the states may have ended in 1865 but not the strife.  Florida’s role in the conflict was negligible though decisive.  The Confederates held and many ancestral Floridians still take pride in that.

However, our governor and vampire-in-chief, Nosferatu, demurs siding instead with the righteous indignation of the NAACP in barring inclusion of a few distinguished members of the Confederacy precisely because they were NOT United States military.  Honorable service and post-war achievements aside, they were wrong, so nyah!  Serves you right you slavers!

But isn’t this place named the Florida Veterans Hall of Fame?  Weren’t they Floridians?  Or is this a Federally funded installation or another usurpation of state’s rights?  Or just the misgivings of a plutocrat ill equipped to see clear what is dear to many of his constituents? 

Who am I kidding?  By constituents, I meant the people of Florida.  Governor Scott’s constituents are predominantly transcontinental oligarchs sensitive only to a shortage of Beluga and Cristal.  So who can blame him?  He doesn’t know any poor or working class people.  Those characterized by the English author Lord Lytton as the great unwashed.  Those considered mere chattel to be corralled and ruled or at least made into cannon fodder to fight wars whereby some future stone edifice might bear the names of those sacrificed on the altar of a bad cause.  Sound familiar?

The governor should be ashamed for not finding a way to illuminate both sides of gallantry in this latest monument to a sanitized past.  Shame on Nosferatu. Bad vampire, bad!

It was either him or her...

    Are you freaking kidding me? A two year-old found his mom’s pistol and instead of blowing his own brains out, turned the electronics display at an Idaho Walmart into a bio-hazard with hers. And then we read that she was a scientist working for an obscure agency charged with design and development research for our government. 

    More proof that even brilliant minds can’t stand up to stupid in an unfair fight. A son has lost his mother in a way that surely will affect his care and keeping in the years to follow this wholly preventable occurrence. Further details are pending and warranted.

In the meantime, I don’t believe there is any malice in a two year-old, so I have to ask as a gun owner and parent, what style of weapon did she carry and why did she keep a round in the chamber? 

If it was an automatic, then she paid the ultimate price for her negligence. I do not care if I’m certified King of the World Champion Over All Others with that exact weapon, I would be guilty of reckless endangerment for carrying it with “one in the pipe,” in public.

If however, the weapon in question was a revolver, then it had a very slick action. One that could be squeezed by a two year-old. If that is the case, there is a reason that the old-timers kept only five rounds in their six shooters. To prevent this very thing from happening. 

With either design, this tragedy could have been averted with the “specific” knowledge required for the weapon in question. All the advanced academic degrees in the world cannot replace acute experience and self-awareness. 

I will pray for the shattered family she has left behind. I will also pray for a renewed sense of responsibility on the part of owners of firearms. Let us not let this happen again.