April 17, 2007

• Guns, Death, Fear and Politics

  Perhaps I should address political correctness, too, while I’m in the neighborhood.  I don’t know.  It’s going to be quite a task to organize my thoughts and adequately cover the topics I have set for myself today.

  But first, here’s a little side note I want to share.  Yesterday morning I was expecting a visit from Greyfox, so I plowed through my web research early and went to work writing my entry on twenty-three-and-the-law-of-fives.  I had fun doing it, and was feeling the sort of satisfaction one gets from accomplishing a long-anticipated task.  News of the Virginia Tech spree killings was on the radio, but I hadn’t even considering blogging about it.  It’s neither my field of expertise, nor my main field of interest.  Enigmas and anomalies are more my cup of tea, and shooting sprees are all-too-common and comprehensible social phenomena.

  After spinksy asked me to share my thoughts on the shooting, I ran through a succession of options:  I could dash off a quick expression of my reaction and message her with it.  I could leave the “23″ piece on top to see if it got any interesting comments (We all know, don’t we, that few of us read and even fewer comment any further down than the top entry on a blog page?), and blog about it this morning.  I could ignore the whole thing and try not to think about it.  (That’s not going to happen, believe me, no matter how attractive the idea might be.)  Then, I quit waffling over it and set about getting as many of the known facts as I could find before I started writing down my thoughts on them.

  Imagine the little mental fanfare that greeted my inner ear this morning when I pulled up Planet Blacksburg and read:  ”
  The individual has been identified as Cho Seung-Hui, 23.”  It’s everywhere.
  

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  GUNS

  I don’t question the motives of any of the sincere gun control advocates who want to make guns go away so that violence and violent crime will decrease.  Those are admirable motives.  I do question their intelligence, their sanity, and their understanding of history and human nature.  You don’t just stuff the genie back in the bottle.  It isn’t that simple.  This is a case where it seems obvious that the unintended consequences will far outweigh any productive results.

  a)  Take guns away from law abiding people who use them for personal protection* and to procure food, as many of us in Alaska do, or for sport and defense* as most gun owners in the Lower 48 do, and you end up with an unarmed and defenseless population of upstanding citizens facing a few well-armed groups of organized criminals and a bigger, disorganized,  armed rabble of thugs, robbers, would-be warlords, methamphetamine manufacturers and other assorted dangerous types.

  b)  Beef up police resources and institute house-to-house searches and random searches of vehicles and persons on the street to seize all the guns, and you’ll have a police state run by military and paramilitary organizations with excellent armament and enough power to corrupt and madden even the sanest ones among them.  They won’t only be taking guns away from everyone, but they’ll arrest my family, my neighbors, and anyone else who tries to keep their guns, and since the prisons are already overflowing, they’ll kill some of us just to get us out of the way, and they’ll put the rest of us into work camps.  We might even get the old chain gang system back, and see prisoners rented out for hire.

  c)  If our old explosive-propelled projectile weapons are no longer available to us, there are those among us who will devise new and superior weapons or improvise just any old thing with the materials at hand.  Insurgents in Iraq are doing far more horrific damage to our troops with their improvised explosive devices than the Viet Cong did with Chinese assault rifles.

  I don’t collect guns.  I own an AR-7 military survival rifle in .22 caliber.  Its barrel and action unscrew from the foam-filled plastic stock and fit inside it.  When sealed with the waterproof cap, the whole thing will float.  I used to carry it in my backpack when I was able to go hiking.  I shot a squirrel with it, and used it a few years later for more accurate shooting and more humane extermination of varmints that Greyfox had been shooting and wounding with his handgun.

  When my ex-husband Charley moved out, almost as soon as he was gone I started to be pestered by local lodge rats who saw me as fair game.  After several of them had come knocking drunkenly on my door at night, I asked Charley what I could do to rid myself of the two-legged varmints.  He offered to lend me his stainless steel Ruger Security Six .357 magnum revolver with a four-inch barrel.  I said, “Charley, I don’t want to shoot the assholes; I just want them to leave me alone.”

  He said, “Trust me,” and since I did (still do), I went along with him.  We went to the gravel pit on Saturday when there was a good crowd at the lodge.  I burned a box of ammo on target practice, and the shooting was clearly audible down the road at the lodge.  When the ammo was used up we walked into the bar smelling of gunsmoke, with the .347 holstered on my hip.  As required by state law, but with maybe a little extra flourish not required by law, I handed my weapon over to the bartender for safe keeping.  Then Charley started bragging to everyone present about my uncanny accuracy with the handgun.  To this day, none of those varmints has bothered me, and I never even had to wing one.

  I kept the .357 in the house until the winter before I met and married Greyfox.  That year the snow was deep and moose were stranded, starving and desperately mad, in the plowed roads and driveways.  I started carrying the revolver when I walked Doug to and from the school bus stop.  One day, when a moose charged me from a neighbor’s driveway, a bullet from the .357 turned it aside and saved me from being maimed or killed beneath its hooves.  Charley and my other friend who had to track my wounded moose and finish it off, told me it was stupid to go up against a moose with a handgun, that what I needed was a 12-gauge pump shotgun. 

  Some years later, Greyfox bought me one, and that completed my arsenal.  Charley used to tell me I should have a Barrett Light 50, because my farsighted vision and steady aim are wasted with the firearms I have, and the ArmsMerchant I’m married to now has often head-tripped about having various assault rifles in case the shit hits the fan, but I’m content with my guns and Doug’s Marlin .22 rifle and the Ruger Super Blackhawk .44 mag. with which he shot the moose that was stomping Koji in our front yard.

  Greyfox, the ArmsMerchant, works at several gun shows a year, mostly selling knives.  I don’t go to many of the gun shows, for the same reason I don’t go anywhere very often:  chronic fatigue.  I enjoy the gun shows I get to go to, mostly because a lot of the AGCA members are mellow and sexy older Alaskan types, oozing confidence and competence along with testosterone, and because there are always a few Second Amendment Sisters around to talk to.  Since I have an appreciation for efficient design and fine craftsmanship, some of the guns are pleasant to look at, too.
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  *The difference between “protection” here and “defense” there, is that we’re more likely to encounter bears or raging moose, and average urban/suburban Americans are more likely to be attacked or menaced by humans.
  

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  Fear and Death

  I was grateful last night to HomerTheBrave for helping me put into perspective the common mass reaction to the shootings.  After I posted my response to spinksy’s request, I visited a few of the Xangans to whom I’ve subscribed.  Out of over a dozen, only three did not mention the shootings.  One of those who didn’t write about it wasn’t in the U.S., and one mentioned the incident only to say she wasn’t going to blog about it.  Most of the people who wrote about the incident expressed horror, grief, and/or incomprehension.

  Homer deplored the way the killings had become a political issue even before the corpses had cooled, and offered an astute analysis of the psycho-social dynamics at work.  The words that made all the difference for me were these:  “Death is scary.”  I might have eventually reached that conclusion myself after I stopped to think about it, but I wasn’t in stop-and-think mode.  I was clicking around, reading, and marveling at the reactions I was reading, which mostly ranged from emotional hysteria to maudlin sentimentality.
  
  I know I’m different, that my attitudes toward death and a lot of other things are not shared by most people.  In childhood I had a lot of difficulty accepting that I wasn’t normal.  Eventually I adjusted to it and learned to appreciate some of my abnormalities.  An IQ at the 99.94th percentile isn’t hard to accept when you think about it, and having no fear of death seems almost heavenly if you really consider the ramifications, and the alternative.

  It is not that I don’t love life, nor do I unnecessarily risk dying.  I thought of an analogy this morning, something someone said, “There are two kinds of people — those who love to win and those who hate to lose.”  I love to win, and I take losing in my stride.  I love life but I do not fear death.

  Possibly I could have come around to that attitude in a rational manner just through the realization that every life ends in death and it is pointless and destructive of happiness and peace of mind to go through life in fear of the inevitable.  Maybe I could have, or maybe not.  The fact is, that’s not how I arrived at my serene acceptance of my eventual demise.

  Truth is, I don’t recall ever in my life having been afraid of dying.  I’ve been afraid of lots of things, but death isn’t one of them.  When I learned that my pediatricians said I wouldn’t live to grow up, any anxiety I felt wasn’t about death or what might come after, it was all about things I wanted to do before I died.  My love of life was in place even then, before I ever started to school.

  Maybe this is one of the attributes of an old soul.  My past-life memories were still all unconscious back then but they surely must have influenced my personality even so.  Now that those memories are available to me on a conscious level and I can recall having died in numerous different ways, the familiarity with the process might have something to do with my lack of fear.

  Those things, as I say, might have something to do with it, but the thing that has had the greatest influence has been my conscious choice to transcend fear.  First time I ever heard Dick Sutphen say that the reason we are here is to transcend fear and practice unconditional love, the words had the ring of truth to them.  The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.  Even if it wasn’t divinely ordained, it makes sense.  Working at it can’t hurt, and succeeding at it has been sweet every step of the way.  I’m just glad I had sense enough to do it.

  Years later when Neale Donald Walsch came along with Conversations with God and the message that each thing we do has one of two “sponsoring thoughts,” either love or fear, it tied in beautifully with Sutphen’s teaching about transcending fear and practicing love.  Any time I feel troubled or uncertain, I ask myself, “What would Love do?”  As time passes and I get more practice, there are ever fewer moments of uncertainty and a lot less trouble in my life.

  Grief is not a loving thing.  Grief arises from fear.  Horror obviously is fear-based.  Anger and hatred, as well as the almost knee-jerk calls for gun control — they are all motivated by fear.  “Misguided” is, I think, the kindest word I can use to describe the majority of the reactions I have seen to Cho Seung-Hui’s campus rampage.  The mindset I have been observing in the aftermath of the shootings reminds me of a bunch of children telling ghost stories to rouse each other’s fears.  It doesn’t help that most people are in denial about their own motives and try to put a sympathetic face on it, pitying the families, dwelling on the losses.  I’m not blaming or trying to shame anyone, I’m only observing and commenting — no blame, no shame.  I feel sympathy and sometimes pity for those who turn their own lives into hell by living in fear.  I know how that is, because I’ve been there.

  Seung, as it turns out, had given out so many signals of his seething hatred that one classmate has said that when she heard about the shootings, she thought, “I bet it was Cho Seung-Hui.”  A senior, and an English major, he left behind awkward unskilled writings that seem to have been produced by a young adolescent seeking to shock, appall, and repel readers.  His writings aroused sufficient concern with at least one teacher that he was referred for counseling.  There has been mention in news sources that he might have been on some sort of medication for depression.

  Seung left a note in which he mentioned, “rich kids,” “debauchery,” and “deceitful charlatans” on campus.  He disavowed responsibility, writing, “You made me do this.”  He is described as a quiet loner, which is a cliché among those who are asked to describe the young men who commit crimes such as this.  Sources at VA Tech have told reporters that he had stalked several women, and that he had recently set a fire on campus.  A note containing a bomb threat was found yesterday near some of the victims, and there have been two recent bomb threats at the university, but whether they were made by Seung Cho is unknown.

  I suppose there are still many people who find this young man’s actions incomprehensible.  I find them pointless and senseless from a global perspective, but from that man’s warped perspective they make sense and they got across the point he wanted to make.  His actions were obviously destructive, and certainly grandiose, but I don’t understand what about them some other people find so hard to understand.  I just look at his picture and read his writings, and I understand what motivated him to end his life in such a flamboyant manner.   It wasn’t love.  It had to be fear.

  That the threat he posed was largely ignored is slightly less comprehensible, but such things are inherent in our culture.  Even when confronted with outpourings of the ugliness some of us carry around in our minds, others tend to turn away rather than to confront it.  Each such rejection adds to the load of anger and hatred.  Again, fear-born reactions gave birth to ever more things to be afraid of.  Life on this planet will go on in that manner unless and until the mass of us transcends fear and practices unconditional love.

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  POLITICS

  Maybe I’ll get to that later.  For now, I have no political pronouncements, just a suggestion.  Watch and listen.  Try to discern if anything you see and hear in the political arena is motivated by love, or if it is all coming from fear.

  

  • 7:10 pm
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