Author: admin

I was once a card-carrying member of the NRA.  Growing up, having that card proved I was neither reckless nor irresponsible but was, rather, cautious, careful, and concerned about safety, both mine and that of the people around me.  That card showed the world I was old enough to have a gun.  It meant I had taken all the recommended courses and understood firearms were not toys, that they were capable of causing great harm, that they were to be treated with caution at all times, that having one was, in and of itself, a big responsibility, and that I would always follow the established and accepted procedures for gun safety.  

My family proudly displayed an NRA sticker in the back window of our sedan, certifying there was a bona fide member inside.  (Spoiler Alert!) I was the NRA poster boy on board.  I loved guns.  I relished breaking them down and putting them back together blindfolded. The smells of machine oil and the faint wisp of spent powder from a cleaning swab were like the odor of baking cookies to me.

And I loved the stories people told about Bozos who were careless or ignorant of gun safety.  It was hard for me to imagine such people even existed, that there were people who treated guns so carelessly. My older brother and I had a favorite story that would send us into paroxysms of laughter.  It went something like this: there was a rabbit hunter who came to a fence, a barbed-wire fence typical on farms.  As every card-carrying NRA person knows, when you come to such a fence you lean your rifle against the post in front of you and then move to the next one to cross.  In other words, you never cross with your gun.  Well, this is a story, after all, true or not, so as it happens this person leaned his rifle against the post in front of him and proceeded to cross the fence.  As he straddled the barbed wire a rabbit ran between his legs.

Naturally the hunter became flustered and tried to grab his gun while still trying to cross.   Entangled in the barbed-wire, he fumbled and struggled until the rifle fell over and shot him in the balls. Happily, the rabbit hopped away.  Makes perfect sense.  Makes an even better story.  At least it had one benefit: when my brother or I suspected the other was about to do something incredibly stupid, the smart one would say, “Remember the rabbit.”

So, in my mind I was fully up to speed with what was expected of anyone who had a gun.  Rules are rules.  But, rules may not be all there is to owning a gun.  Maybe I’ll tell you one more story about this kid who was the pride of the NRA, one more story about the one who understood all the rules, one more story about the Wunderkind who practiced all the protocols and knew everything about safety, and still didn’t know shit from Shinola.

 I’m seventy-three years old and this one still haunts me.

My family was visiting kinfolk in West Tennessee.  We were calling on my father’s side: the Barkers. Uncle Barker and Aunt Angie were farmers: incredibly hard-working, honest, loving, generous, considerate, and as non-judgmental as anyone I have ever met.  They would scoop you up and hug you when you least expected it just because they loved you.  There were no histrionics.  There was no theater.  No one person was more worthy than another.  There was no bragging or pretense.  But there was laughter, there was always laughter, and plenty of it.  And there was a value system that included an insistence on choosing right over wrong, consideration for others, and an appreciation and respect for nature, honesty, and the need for fair play.  They would do anything in the world for you if you played by the rules, if you were fair.  And even if you didn’t play by the rules they would still love you, but they might consider you a dud.

I can’t remember for sure which cousins took me hunting.  It was definitely Cecil and  either Travis or Royce; going forward I’ll say was Travis because Travis and Cecil are forever paired in my memory.  Those two struggled to make sure I was being entertained.  Hunting can be boring at times. Maybe they teased me about living in the city and suggested I would be happier working from dawn to dusk the way they did.

Okay, maybe some of this is my imagination because when you’re hunting you don’t spend a lot of time actually “talking.”  And we didn’t either.  There was plenty of head nodding, pointing, waving, and other such signals, but not much noise.   In other words, Cecil and I weren’t really having a discussion about what was or was not morally acceptable when it came to stalking and killing squirrels.  We were hunting.  I was a card-carrying member of the NRA; he assumed I knew what I was doing. He knew what he was doing, he did it every day.  He was the expert, even if he didn’t have a card.  I most definitely had a card.  And, well, I at least had a card.

This was long before I ever heard about Vietnam.  But in that backwater to nowhere I received my very first lesson in the “Rules of Engagement,” and that lesson was taught to me by Cecil, Travis, and a squirrel.

It was early Spring. The trees were bare and the ground was covered with a patchwork of colored leaves.  We were lucky, it had rained recently so the leaves made little noise as we shuffled along. It was quiet.  The only sounds were from our breathing, an occasional fart, and our feet among the debris on the ground.  The quiet was palpable for a city kid.  I mean there were no traffic sounds, no planes coming in for landings; just crazy stuff,  such as birds chirping, or a woodpecker hammering away, or branches rattling in a breeze.  

It’s easy to drift off under such conditions and I’m sure I was about as bored as a teenager can get when a squirrel ran out of a thicket about twenty yards ahead of us.  We were spread out in a line, as if we  were sweeping a rice paddy. The squirrel stopped, sat up, and looked us over with something I would categorize as disdain and then turned and proceeded up a tree into a round globe of leaves perched in the fork of two branches which were rather high up.

I was stunned and unsure what to do.  Cecil and Travis looked at each other and shrugged.  I pointed at the leaf globe.  They smiled, waved, and turned to move on.  I was stunned.  We were SQUIRREL HUNTING; so I immediately pumped three rounds into the nest.

 Surprisingly there was little obvious affect.  A few leaves flew up. The report of the rifle rang in the trees and I was there alone with Royce and Cecil staring at me in disbelief.

“What are you doing?” Cecil screamed, running up.

“Are you loco?,” Travis added for good measure.

“Well, there was a squirrel…,” I started.

“But it ran into its nest,” Cecil countered.

“Yeah, it was totally back in the nest,” Travis agreed.

“Okay, so? Are we squirrel hunting, or not?” I asked, offended.  “This is a squirrel, we’re hunting squirrels, and maybe I got this one.”

“And maybe you shot a mother feeding her babies,” Travis said.

“Yeah, she was probably out looking for stuff to build up her strength,” Cecil piled on.  “If she’s nursing, she’s using up a lot of energy.”

So, I stood there in the beautiful, colorful, temperate forest, with the sunlight angling through the trees and the sounds of nature in perfect harmony all around us, and realized I was absolutely, one hundred percent over my head. I didn’t understand any of it; I didn’t really understand what I had done wrong, but it was obvious I had done something horribly wrong and, worst of all, I didn’t have a clue what to do next. I wasn’t about to admit I had screwed up because I was totally out of my element.  The only thing my cousins and I had in common at that moment was the fact we all had guns and had set out with intent to use them.

Oh, and there was one other thing that I could feel developing in the pit of my stomach: that I had just become a family story about the ignorant relative who had stumbled off into the woods and broken a dozen rules that everyone in every place in every county of Tennessee had understood from the day they were born.  I could have shown them my NRA card, but I don’t think it would have changed much. I had become a family legend. Years and years of good-natured laughter and knee slapping would follow at my expense.

And really, when you think about it, there I was, a city kid who actually had a chance to commune with Nature, to be part of something special, but Nature let me down.  The sound of wind in the trees, the rustle of leaves, the spangling sunlight, the smell of decomposition and rebirth as the earth destroyed and rebuilt itself, the piercing eyes of a squirrel that stared right through me were, well, more or less wasted on me.  I mean, they were really very nice, but they didn’t seem to have the special juice I needed to become spontaneously wise.  Really, when you get right down to it, it seemed a lot of work was needed for me to see something ordinary when I could see something totally meaningless without any effort at all.

To this day I have no idea whether that squirrel lived to die of old age or was assassinated by my .22 long rifle slug to the back of its head.  But, dead or alive, I will always remember it even if I never crossed its mind again.  And  to reassure myself that I might have had an inkling of what I was doing, I carefully put my NRA card away in a safe place where only I could see it and never spoke of it again.

Kaepernick took a knee. That caused a real dust up.  A lot of flag-wrapped people were outraged.  Flag-wrapping is a popular pastime, especially for those who never served.  Probably they would have served if it had been more convenient.  And they never take a knee for anything, because theyhave respect, whatever that means.

Besides, there are lots of ways to be disrespectful when the National Anthem is playing.   You could be a player standing on the field scratching his balls, for example.  Or maybe you’re in the stands talking on your cell phone.  Maybe you’re just digging in to your double cheese nachos and don’t want to put them down.  Maybe you have psoriasis of the scalp and don’t want to take off your cap.  I really don’t think those brave souls who died on Bunker Hill would turn over in their graves if they heard of that, after all, some of them were also beset by sores.

And what about all the people who have sung the National Anthem?  Some have forgotten the words.  Some didn’t know the tune.  Some were just downright crass and insulting.  Some tried to make a mockery of it.  But, it’s just a song.  So we grumble and fuss and then let it go, chalk it up to bad manners, bad karma, or just a bad upbringing.

We can chalk it up to a lot of things, but taking a knee is nothing more than taking a knee.  This isn’t church, it’s a football game. Probably half the people there are betting on the outcome.  So, does that make it a kind of casino?  Probably not. But , that’s what it’s becoming. Still, most of us don’t go to gambling halls or sporting events to solve problems or display our patriotism. There are other, more meaningful ways to do that.

Let’s see.  Maybe we join a local action committee, or show our support by contributing money, time, or energy toward a good cause, such as ensuring lead-free drinking water for our children, or seeing that teachers have the resources they need to be successful, or working to end biased and lethal police practices that manufacture petty criminals so they can be turned into a revenue stream by local governments, or finding ways for the sick and dying to receive some medical attention, or helping the hungry find food, or the homeless to find shelter.  Maybe we do something to help make life better for our wounded veterans who were deployed over and over again by a thankless and inept government. Yeah, that’s a good one.  

Or maybe we avail ourselves of the most basic opportunity that’s there for each and every single one of us – we vote.  We see a problem, we find someone who understands why it is a problem, and we vote them into a position to help effect change.  So, although I agree you have every right to kneel as much as you want, every right, if you really want to make a difference, you’ll get off your knees and march down to the Voter Registration Office to sign up.  Then it won’t look like you’re begging someone else to take care of the problem for you.  And you will be able to count on my continued support for your community involvement. Thank you for caring.

In my opinion congress (a political body set up to govern) ceased to function as intended when we stopped electing politicians.  And it was absolutely guaranteed to fail when we started electing businessmen.  Here is why: 

At the end of a typical day a politician asks himself: 1) have my voters and my country been helped by my efforts today, 2) have they been made better, stronger, more enduring, happier and, 3) will that be enough to make them put me back in office so I can continue to loll in the lap of luzury?

At the end of the day a businessman asks himself 1) has my advertising been effective, 2) how much did sales increase, 3) why is everybody standing around, and 4) how do I get even more for myself tomorrow?

We elect people to look after us, we don’t elect them to make sure there’s a drive through window if you’re in a hurry.  We elect people who want to ensure our checking accounts are real and not Ponzi schemes.  We elect people who want to make sure we have a secure retirement after we have worked tirelessly for forty years.  We elect people who want to represent those who must band together in order to be heard, the poor, the tired, the sick, the elderly.  These are people who will be abandoned if we don’t extend them a hand. These are our friends, our families, our future.

So, in reality, we want the government to represent US.  We want them to step in because we have to launch ships, fight crime, build bridges, fight fires, teach children, or maybe even just bury the dead. We want them to help us help the poor, the defenseless, the young, the old, the handicapped.  We want to extend an arm to an old man crossing the street or shake the hand of a veteran and say, “thank you.”  We want each and every person in this, the United States of America, to feel welcome, appreciated, and at home.  It’s not that we don’t want to be there in person, it’s just that life is, well, crazy. We have so many demands placed on us. We’re trying, we’re really trying, but we can’t be everywhere at once.  We need the government to help us out.

And to that end, we don’t want a government that sees each of us as a profit and loss potential.  We don’t need to spend our lives on someone’s balance sheet in the “Debit” column.  We are NOT A COST.  We are Americans who seem to have lost track of what that means.  We are not objects to be placed on a “Sale Table” to clear out inventory so the owner can make an even bigger profit next week.  WE ARE THE REASON YOU ARE IN OFFICE TO START WITH. WE ARE NOT YOUR MINIONS.

Here is my pledge.  If there is a “businessman” in office who claims being a “businessman” makes him superior, I will never buy his product again. I will never go in his store.  I will never order from him on line. I will never do these things because he is grotesquely inadequate in that he can only think of himself and as far as I’m concerned, that is now clearly passé.

It is time for each of us to read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to think about them dispassionately, and then discuss what they actually mean.  In the process of doing that, I think we will find the word “businessman” is never mentioned.  Businessmen sell things, including people. Politicians govern.

I would have been on the other side of the aisle if I had been in the Senate, but I know it would have made me proud to look across the aisle and see Senator John McCain.  He was the sort of person who always had America’s best interest at heart.  He was honest and steady, brave without question, a little quirky, frequently entertaining, sometimes annoying, but always, ALWAYS, worthy of our respect.  Thank you, Sir, for being there when America needed you, not just once, not just twice, but every time the need arose.  I don’t have many heroes, but you, Sir, will always be one.  You were truly an officer and gentleman who understood what it meant to serve with honor.  That you did, that you did.  God speed and good sailing.

I hadn’t intended starting this blog quite yet.  I’m still in the early stages of the newbie’s learning curve and feeling way over my head. I have been working to get up to speed.  Blogging For Dummies has been read, marked up with a yellow highlighter, and tossed on a shelf (I even understood some of it, but not much).   There is a stack of screen prints that has been duly sorted, punched, and placed in a cheap purple notebook.  I’m about to start reading through those again.

The plan was to take as much time as needed to become proficient at all the skills needed to put a credible blog on the net.  Then Aretha Franklin died.  I can’t explain it, but I was a fan, and had been for a long, long time.  It made me stop and think about the finiteness of life, how things change as time goes by.  Each day is one less that we have.  So, maybe I will learn as I go.

I can assure you there will be bumps.  I apologize for those in advance.  Bear with me. Offer advice and coaching.  I’m open to any advice on how to keep things safe, relevant, useful, and interesting; how to control spam; how to stay current on comments; and how to make sure it all stays honest.

Thank you for spending your time with me.  I know life is hectic and you have to pick and choose what’s worth your time.