Be Calm

I just planted tulips.  I spaded up a little bed for red tulips on the west side of the shack a while ago and waited so long I had resigned myself to the fact that I’d lost the planting window and wasted those bulbs.  But there it was December 8 and just as it got dark I finished putting 30 oniony looking bulbs in the soft unfrozen dirt wearing nothing but a sweat shirt and bibs.  If this is global warming I’ll take it.

Planting fall bulbs with confidence they’ll sprout in the spring is optimistic don’t you think?  Like my garlic bulbs I planted these three inches deep or so.  They freeze under there you know, along with the dirt around them.  When the temperature goes in the single digits and below zero they’re out there, harder than a rock, under the snow, and still they respond when the ground warms up come April.  There is enough life in them, somewhere in that small little dome of matter, to push their way up through the ground.  And then as if that weren’t enough damned if they don’t go on to bloom.  Grow stalks and leaves, wave in the wind, get high, flower, go nuts.  You have to envision spring to plant in the fall.  Whether you are conscious of it or not you implicitly assume both the plant and the planter will be alive when the big show goes on.  Planting is a hopeful and life giving act.  We need some hope these days.  I think maybe that’s why I did it.

 I’m all backed up on blogs.  I’ve got to figure out what I think about the topic to follow and get this off my chest or I’m going to get hopelessly bogged down.  What’s worse than a bogged down blogger?  Luckily I put some days aside to write a 5,000 word piece for my family, a long delayed little chapter of our family history that made me cry while I wrote it.  Immediately after it was finished it seemed like the world blew up.  I’ve been stuck there ever since.  My mind has been taken over by the news.

John Kass, whose snarky prose irks me, also gives me food for thought.  He finds humanity in the worst of stories.  As liberals and conservative, Republicans and Democrats, find fodder for their beliefs and opinions in the tragedy of fourteen people murdered in Southern California (and I am as guilty as this rest) Kass picks this out of all the noise surrounding it.  He writes:

 

“It is an unspoken promise our politicians make to us, that we make to ourselves, that if we put a name to a thing and define it, and attach ourselves to a point of view, and condemn or shame anyone who may disagree with us, we might find a small measure of control.  Of course there is no control.  That is the thinking of children who believe that all they have to do is demand a safe space and they’ll get one.  But there is no safe space. There never was a safe space.”

Even the killers, the shooters in Southern California sought that safe space.  Kass goes on: “What I couldn’t get out of my mind was something that would have been comical if there weren’t so much death involved.  The idea of Farook and Malik dropping their 5-month old daughter off with Grandma.  Then they were both in their black tactical gear with their assault rifles, with their pipe bombs and an improvised explosive device, they were read to kill and kill and kill.  But first, they took care of their baby didn’t they?  They made sure their child was safe in grandmother’s arms.  Only then did they get back in the SUV and drive off to slaughter the infidels.”

We now know that Grandma lived with them, and so there was no side trip needed to make the drop off.  But that doesn’t dull the point John Kass is making.  They made sure their baby was safe, before they wreaked havoc, mayhem and fear not only to Americans in San Bernardino, but to all of us.
 

Now that we have such sophisticated social media one dangerous incident can send waves of shock across not only our country but the world in minutes.  Bad news used to travel fast.  Today that adjective doesn’t begin to capture the speed and the impact with which bad news hits.  Bad news is international and instantaneous.  It hits us wherever we are, whenever we check our phones.  We now not only watch the stories develop after the fact but we sometimes watch them take place.  We are flooded with images, sounds and opinions before we have barely grasped what happened.  It apparently no longer requires thousands of deaths and monumental building collapses to potentially change the course of world history.  You can do it in seconds with an assault rifle or two.  And these smaller and more frequent tragedies build on and magnify the last.  The entire world is impacted by a few deadly minutes in a relatively out of the way community in Southern California, just as the world is rocked by a handful of crazed gunmen in Paris.

      

So much violence is happening at once and we are aware, it seems, of all of it.  For example in Chicago a  young man the State of Illinois was charged to protect as its ward was shot 16 times by a policeman with little or no provocation.  How do we know?  We saw it.  It happened over a year ago and was covered up till now but the video, horrific as it was, is everywhere.  I don’t know how many times I saw it on my TV, computer, and smart phone screens.  As fresh witnesses to violence against a boy in an American street committed by police, whose sworn duty is to protect us, it is an assault on us.  Those images haunt me.  The clips inside the Paris night club haunt me.  The bodies being hauled out of the auditorium in San Bernardino haunt me.  Consider me now haunted.

 

All of that comes on the heels of the violence perpetrated against Planned Parenthood in Colorado which adds abortion to the toxic political debate.  I was so sucked into that nightmare video by CNN’s broadcast with its nonstop commentary and the endless loops of visual mayhem that I went to bed feeling that the America which I worked hard to bring peace to in the 1960’s was being eaten up and spit out by the desire to what?  Further a cause?  Gain attention?  Destroy the status quo?  What is happening to us?  Whatever end is desired, violence is the means of choice used to gain it.  And no one bothers to calculate whether the ends justify the means.  They just keep pulling triggers.

Maybe Kass is right and there is no safe place.  Maybe I should believe and take to heart the idea that my safety can be lost in a second on the whim of a person intent on destroying it.  Let’s examine that.  If that is true then should I assume it is not safe in my church as was the case in Charleston?  Should I be wary at Handy Foods while shopping for food?  Should I cast a suspicious eye at the other patrons at Herman’s Liquors?   Is it not safe even here right now in the shack by the stove?   The shack door is not locked when I’m in here, sitting with my back to it, and even if it was there are big windows to shoot through.  In America today should we just assume that we live only because, with seemingly everyone armed and possessing the capacity to kill us, no one chooses to shoot us?  Is that the America we’re living in?  Are we being asked to accept and embrace fear as part of our daily lives?  Should we counter that fear by arming ourselves and being prepared to kill each other?

I went with two other couples to  Two Brother’s Brewery, inside the old Aurora Roundhouse, to hear my nephew and talented bass player perform with the suburban band “Hoss.”  They’ve been playing together a long time, despite jobs and lives and children.  They go to extraordinary lengths to each year perform a benefit Christmas concert that is terrifically entertaining.  Each year they learn an entire great old album.  Some years ago they performed Bob Marley’s Greatest Hits album, learning both reggae and Marley’s songs at the same time.  This year for their second set they worked up all the songs on the Talking Head’s Remain in Light album, plus a few more.  To hear those classic songs, fresh and unique in the early 1980’s, played live now today by good musicians was a rare treat.  The place was loud, the crowd was enthusiastic, and besides that the beer is really good there.

I have to admit danger briefly crossed my mind when we had our arms up in the air, yelling along to the lyrics of Once in a Lifetime,

Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
After the money's gone
Once in a lifetime
Water flowing underground

Though the club in Paris was a much bigger venue it may have felt much the same that night at the Bataclan just before the shooting started.   Someone at Two Brothers greeted us at the door, but there was no real security.  I looked around.  It could happen, in that big room with the tall ceilings, the old limestone walls, the stage lit up by fancy  lights which held the vapor from the smoke machine, turning it red, blue, and green in turn.  Someone could have just walked up behind us while we were focused on the stage and let us have it, spraying the crowd with bullets.  Our lives could have come crashing down but they didn’t.  We listened till the music ended, made our way back to our van, and were soon safe at home.  A night without incident in Midwestern America, like so many other nights I’ve lived.

Back to my questions.  Are we being asked to accept and embrace fear as part of our daily lives? Should we counter that fear by arming ourselves and being prepared to kill each other?

When I drove home from work the night of September 11, 2001 long lines of cars clogged the gas stations.  Fear of what might happen next caused people, inexplicably, to seek safety in a full tank of gas.  Times have evidently changed however.  Last night on the news I was shown images of block long lines at a gun shop in San Bernardino.  Fear and measures taken for safety have taken an alarming upturn.

    

Both scenarios reminded me of the night the American led coalition put together by George H.W. Bush, massed on the border, crossed into Kuwait and began to chase Saddam Hussein’s army back into Iraq.  I was in Handy Foods that night and a guy I didn’t know came up to me, rolled his shopping cart next to mine, and said

“We started shooting over there.”

His cart was full of canned goods, much of it canned meat.  He was visibly scared.  I could see it in his eyes, feel it in his body language.  It’s amazing to me how such infinitesimal odds of danger create such palpable and personal feelings of fear.  You have to be damned scared to buy that much Spam.

 

If you count back from that night in Handy Foods when George H.W.’s Desert Storm operation began, we’ve been in a shooting war in the Mideast for 25 years.  My kids, now 32 and 30, have lived with their country being an international aggressor, leading the charge in invasions and airstrikes overseas, most of their life.  That’s part of what they know and believe about America. Their government hunts down and kills people by drone.  We finance violence.  And what have we accomplished?

Of course American led violence was ratcheted way up fourteen years ago after 9/11.  You could feel it coming.  Afghanistan was bombed until there were no targets left.  Iraq was taken apart.  We put U.S. troops in both countries, suffering 6,717 American deaths and a whopping 50,897 wounded. The effects of those wars are still being felt among American veterans. We struggle to care for them properly still, their mental health needs in particular.  Should we ask them to lead the free world on the Mideast battlefield again?  What will be different this time?  Haven’t  we battled insurgents in Mosul before?

I read with interest on Face Book the words of a Fox News analyst (now suspended), who railed against our President after hearing his Sunday night nationwide address.  Before calling him a name I wouldn’t even put in my blog let alone say on TV, Col. Ralph Peters said this:

“Mr. President-we’re not afraid.  We’re angry, we’re pissed off.  We want you to react.  We want you to do something.”

As you can see Donald Trump is not the only one lately mouthing angry public sentiment, no matter how primitive and damaging it is.  I think that is pretty much what Americans want.  We want someone to do something, anything, to make us feel better again.  We want our safety back.  Maybe not even that.  We want our sense of safety back, and by the way we want it back right now.  Would invading and occupying Raqqa make us safe?  A city we only learned the name of a month ago?  Where is it?  Syria?  Is that where ISIS is headquartered?  OK, let’s go there.  Let’s do that.  That should put an end to this.  To them, whoever they are, however they believe.  The sooner the better.

I’m very glad Barack Obama is our president now because he is deliberate and slow.  We should not trust our first reaction as people or as a nation.  We have done and can further do a lot of long term damage by reacting and making policy out of fear and its first cousin; anger.  Our track record of bringing peace to both the Mideast and our own country by waging war outside our borders is not good.  Killing them where they live before they kill us may sounds good but I think it’s a failure.  So what do you do?

For myself, I’m going to take the advice of Santa Claus, whom I just ran into down at the YMCA.  We had a nice long talk, which I’ll share with you another time.  Before we parted that night he gave me that smile, like only Santa can, and offered this timely holiday suggestion.

“Be Calm and Jingle On.”

That’s my plan for the near future.  Heck I may adopt it as a year round strategy.

I may not be safe but I feel safe so I’m going to continue life as I would like it to be and live without fear.  I am not going to lay in a supply of canned goods and bottled water preparing to hunker down against a rising tide of anarchy.  I’m going to go to church and welcome those I don’t know.  I’m giving strangers the benefit of the doubt.  I’m going to go out of my way to greet and get to know foreigners and people different than me; those with headscarves and prayer rugs especially.  I need to understand everyone more.

I am running my gas tank down to an eighth of a tank like I always do.  I am not locking my door.  I am sitting with my back to it, letting the sun come in the window, and enjoying the quiet.

I am not buying a gun.  I am not stocking up on ammo, going to the firing range, keeping a loaded pistol in my house, shopping for an assault rifle, or putting in a security system.  I never have.  I see no reason to start now.

 

I’m going to live the rest of my life as peacefully as I possibly can.  I live in a good community which I want to help improve.  I will support and work to elect government officials that put peace and the welfare of humans on the planet before all else.  I’m not sure who that is right now.  Between the Democrats and Republicans we may currently have only the choice between More War and Much More War.  But as peace candidates emerge I will look at them closely.  I won’t stop reading and watching the news, but I’m going to approach it with both skepticism and balance.

And if the warm weather holds I’m planting daffodils.  It’s a free country.  You can’t stop me.