Monthly Archives: May 2022

Memorial Day 2022

Memorial Day.

Let us remember the soldiers who did not fall in battle, but who fell at home due to mental health issues. Let us remember the soldiers who did not fall in battle, but who struggled with lost limbs, lost eyes, burned bodies, organ damage, and brain injuries the rest of their lives. Let us remember the soldiers who did not fall in battle, but who were lynched because they were a different color and believed that wearing a uniform gave them some kind of equality in this nation. Let us remember the soldiers who did not fall in battle, but who struggled to fit back into civilian life after seeing what they had seen and doing what they had done.

Let us remember the soldiers whose spirit of civic duty of self-sacrifice to make the world better is a spirit we all should aspire to, that there may be no more war among us again. There is an ultimate hope in the calling of a soldier: a hope that, through one’s discharge of duty, there may come a day where we ask no more for soldiers, that service no longer consumes one’s life, whether on the battlefield or in the years that follow the battlefield.

Memorial Day.

The Right Time to Start Talking About Gun Control

Now is not the right time to start talking about gun control. The right time to talk about it was probably September 7th, 1949, after 13 died in the Camden, New Jersey shootings. So, if we’re late to the conversation, we should still have it.

The Second Amendment was created not for national defense or for personal defense, but to allow states to have their own militias to suppress slave rebellions, out of fear that a federal army made up of troops from states opposed to slavery would not assist in suppressing slave rebellions. Following the Civil War, the emphasis shifted to maintaining White control of economics and politics through exclusive access to firearms. Whenever Blacks or Hispanics defended themselves from White mobs with firearms, they were swiftly and surely prosecuted and punished by Whites for daring to disturb the White supremacy.

At its roots, the Second Amendment has always, always been about racial oppression and inequality. There is mythology and propaganda placed around it to obscure those roots, but let us deal in truth. It is a legacy of America’s slaveholding past. It continues to be a right that has a “Whites Only” ring to it all too often for it to be a truly universal right. The solution to America’s gun violence problem is to first acknowledge that we no longer have any danger of a slave rebellion and that we want all people to live in freedom, safety, and equality. Then we acknowledge that it is still possible to have personal weapon ownership, but with restrictions. There are dozens of examples around the world of democratic, peaceful nations that have both regulated personal weapon ownership and murder rates much lower than in the USA.

That’s not to say that murders and gun violence are non-existent in nations with regulations. It’s that the gun violence is at a much, much lower rate. Imagine what it would be like here if, instead of having 17 mass shootings in the last 10 days that took 33 lives and hospitalized 76, we had only one? I’d rather none, but one instead of 17 is a start. In the last 10 *years*, Germany has had only 21 killed and 65 hospitalized as a result of mass shootings, and they permit regulated personal weapon ownership.

When, in our nation, we have lost more in 10 days than another has lost in 10 years, we have to confront our present with a realization that we have built up walls of illusions about weapon ownership that prevent us from seeing the truth and the better place we can be if we begin to have the conversation that should have started 73 years ago… or even before that… but we need to have the conversation and we need to be willing to compromise from all-or-nothing stances to find a solution that will work for reducing America’s gun violence. We have to believe in and have hope that such a solution can be found, and that it can be lasting. We have to be ready to shed our idols and happy illusions so that we can be comfortable with the truth as our chief tool that will build the future we want to live in.

I don’t want to exclude anyone from the conversation: even if you’re a White Supremacist, it’s time to have the discussion about reasonable regulations on personal weapon ownership, along the lines of any of the dozens of other democratic nations that have implemented them with success. We can look to Australia, Germany, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Israel, Japan, UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and many others. When we make peace our path, a better world is our destination.

The Poor Shall Never Cease

“For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore, I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thy hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.” – Deuteronomy 15:11

In the New Testament, Jesus underlined this teaching of Moses’ many times. Since then, men have made excuses for not observing this commandment. Many of these excuses are ultimately connected to an addiction to money.

An addiction to money is a serious and real thing. The addict wants to gather up as much of the stuff as possible, more than could be used sanely by any one person in life. That excess is seen as necessary, and the addict makes up all manner of falsehoods to justify not giving away freely what is not needed to sustain life.

If you make excuses or reservations or qualifications about how to fulfill the command to open your hand – and not just barely open, but wide – to the poor and needy, who are equated as brothers to you, then that is the addiction to money speaking. You need to find help so that you have a healthier relationship to money that does not involve a dependency. There are people at all levels of means who are able to open wide their hands to their brothers. As we heal ourselves of addictive behaviors towards money, we join with them in healing the world.