Welcome to the Park Road blog - where we share thoughts and commentary on topics ranging from faith, to current events, to life at Park Road. We invite you to be part of the conversation.
Viewing entries tagged
Russ Dean
Sadly and ironically, as studies show, the more we get, rather than opening our hands even wider, self-sufficiency tends to foster selfishness. Affluence begets anxiety – rather than having too little to share, it seems we have too much to be willing to share. Abundance often turns in on itself, sometimes even to the point of greed.
Guns.
I just needed to get that out there, in case you’re one of those who hears the word and automatically turns the page. If you think everyone who owns one is the spawn of Satan, go ahead, turn the page. And if you think anyone who can actually pronounce the word “control” is a worthless, bleeding heart nutcase, go ahead, turn the page.
For the rest of you, could we have a conversation?
If so, we will at least be ahead of the Florida state legislature who voted overwhelmingly this week not even to allow a conversation. Not even a conversation – because you know how dangerous it is for grown adults, elected to serve the common good, to have conversations. That courageous and visionary decision was made as the rest of the world was being inspired by the young people from Parkland, who had just survived the latest round of our homegrown, signature terror.
Heart-broken, outraged, chests pounding in breathless fear from their lucky or fateful escape, the sound of that brutal, battlefield machine still ringing in their ears, these students spoke with eloquence and power. And one teenager’s protest sign spoke for all: “Why are we being the adults?”
If you’re still reading, for their sakes let’s be the adults: this was not mental illness.
Recently mental health experts have been borrowing the phrase, shouted repeatedly at one of those high school rallies: “We call BS on this!” Studies show that only a small minority of mentally ill patients are violent. While many of our now-infamous mass killers were undoubtedly distressed, depressed, unstable, unhinged, most were not actually “mentally ill” when they started shooting.
If you’re still reading, for their sakes let’s be the adults: this was not a failure of protocol.
Yes, the FBI admitted they missed some signals, but the local authorities had already visited that teenager multiple times, and he still became a crazed gunman. Yes, on a YouTube post he claimed, “I’m going to be a professional school shooter,” but the first amendment is as constitutional as the second. Are we really going to arrest everyone who says something stupid on social media?
If you’re still reading, for their sakes let’s be the adults: this was not about background checks or assault weapons bans.
Yes, it hardly seems unreasonable to do a simple background check on anyone who buys any kind of gun, anywhere, anytime. It only makes sense to improve that system. One would think it would be at least as difficult to buy a military-grade weapon as a handgun – but the opposite is the case. Some avid gun owners even agree that if you want an AR15, you ought to “sign up and serve your country” – but even with a complete ban on assault weapons, anyone who wants one badly enough will find a way.
If you’re still reading, for their sakes let’s be the adults: surely we cannot believe that arming our teachers is the answer.
Yes, if every teacher in Parkland had owned a gun, Nikolas Cruz might be dead today – but he would not be the only one. If a crazed gunman knows teachers are armed, you can imagine who has the first target on her head when he starts unloading a magazine in her classroom. I heard an “expert” say recently that the most important thing we can do is concentrate on the first five minutes AFTER the gunman starts killing our kids. Really? Are we that powerless? Are we that ready to admit defeat, to concede that the best thing we can do is kill the lunatic before he kills too many of our children?
If you’re still reading, for their sakes let’s be the adults.
After so many of these tragedies it ought to be obvious that the problem we have is not a mental health problem, not a gun control problem, not a policy problem, not a response problem. But if we are talking like adults, we owe it to ourselves to be honest: we just have too many guns.
So, please, don’t just turn the page.
I didn’t say I don’t believe in the Second Amendment. I didn’t say you can’t own a gun. I didn’t say policies aren’t necessary. I didn’t say I hate the police or the military. I didn’t say laws aren’t important or can’t make some difference. I just said when there are 300 million guns in the country, anyone who wants a gun, of any kind, to be owned for any reason, will have one – no matter who they are, no matter the laws, no matter our preparedness for response.
Until we can admit the obvious, nothing will change. But when we have the courage to admit the obvious, adults acting like adults will be able to have a conversation about what we can do to let reasonable people own reasonable guns for reasons that make sense. That conversation will allow us to slowly change the mentality of violence, that has always only led to more violence. Until we can be honest, and act like the adults our kids need us to be, there will be no end to our madness. We’ll just have more…
Guns.
I grew up in the simmering tide of the cold war. While I don’t remember bomb shelters and never practiced “duck and cover” under my school desk, tensions with the world’s other superpower were just below the surface. All the time.
That was clear to me because I also grew up in the fire of evangelical apocalypticism. While my pastor/father didn’t preach about the “end times,” it was just in the air – so I understood that we might be living in the “last days” and that Armageddon, when it came, was going to have something to do with the great Russian bear.
The word “Russia” still echoes with dimly fearful tones, and it doesn’t just connote national enmity; there’s a spiritual darkness that faintly hovers near. So, if there was ever a rival to beat, there was all the reason in this world and the next for it to be Russia. So it’s still a bitter pill to swallow to have to admit the truth…
Russia is winning.
And their plan is brilliant. They don’t need nuclear weapons. Words are weapons of even greater mass destruction. They don’t have to pull a single trigger. They know they could count on us to do all the sniping. Maybe worst of all, they beat us at our own game, on our own turf, using our own most coveted possession against us.
Don’t you know it brings a devilish smile of sadistic pride to the face of the entire Kremlin to know that democracy and free speech itself was the Achilles heel they used to bring us to the brink of destruction?
Russia is winning. The war is not conventional, but it is just as destructive, because it proves to us that the greatest enemy isn’t communist propaganda – just our own blinding affluence, because it is the success (and the great failures) afforded by our affluence that are the source of our division.
The recent indictment by the Mueller Investigation, charging 13 Russian nationals for interfering with the 2016 election, proved the depth of Russian knowledge about our weakness – in all its powerful pettiness. The only weapons the “Red Menace” needed in order to have their way in our “free election” was access to our own social media feeds and enough understanding of our penchant for self-destruction to bait us into caricaturing and demonizing and despising each other – almost to death.
It’s sad that you don’t even have to live here to see how much we have come to disdain each other. Russia employed human-created tweets and automated “bots” to ply our racial hatreds, our religious poisons, our cultural distinctions, and our ideological madnesses with methodical precision – enticing us into a war of words that has left us more fractured than we’ve been since we were Union and Confederate enemies.
Unfortunately, even our President cannot see that he is still a pawn in this simple, brilliant, demonic game of war. He insists there was “no collusion,” and indeed there is no need for collusion, as far as they are concerned, as long as we keep playing perfectly by their strategy: divide and conquer.
The opening act of creation has often been cited to note the power of words: “And God said, ‘Let there be…’” Words have always had world-changing power, and if we cannot learn a little respect and generosity for everyone, learn to bridle our tongues and silence our social media rages, God will have had the first word, but the Russians will get the last laugh.
--
Photo Credit: Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash
The weekend was filled with tension and controversy. It seems to be the rule of the day.
Dozens of professional football players took to their knees to express their concerns for the racial disparities that continue to ravage our nation. You may disagree with the cause of these disparities.
No one can honestly disagree they exist.
Again I am sitting in this little farm house on the banks of the Choptank River, just outside of Easton, MD. The calm is as amazing now as when I was here in February for a few days of writing. There is no snow today, but the water is glass. Hardly a sound breaks the still, humid air.
It’s as if all is well in the world.
Is there a better word? New clothes… new car… new house… new job… new day… Don’t those three little letters, N-E-W, sum up all human hopes?
The poor want a new way, a new hope. The affluent want a new challenge, a new adventure. The living want a new opportunity. The dying want a new reality.
It never ends. When we’re born, everything is new, and we die still seeking newness. Every age, every stage brings newness. Could we live without it?
