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This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about ending gun violence.

Really, the solution is quite simple: after the apocalypse, when we’ve all reverted back to Stone Age savagery (Well, mostly died; those few who remain will revert), guns will be nothing but strangely-shaped clubs that occasionally explode. But since I seek to save lives, the idea of letting things go their course until the majority of people have died (My same solution would work for climate change, too, I’ll note) is antithetical to the purpose. So let’s be serious.

For simplicity’s sake, because I want this to be a short blog, let us assume that the Second Amendment is worth preserving. I’ll come back to it tomorrow and discuss it at length  (Hopefully not too-long length) but for now, let’s just agree that it’s part of our Constitution, that it’s the accepted law of the land, and that fighting against it or arguing against it directly is going to be counterproductive. I hope we can also agree that there is value in it — I think there is — but we’ll save that for tomorrow.

Because the first thing I want to say about this cause, preventing gun violence, particularly trying to put an end to gun violence in schools (This post is a continuation of this one, if you haven’t been reading along.), is this: it doesn’t begin in our schools.

It begins with the military.

There are two reasons. Three, really, but one of them will wait for tomorrow. The first is that we live in a culture soaked in violence, steeped in blood; that culture influences us to see violence as an answer. The military is the first and most prominent source of this idea, that violence is a solution to problems; because not only does our diplomacy start and end with force, but we laud it, incessantly, as the best thing about us: we are the world’s superpower, we are the global police force, we are the shining light on the hill — which we think is the Bat signal. Anyone anywhere needs help, one of the first things we do is send the Marines. Hoo rah. All of our military veterans are heroes, everything good about this country — our freedoms, our values — are due to the military.

And what does the military do? The military kills people.

Of course that’s not all the military does; and the other tasks, I would gladly maintain. I would cherish a global rescue force that sent in manpower and superior engineering knowledge to help with natural disasters. I would absolutely adore a massive collection of dedicated, patriotic men and women who actually lived and worked among real people in terrible places, and helped them, and got to know them; I think those soldiers, the ones who win hearts and minds, are indeed heroes, and the best possible face that we could put on America to people around the world.

But only if those same soldiers don’t kill the people they have gotten to know.

That’s the second reason why the military has to be the first place we do something to end gun violence: because an Iraqi child’s life is not worth less than an American child’s life, and while we grieve sorely for the school children we have lost to gun violence, I don’t hear the same outpouring for the tens of thousands of children in Iraq and Afghanistan whom we killed.

I don’t blame soldiers for the violence they commit and represent; that is their job, and it is we, the people, who ask — who insist  — that they do it. So this is the first place to start, if we’re serious about ending gun violence. Anything else, any attempt to remove firearms from the hands of our civilian populace, while we pay a million men and women to circle the globe with their fingers on the trigger, is absurd. First we have to put down the nation’s gun.

In a practical sense, I’d suggest keeping a massive and essentially unbeatable National Guard, with as much of it as practicable as Reserves: let’s go back the Minutemen, one of the first and most important ideas of the founding fathers, and one of the first that they lost, because a standing army is just such a useful tool. You can use that hammer to smash anything. Or anyone. I’d also suggest that as many of our current assets as possible be transferred to the UN for their peacekeeping forces — or to another similar body if we’re not happy with the United Nations specifically. I do recognize that force is necessary at times, to stop atrocities around the globe; but I also recognize that we are too reluctant to commit our own troops to that cause. So we should participate in the cause, but not be in charge of it. Frankly, we could use the humility.

That’s first. The second step in ending gun violence for real is something that should happen in this country, and it is this: legalize all drugs.

I don’t know that drug users and drug dealers are the biggest source of illegal activity that includes gun violence, but I know they are one of the worst, and also one of the easiest to put a stop to. Legalize drugs, control them, build a market for them, and not only does the majority of crime in this country stop (or take on a different tenor, which is certainly likely; the other thing we need to do to stop crime is reduce income inequality — but that’s a different blog and also a societal issue that leads to property crime more than violent crime. Drugs tend more towards violence, especially between and among dealers.), but also the majority of violent crime and societal instability in Mexico.

Are you listening, Trump? You want to make Central and South America a better place, with fewer gangs and less violence, and therefore less reason for people to emigrate to the US? Here’s your chance. Legalize drugs. Problem — not solved, but certainly ameliorated.

But the legalization of drugs, while it would stop some of the worst gun violence we face, would actually contribute somewhat to what is possibly the saddest cause of gun violence, and the hardest to fix: domestic violence and abuse. This is the third step we have to take. Not only because the thousands of women who are killed by their partners every year are not worth less than the school children we grieve so sorely, but also because it has to be obvious by now that one of the potential causes of school shootings is a violent, unstable home life, generally one cause by abuse and neglect. (And inasmuch as drugs and alcohol contribute to abuse and neglect, my second solution makes this one harder; however, I would hope that legalized drugs would have less stigma attached to seeking help, and maybe that would make some difference, too. There would need to be stiff penalties for crimes committed while under the influence. That’s probably another blog.)

I don’t know how to stop this, to be honest. I can’t understand someone turning in anger and attacking their own loved ones — and I also can’t understand someone living with people they don’t love. Of course desperation is part of it, especially for people who stay with abusers; so maybe solving our income inequality and poverty problems are more imperative in this cause than I thought. I do feel like this one is the hardest and the longest-lasting problem, one that will take at least a generation of hard work to reduce if not eliminate; because the only way to solve this is to break the cycle of abuse. Abusers are broken people; and they break the people they abuse. (Not everyone. But it’s no shame to be broken by someone who seeks to do it, and it does happen, far too often.)

That is, when the abusers don’t simply murder them. Often with guns.

So these are the first three steps we must take. And I’m fully aware that just that first step is essentially impossible in this country in this day and age; everyone in politics is beholden to the military, forced to kowtow to them in a country where even the NFL, a bastion of American spirit if ever there was one, was humbled by the rumor of disloyalty to the military. And of course there is the very real possibility that the military would not allow itself to be dismantled: there are a number of very powerful people with a vested interest in maintaining our addiction foreign wars, and if we think a military junta couldn’t overthrow our government simply because this is America, then we haven’t been paying attention. There’s also the awesome might and influence of the military-industrial complex, and they have less than no morals. I kinda feel like, if this blog were to go viral, they would murder me just for suggesting this.

That’s all right, I’m not scared of them.

I’m scared of someone coming to my school with a gun to kill people. To kill my students, my friends. To kill me. But despite my fear, despite the immediacy of it, if we don’t start with these three steps, then anything we do claiming to reduce gun violence is just hollow.

Let’s do this right.

Who Goes There?

Dusty Leave a comment

I am an atheist: start from there. There is no God, no higher power, no consciousness directing the universe. Everything that happens, happens because of random chance, multiplied by time. The essential symbol of my worldview is the Big Bang: everything that exists came from an explosion.

So then how do things make sense?

How does an explosion create a stable planet, in a stable solar system, at the Goldilocks distance from the sun, with liquid water and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere? With a tilted axis and an oversized moon allowing for seasons and tides? How does an explosion, nothing more than energy added to matter, create life? How does that life continue to exist long enough for evolution to take place, which eventually leads to – me? How can I be sitting in my air-conditioned living room, next to my dog (who is lying on his back waiting for tum rubs [He gets a good skritch every time I pause. Like now.]), typing these words in English on my laptop computer, drinking coffee with half-and-half and stevia and and cinnamon-flavored honey – because of an explosion?

People of faith see the answer to these questions clearly: the answer is God. We are surrounded by miracles, and there is no clearer evidence of the existence of a benevolent creator. People have been reaching that same conclusion independently for tens of thousands of years, all the way back to the people who were buried with Earth Mother figurines, and those who raised Stonehenge or made the heads on Easter Island. We look at the amazing world we live in, and we assume it had to come from someone or something divine.

But there is no God: that is the starting assumption. So then how?

I hear people say, “Let go, and let God.” I mock it, because I find the idea of surrendering free will, of one’s own free will, inconceivable. I hate being told what to do. I hate trusting someone else to figure things out for me. If I could, I would grow my own food, fix my own car, whittle my own furniture. I have been struggling recently because in the upcoming school year, I have been instructed to use a pre-determined curriculum, one detailed and prescribed down to two-minute intervals, scripted and designed and carefully laid out in every way. Oh, I’ve been told that I can, and should, adapt it to my own preferences; but my preference is to chuck the entire thing out of a moving car, preferably into the midst of a brawl between switchblade-wielding badgers. I don’t want to teach what someone else tells me to to teach. I have never liked that, and I have never done it: other than some small things here and there, an idea for a lesson, a single handout, I have never followed anyone else’s plan for a class (Except for one: I taught David Schmor’s Speech class, pretty much start to finish; his assignments, his lectures, his grading methods. But that says more about how well David designs a class than it does about my predilections. We’ll call it the exception that proves the rule.). Whenever problems arise in my life, I handle them, either by myself or with my wife by my side: two of us against the world. I don’t like the idea of relying on anyone else: certainly not on God, whom I don’t believe in and wouldn’t trust if I did.

But how can I do that? How can I create everything I do as a teacher out of my own head? I was a terrible high school student – skipped or slept through many of my classes, never did the work, passed because of a good memory and a love of reading, and with the mercy of more than one teacher. I didn’t learn anything in my teacher-preparation program, except from the time I spent student teaching – which I largely did on my own; that is to say, I got advice and feedback from my master teachers, but I designed the lessons, I taught the material, I graded the work. I read pedagogical textbooks with an eye so jaundiced it’s nearly blind; whenever I take any teacher training workshop, I either don’t pay attention or I don’t do what I’m told. So how on Earth am I a good high school teacher? Where did that come from?

It’s nearly the same thing when I write. I have never really studied writing, other than as literature I have read; I’ve never had a writing mentor. I don’t edit: the first draft is pretty much the final draft. I don’t think much about what I’m writing in advance; I plan out my novels pretty extensively, but my blogs? I just pick a theme, think of an opening, and go. When I hit the last sentence, I post it On top of that, I’m generally pretty damned lazy, and unfocused: I am one of those people who pick up new hobbies and put them down again right away, because I’d rather be playing video games. How did I get to be a good writer? Where did this ability come from? Not from my parents, who are both intelligent but non-creative. I have writers in my family tree, but are creativity and writing acumen really genetic?

The miracles that surround us aren’t just natural: this morning as I stood in my shower, hot water streaming over me, sluicing away the shampoo and soap, looking at the tile walls, glass window, wood and brick house, electric lights, municipal water supply and sewers, I thought about: how could people possibly create all this? Particularly what has been added to our world, in terms of capability, of convenience, of complexity, all in the last century? A hundred years ago, if I had the running water (Never happen on a teacher’s salary then – but would I have been a teacher 100 years ago?), it wouldn’t have been hot, and I wouldn’t have had the electric lights, the coffeemaker, the refrigerator (Maybe an icebox), the computer, the dog adopted from the animal shelter. Just 100 years ago. My grandparents were there. How have human beings been capable of creating all of this? Did we have guidance? Divine inspiration? Can we create because we were made in the image of a creator? And if not (Not, indeed), how?

When one of the millions of the faithful “lets go and lets God –” what happens? Who goes there? Things don’t stop happening, and the lives of those who put their faith in God do not fall apart in a spectacular collapse; things often work out just fine. It’s like someone’s guiding them, making things work out. So if it isn’t God (And it isn’t. Spoiler alert: this writing is not leading to my spontaneous conversion.), then who is steering the ship? Starting from my basic assumption of atheism, of a universe without a creator; who or what makes things work out for the best?

My wife and I have adopted two dogs from shelters, one in California and the second here in Tucson. Both of our dogs have been absolutely lovely: very smart, very loving, almost no trouble to train and care for. In neither case could we possibly have predicted, when we chose them and brought them home, that those dogs could have been the sweet, wonderful companions they both proved to be. And we frequently ask ourselves: How did we get so lucky?

I’ve been reading The Watchmen, and one of my favorite moments in the book is when Dr. Manhattan, a man-turned-divine being who is trying to decide if he should save corrupt and fallible humanity, tells his former (and very human) sweetheart that he longs to see a thermodynamic miracle: an event so unlikely that is is effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously turning into gold. He says that he has realized, in talking to her, that he is in the presence of one such event: her. The chances of her parents coming together to make a child; of one particular sperm out of hundreds of millions uniting with one specific egg; of that zygote’s survival to become a child; of her upbringing and life experience turning her into the woman she is, and of her meeting and loving (and being loved by) Dr. Manhattan, a blue-skinned superbeing who can see neutrinos – that’s a miracle. Every human being is a miracle, Manhattan says; and he decides he will save humanity because of that.

I’ve used a similar example with my students. I met my wife Toni at Cabrillo Community College in Santa Cruz, California. She worked in the bookstore for her workstudy, and I had a job one semester taking ID photos, in the cafeteria upstairs from the bookstore. The IDs were $8, and so I always had to get change; I went down to the bookstore to get it. That’s how we met.

But look at the probabilities involved. Toni didn’t go to college right out of high school; like me, her academic transcript was spotty at best. She chose to enter the world of employment, where she did quite well for several years. She decided to leave a perfectly acceptable middle-class lifestyle, one that would have satisfied millions of Americans, and go back to school to study art. She decided to start her education at the community college; she decided to go full-time, and leave her job, which is how she ended up working in the bookstore. If she had gone to school earlier, or later, or if she’d kept her full-time job or gone to work in the registrar’s office instead of the bookstore, we’d never have met. Me, I wanted to go to UCSC because I wanted to study creative writing, and because my father, who worked at Stanford at the time, had a friend who taught physics at UCSC, who told my father, who told me, that they had a good creative writing program. He showed me the town on one visit, and so I decided to go there. But my grades were terrible, and so I couldn’t get in to UCSC. But rather than choose one of the thousands of other schools – rather than stay in Massachusetts, where I grew up – rather than join the Peace Corps or start a grunge-rock garage band, I decided to go to the community college in Santa Cruz, 3,000 miles away from the place where I lived, with no better recommendation for the university I had decided on than the word of my dad’s friend, for two years before transferring to UCSC. Except then my Cabrillo counselor screwed up, and my general ed. program turned into three years, instead of two.

I met Toni during that third year.

How did this absurd chain of events (And it goes farther: I had just ended a relationship about a month before meeting her. What if I hadn’t? Our first conversation ever featured me acting like an idiot, mumbling and stumbling through every sentence; what if she hadn’t wanted to speak to me again? What if, what if, what if?) come to pass, and lead eventually to my finding the love of my life, my soulmate? It’s no wonder people decide that fate is real, or karma, or God. What other explanation makes sense?

When people pray, and then hear the voice of God tell them the answer, what voice is that? Something tells them what to do, where to go, how to act; something gives them the solution to their problems, the inspiration they need to create something new and revolutionary, or the comfort to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. If it’s not God, then what is it?

It’s not God. That I’m sure of. So you know what I’ve decided it is? What is responsible for humanity’s incredible accomplishments, and our unbelievable resilience, and adaptability? The reason we can handle anything put before us? The force that makes our world full of wonders, that brings long chains of coincidences into some kind of order?

It’s us. We do these things ourselves. Because we’re fucking awesome.

How can I teach well, without any resources other than my own brain? Because I’m just that good. How do I write well? Because I’m a genius, and because I read the writing of other geniuses, and I pay attention. I am standing on the shoulders of giants, but they are tall because they stand on others’ shoulders – not because God raised them up. Human beings made the miracles, not the other way around.

How did Toni and I get to be the couple we are? The actual meeting had some dumb luck to it, but mostly, we made it happen because we wanted to. She chose to speak to me, and then she chose to speak to me again; eventually, I broke through my awkward shell, and she saw how awesome I am.

How did we get awesome dogs? Because dogs are awesome, and we treat them well and appreciate them for what they are.

How can people handle whatever terrible trials that life throws at us? By being absolutely incredible, strong and determined and intelligent and resilient.

We are incredible. We can do anything. There is no God: we need no God. We are enough, and more. We are.

So the next time your life seems about to overwhelm and drown, remember: remember what humans have done, remember what humans can do. You can do it. You’re human. You’re awesome.

No better way to close this than with the collaborative work of several of my all-time favorite creative humans.