.
And I’ll tell it
and speak it and think it and breathe it
And reflect from
the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand
on the ocean until I start sinking
But I’ll know my
song well before I start singing
And it’s a hard,
it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
It’s a hard
rain’s a-going to fall*
I was raised around guns. As a military dependent, living
on Air Force and Army bases in the United States and in Europe in the 1950s and
60s, there were guns aplenty—not just the military-grade weapons, but small caliber
.22 rifles, .38, .45, and .357 caliber pistols, and 12-gauge shotguns. I
learned to shoot on NRA-sanctioned ranges located in the far corners of the
bases, and got all the NRA medals. I became a proficient, competitive, and
champion-level skeet shooter on skeet ranges in Ohio, Nebraska, Louisiana, and Colorado.
I was a fair pistol shot with our pistols fired on base ranges, or, when
available, at civilian ranges off-base.
It was a family thing with us. My father was an excellent
marksman; my mother was as well. We had handguns, shotguns, and long rifles in
our houses for most of my life. Oddly enough, I guess, we were not hunters. Killing
was not our thing. Punching hole in targets, or powdering clay pigeons made up
100-percent of our time with our guns. By the time I departed for college in
the late 60s, and my parents were getting older and considering retirement, our
gun collection began to dwindle. We sold a few of the pistols, and cleaned,
oiled, and stored the shotguns and rifles. By the 1980s, our guns were barely
remembered artifacts, encased in a chest in the basement, never to be fired
again…with the bulk of them sold after my father’s death in 2003.
The same story, with variations, was true for many of my
military brat and civilian friends and their families from that age in America
where guns were relatively common, often used for hunting in those parts of the
country where that sort of thing was safe and acceptable, and otherwise used to
punch holes in targets and powder clay pigeons. It never occurred to us—the commonest
of people—to turn our guns into human killing machines if or when we had a beef
with someone, or if or when we descended into depression, or if or when life
did not go our way and someone cut us off on the freeway or disparaged our dog
or mowed their lawn not to our liking. It also rarely occurred to any of us to
own a weapon that made absolutely no sense to own—like a semi-automatic rifle capable
of spraying a room full of children with death.
Now, let me be totally frank here. The world around my childhood
was hardly cotton candy and carefree hours. I grew up in White-only America, in
states where lynchings occurred, where beatings, bombings, burnings and brutalities
unimaginable happened to Black Americans and their white sympathizers and
defenders. I know physical and psychological bullying, having been the target
of a schoolyard bully and seeing how even my best friends turned away from the
taunts and beatings that rained down on me from a 14-year-old thug and his
buddies. I have a personal connection to alcoholism that was ruinous.
And I know the ominous tones of vitriolic hate speech aimed
at men, women, and children who did not fit the White version of America as far
too many of my acquaintances and their parents wished it to be (and as it never
was). You have not felt true embarrassment until you hear the most venomous
racial epithets trip blithely off the lips of a pearl-wearing Leave-it-to-Beaver
next-door neighbor mom, or spit violently from the adolescent tongue of someone
you thought was your best buddy. These were not uncommon words. They were the lingua franca of a large portion of America.
I heard those words in the North, the South, the East, and the West. I heard them
from teachers, businessmen, mothers, fathers (thankfully, not my mother or
father, though my father had a hard time accepting the assimilation of Black-Americans
into all roles of American life). I heard these words from privates and
generals. There are few things as jarring as hearing an otherwise-revered war
hero extrude the N-word from his lips as if he were simply molding some racially-textured
Play-Doh for the amusement of dinner party guests.
We have not ended such attitudes; we have only put an ill-fitting
lid on them, and the rancid stew of inequality and injustice simmering beneath
that lid is getting hotter, not colder. You need look no further than the
current White House and it’s socially-misguided population to know we stand on a
crumbling precipice of perverted potential, one misstep away from descending
into irreversible degeneracy, suspicion, and subversion. Aided and abetted by a
segment of the media that glorifies all who are white and wealthy, or cruelly
pretends to dignify all who are white and ignorant, our national leadership
casts aspersions and doubt upon all who are black, yellow, beige and brown
(thank you, Nina Simone and Langston Hughes for Backlash Blues).
I also grew up in an America that objectified and
denigrated girls and women, and stigmatized them if they did not measure up to
some unreachable standard, or if they pushed back against the social norms of
the time. Many men of the time read Playboy, and
news stands in many markets and convenience stores displayed far more crude
magazines next to Family Circle, Good Housekeeping and Readers’ Digest. The female
form was reduced to a sexual snack, gaudily painted with lipstick, carefully
airbrushed, and wrapped like candy in silk for male consumption. And, like
racism and guns, Americans defined and accepted—frequently celebrated on fashion
and contest runways, in magazines, books, and big silver screens—women’s proper
role in our society.
We have not ended such abuse and disrespect; we have only
glossed it over and made tentative strides toward addressing the underlying misogyny,
denigration through popular music, political imbalance, and income inequality
that continue to derail women’s reasonable aspirations. As for pornography, it
may not appear on store shelves as it once did, but it is thriving in the virtual
world, and it is tolerated—and apparently paid for—at the highest levels of government.
Note that I have not—nor will I here—discussed the darker
side of America of the 50s and 60s: abortion, drugs, spouse abuse, alcoholism,
closeted homosexuality, the shame of priests, rapacious environmental pollution
and destruction at the hands of the huge coal- and mineral-mining companies and
the energy plants and vast factories they continue to feed, the Cold War,
nuclear threats…the list goes on. There remain today holdovers of these and
other ills, and we still approach them with great reluctance and lack of a galvanized
national will.
If we cannot fulfill the vision of an America that is open
to all, safe for all, filled with achievable opportunities for all, tolerant of
all, listening to all, answering to all, uniting all, and celebrating all, how
can we possibly deceive ourselves into thinking we have any chance for reasonable
and effective debate on what to do about guns? And if we cannot debate the
issue, we certainly cannot solve the problem.
We thought we were ready to end racial hatred and embrace
our differences to such a degree that they would fade into the mists of time. We
are not there yet.
We thought we could address women’s economic and social
equality and set but one bar for men and women—and government—to clear: the bar
of equal rights. We are not there yet.
We thought our education systems would elevate our children’s
intellectual and practical futures to world-class competitiveness. We’re not
there yet—and that goal is disappearing in the dust of nations ready and
willing to fill the intellectual vacuum our schools are creating.
Clearly, we are not ready and willing to act to bring an end
to gun violence and killings in schools, killings in theaters, killings at
music venues. If we were, we’d be there. It’s as simple as that. Our national
baggage of misguided and failed programs is so filled with the junk of past
generations it is a wonder we can make any headway under such a loathsome burden.
The enormity of the gun problem is beyond comprehension. Hundreds
of millions of weapons in the hands of hundreds of millions of people. A miniscule
percentage of those people will use their guns to do harm; the vast majority of
Americans will not be able to relate. They can’t relate now. No number of
deaths will cause Americans to break the chain of ownership. Legislation is not
a viable option. Sorry. Just not happening.
What would be legislated? A guns-to-plowshares program? A pay-for-gun
collection program? A “well-just-come-get-your-gun” program? An electronic
tagging program? Oh, sure, that will go over well. How about a turn-in-your-neighbor-who-seems-crazy
program? Or a “Well-he-looked-dangerous-to-me” program? More mental heath screenings?
Given that the path of conservative government is veering away from funding
programs that might help identify troubled—and potentially violent—gun owners
or possible purchasers, mental health programs are simply unworkable and unscaleable.
To think we can resolve the gun problem before we have achieved
success in grappling with our other issues—some of which are eroding the
foundations of our democracy at an ever-increasing pace—is to deny the reality
that we just don’t have the will to protect our young people—or anyone—from the
killings that will continue unabated. There are no answers ahead; only coffins
of many sizes.
It’s a hard rain that is falling. And it will only get
harder.
*© 1962 Bob Dylan
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