Aurora to Ardmore, London to Lebanon

Aurora.

I wasn’t going to pander to it because – well, because it is so personal and the press has made it so ‘newsy’ (when it really isn’t) that I didn’t want to add any more to that.

But then my daughter, who is in Scotland, writes in her blog about being a global citizen and in a Skype call with her I enthusiastically support her taking a bus to go running off to London for a day of adventure with her friend. I remember when I was 14 and I traveled by myself throughout Europe, in Greece, in Communist countries, and the most fearful thing was that someone would grab my ass.  And so I think – go, wander, explore, because that is life, that is how life should be. 

Now it does cross my mind that London is the home of the summer Olympics and  that the Olympics is a potential source of terrorism.  And it does cross my mind that she will be working the Fringe Festival which attracts close to 2 million people into the city some of whom might be 'fringe' themselves. But even as these thoughts make themselves known they are over-ridden because I believe this is what it should be like at her age; hop on a bus, ride 10 hours into London, go roaming about, work in a giant artistic event, experience the world and just keep exploring. Thus I  I bury my mother hen fears - which exist in part because I am an ocean away - and instead trust her sensibility while I recall how much I gained in self-awareness and confidence from my own early travels. She has my blessing and I am thrilled for her.

Then this; Aurora and the fragile nature of life rears its head.

I know that had my daughter been home, she, like so many other kids, would have likely been at the opening  midnight showing of a new Batman release. And, I know that, unlike her going off to London,  I wouldn’t have had even a second thought about it because I am nearby and just like in  Aurora, Colorado the movie cineplex here is in a mall - a place that is considered very safe. Her friends are good kids all and it’s just a movie,  the kind of thing you do every day. In fact, the status on Facebook for two of her friends this evening  read ‘at the movie’. Its a normal, American kid thing to do.  Between the two, given the commonplace nature of going to the theater 5 miles away my worry about her taking a bus to London seemed the far more reasonable.

But the very normalcy is just the part that gets folks about this; when the everyday stuff suddenly isn't so everyday you find yourself struggling for answers.  After 9/11 when the area where I worked in the city was under lockdown, when we had to show badges to get in and out of buildings, when I passed body search dogs on my way to the office and there were kids with AK-47’s on the street corners  I felt invaded by fear.  However my friend, a Rabbi, who had lived for a while in Israel shrugged, this is how it is he said. But doesn’t it make you crazy I asked?  God will decide my time was his answer.  Now I don’t know about that part, but I understood, he had lived with street bombings and violence as something that could happen. I lived in ignorance.

Nor is it just Israel or the Middle East.  My African American friends have a similar response – welcome to life in an urban war zone, or in a Southern town, or anywhere for that matter if your skin color or your features or how you are just doesn't blend in.

I remember when I rode the ambulance in Brooklyn – and I remember the first time we had a shooting – a drug dealer shot in the chest. I was just a volunteer, I never saw a bullet wound (or even a dead person). The medics threw me the MAST pants (military antishock trousers – inflatable pants used to keep blood pressure up when there is bleeding from the chest) and I didn’t know how to put them on. But the guy with the bullet wound did and he told me, he’d been through all this before. Even told us which hospital to take him to.  Getting shot was just part of his life.

In the year that followed that incident I got to learn a lot more than how to put on MAST pants. I remember the postman with the vacant eyes when his girlfriends ex decided this guy had no right to her, I remember sitting in the projects waiting for the coroner to come and get the bloated body of an old woman that no one even thought about while I listened to the gun fire down in the alley below, I remember the bar in Red Hook awash in blood and bodies after a bar room dispute, and most of all I recall standing in the ER watching a doc hold a woman's heart in his hand trying to restart it after someone shot her. I heard the momma's in the waiting room crying, and seen the life leaving as a body turned into a carcass. Getting shot got pretty real sometimes.

But for most folks in America, the possibility of getting shot in the middle of a movie theater in a suburban mall exists so far from the reality of their lives that imagining it feels like the end of reason. The violence stuns a lot of Americans because we believe violence in a theater is only supposed to be on the screen. Personal violence is supposed to be removed from our daily lives; sanitized.

So it is that we live in a strange dichotomy; aware of violence through media news clips and movies but the sharp pain of it is once removed. We manage mostly to remain oblivious to the impact it has on people's lives. We are  ferocious about freedom, self righteous in our ideas of justice and and ignorant about what's brewing in the house next door. And,in the end, we are unwilling to address the problem that exists until it lands up on our doorstep.

I have friends and family who own guns; and  the vast majority who do have been trained in their use and have a deep realization of what they can do.  As for myself, I shot a gun once and then for lots of reasons, mainly  because I understood how powerful it could make me feel, I knew that I would never own one. Turns out that I was a pretty good shot, and I even liked it, but I didn't like how it made me feel so strong. To this day I have that bullet to remind me.

Now I do appreciate and respect that  some folks feel different, I get that for them having that gun is important. Yet even the ones that have those guns have licenses and not a one is an assault rifle. And most of them embrace the idea of some sort of regulatory process.

But for me the bottom line is when someone’s right to have a gun comes up against my right to go to a movie, that’s when I say enough.  We are quicker to imprison someone for shooting heroin than for shooting a kid walking in the street.  

Yes, I agree and understand the old maxim, it’s people who kill people – its just that a) they use guns and b) there’s a lot of that killing stuff going around.

No matter what, and I will leave the debate on gun control to the pundits, it still comes to this, it still comes down to the fact that I cannot understand why we do this, why are we, with all our knowledge, here - with guns and arsenals and assault rifles. Why do we have such a love affair with the gun as an answer, with destroying each other. Why do we increasingly move toward militarization as a solution to every problem. And why do we believe that we have the RIGHT to kill another person, and not just in self-defense or protection but because, just because.  Horrifyingly there have been a few comments in the social media ether in SUPPORT of the killer - and I just stop and think - huh?

We have tapped into this part of ourselves and now we cannot let it go. And that's what make me weep, that is what breaks my heart - because if we believe that a gun is the answer to differences then we have no answers. Yes, I agree, more regulation won't fix things because so long as we think that power over can bring peace we will keep destroying.

Think on this - prior to 1900 disease and pandemics were the largest killers of human beings. After 1900  war and democide became the chief  destroyers of human life - interestingly right around the time we used our amazing human intellect to invent the automatic rifle. And it's gone downhill from there.

Now, it's not like we have nothing else to do, it's not that as though we have already conquered all illness and can prevent pandemics - no, we still have plenty of those.  Even more there is plenty of the basics that still need our attention - every day  50,000 children die from  lack of clean water, it is estimated that 15-30 million people will die of poverty annually, and 10 million children will die before the age of three.

One billion people cannot read or write – with less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons we could  insure every child was educated – and education is the first step to better health, reducing poverty, and improving quality of life. But it doesn’t happen.

These are all things we can do something about – access to water, eliminate poverty, educate people – we have the tools, we have the ability. But we don’t.

Instead we make more guns, bigger guns, more deadly guns. And we argue about regulation.

And this is where I am stuck.

There are 10 firearm deaths per 100,000 folks in the US.

There are .58 and .46 deaths per 100,000 folks in Scotland and England respectively. (that is POINT 58 and point 46). 

So I let my daughter get on a bus in Edinburgh and go to London in search of adventure. And its safer than going to a movie in her home town.

The lust for violence is great in America but in truth the problem permeates the world; Syria, the Congo, Tibet. It is as though there is some perverse belief that calculated destruction is an answer in a world were there is plenty of suffering without any human made violence needed. I have thought, perhaps foolishly, that our highest aspirations as humans was to make the world a better place, not a defeated one.

I sign my notes to people with the word 'metta' - and so far no one has ever asked me what it means. Maybe they looked it up, maybe they know. It is an ancient word from the Pali language - an Indo-Aryan tongue that is used in Buddhism. It's mean is 'loving kindness' - the love of all others, without bitterness, in fellowship, in sympathy, a love which overcomes social, religious, racial, political and economic barriers. I don't have it but I strive for it, I strive to be accepting, I strive to create a world that is more interested in providing water, food and education than guns.

And tonight it is metta that I give for the folks in Aurora, Colorado. It is also metta that I give for the world as a whole; from Aurora to Ardmore, from London to Lebanon.

It is time for us to put down our swords and ask ourselves what we are doing.