On Life

A Fantasy Thought…

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I had a crazy fantasy thought the other night, in the wake of the latest mass shooting incident in Highland Park. What if instead of trying to pass more gun safety legislation, we just banned men from purchasing or possessing guns?

I know there are all kinds of constitutional issues that make this utterly unworkable. But statistics suggest that if we could do this, mass shootings and gun violence would drop dramatically. Over 90 percent of mass shootings are committed by men, most with legally obtained weapons. Over 80 percent of all gun violence is committed by men. Men also make up 86 percent of all firearm deaths. Men own three times as many firearms as women. And 52 women a month die from gun violence at the hands of a male domestic partner. (Source: Men Against Gun Violence)

A question I wrestle with as another man against gun violence is why gender is such a major factor in gun violence. In all the back and forth about gun violence, I hear very little discussion about why men are so drawn to gun ownership and far more prone to resort to gun violence, including mass shootings. [It does need to be acknowledged that there are many responsible gun owners but I also think even responsible, law-abiding gun owners need to examine the psychology of their gun ownership and what kind of person they become as they make this choice. I cannot judge this choice for another, but suggest each needs to honestly judge his own choices in this regard.]

I don’t have answers to these questions. I have questions. I refuse to chalk it all up to testosterone. Why, particularly are so many men choosing to resolve a dispute, their road rage, or a nursed sense of anger with a gun? All of us get angry, but most of us learn to control and channel our angry impulses, precisely because we realize how destructive they may be. Yet it seems that an increasing number of men have discarded the restraints on anger that most of us practice. Why is that?

This seems an important matter wrestle with in our churches, our schools, and our community organizations. I also think the social isolation, and the distorted ways of thinking that arise, fed by “dark web” sites, are factors in mass shootings desperately needing to be recognized and understood and addressed.

At this point we are a society determined to maintain our “right” to own guns and the maintenance of this right means that nowhere is safe–our schools, our houses of worship, our groceries, our parks, our restaurants, our parades and public events, our shopping districts and malls, our neighborhoods and our homes. For those who argue that an armed presence, a police presence is what we need–all kinds of public safety forces were present at the parade in Highland Park. No doubt they saved lives in their rapid response but seven died and twenty or so were wounded by the 80 rounds fired in the brief period before the gunman needed to flee–some with devastating wounds that will take months or years to heal, if they ever fully do. This is the price of our freedom.

This is not the country I grew up in but it is the country we have become. Simone Weil contended that when we speak of rights, we need to speak first of obligations. It seems to me that our contemporary insistence on rights is devoid of the obligations that accompany any right. I wonder what our young men are learning about the obligations and responsibilities that come as they make the transition from boys to adult men. Are they learning only that no one should constrain their freedom, which the power of a gun makes more irresistible? Or are they learning that the exercise of our rights ought never impair the rights of others and especially the most vulnerable among us?

We cannot ban men from owning guns. But we can ask what kind of men we are raising our sons to become.

Could We Just Stop Using the Label “Pro-Life”?

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I did not have a book ready for review today and so jotted down some of my own thoughts about the Texas school shooting and the claims of our politicians to be pro-life. If this is more controversial than you like, here’s your chance to take a pass.

The shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas have reinforced my conviction that as a nation we have decided to sacrifice our children on an altar of guns. And it is not just Uvalde. There has been more than one mass shooting a day in the United States this year. We have more guns than people in this country. You cannot turn on the news in my city without reports of a shooting, often resulting in one or more deaths. Most of those both killing and dying are young.

And no neighborhood is safe. I thought I lived in a “safe” neighborhood until a woman was murdered in her front yard by a stalker. This was little more than a block away. I heard the shots and thought they were fireworks. Until I saw the news the next day. No place is truly safe when there are more guns than people and people seem angrier than ever. I’ve learned not to respond to aggressive drivers. They could be carrying. Some live with this all the time. I predict more of us will.

What is most disturbing in my state and many others is that the very people who have aggressively promoted pro-life measures are the same ones removing all the safeguards on gun ownership. We now have a permitless carry of concealed weapons law in our state but there has been no action on “red flag” laws that would allow a court ordered restriction of the access of someone with mental health issues to a gun–a measure the overwhelming majority of the American public favors. Such orders may be sought by family or law enforcement, require a court ruling and due process, and have limits protecting civil liberties. Yet even such measures do not impair law abiding citizens from buying any gun they want.

That is why I want politicians to stop using the label “pro-life.” Almost none that I know are consistently pro-life. They are only pro-life in the areas their base wants them to be pro-life. Which, from what I can see is “pro-fetus.” I wonder how much most of them really care for mothers and the life they are bearing. I say all this as someone who is pro-life in this sense.

What would it mean to be consistently pro-life?

  • Protecting the life of the unborn, unless this endangers the life of the mother.
  • Pro-life means access to all mothers to good pre-natal and post-natal care and affordable, quality daycare.
  • Pro-life means access to quality health care for all of our citizens, no matter your zip code or economic status. Good preventive care may actually save money as well as lives, especially for urban hospitals where the emergency room is the doctor’s office.
  • Pro-life means addressing issues of mental health. Often, mental health is something discussed by those who oppose even sensible gun measures, but then nothing is done to provide good mental health care, especially for those whose conditions might lead them to harm themselves or others.
  • Pro-life cares about our addiction crisis. Over 100,000 drug overdose deaths occurred in the US in the period ending in April 2021.
  • Pro-life cares about elder care. The warehousing of the elderly and the high numbers of COVID deaths early on in the pandemic in congregate care settings points up the lack in our care for our elder population.
  • Pro-life cares about the world we live in, the air, the water, and the climate. In some parts of the world, extended droughts threaten life as do prolonged high temperatures.
  • And pro-life is committed to substantive measures to reduce gun violence. As long as guns are ubiquitous, so will be gun violence. Pro-life asks, “why do we want guns?” Certainly there are legitimate reasons, but I believe that when many buy a gun, they make an implicit decision that they are willing to take a life. Sadly, most often, it will be the life of someone they know, or even their own life. Guns turn a momentary angry or self-destructive impulse into a fatal act.

I know few politicians who affirm a consistent pro-life ethic covering all of life for all people, no matter their status. So I wish they would stop saying they are pro-life because in my ears it is a hypocritical statement. At the same time, the politicians we elect reflect the people who elect them. For most of us, we cannot claim to be consistently pro-life either. We are selectively pro-life. We are not terribly disturbed that people in another zip code in our city have a much lower life expectancy, just because of where they live, or that some small island nations may have to find another place to live because their homes may be submerged.

Maybe as a country, we need to face that we have embraced a culture of death. We celebrate it in our videogames, television, and movies. We seem relatively indifferent to the 100,000 drug deaths or a million COVID deaths or the gun violence occurring every day in any major city. It makes me wonder how quickly we will forget the 19 beautiful children and two dedicated teachers who died in Uvalde. Already, those who died at the Topp’s grocery store in Buffalo are fading from view. Equally, we are indifferent to the nearly 42 million abortions in the U.S. between 1973 and 2019.

Little wonder we do not have consistently pro-life politicians. They are simply a mirror reflection of the people who have elected them. They are a reflection of us. Let’s stop pretending.

Living Under a Nuclear Cloud

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I’ve lived my whole life under a nuclear cloud, as likely most of you had. Recent events in Ukraine, and the nuclear sabre-rattling of Russia’s president have brought this to the fore. Most of us with any understanding of European history have a sense of how this conflict could escalate in some truly horrendous ways. In a statement widely attributed to Albert Einstein, it has been observed: ‘I do not know what weapons the third world war will be fought with, but I know that the fourth one will be fought with sticks and stones.”

“I do not know what weapons the third world war will be fought with, but I know that the fourth one will be fought with sticks and stones.”

-Attributed to Albert Einstein

My 36 year old son asked my wife and me how we dealt with the nuclear tensions of the 1960’s. It’s plain all this has been bothering him. It’s been bothering us as well, triggering all those memories of civil defense drills of crawling under desks or going down to the subterranean designated shelter area in our elementary school. I watched President Kennedy on our black and white TV show overflight pictures of Cuban missile bases 90 miles from our southern borders, bases from which much of the eastern US could be reached in minutes. I remember the tense days when we wondered if these would be our last. I remember that my parents did not have much to say to assure us, but that my dad continued to sit with me as I prayed my nightly prayers, talking until I dropped off to sleep. I didn’t know what the night or tomorrow would bring, but for the moment I felt a measure of safety. Perhaps that’s all we ever have.

My wife and I looked at each other as we took in our son’s question. We both said, “This is worse.” Is it that we know more, and have seen so many more instances of the unthinkable happening? Is it our apprehension of the volatility of a war in east central Europe, amid a cluster of nations, knowing past histories of how more and more became embroiled in what became “World Wars?” Is it apprehensions of a Russian president who has assassinated political enemies, violated sovereign borders, and crossed moral bright-lines of protecting non-combatants and medical facilities?

How do I deal with it? I think I try to limit the amount of time I give it without ignoring it. But I woke up the other night thinking of how serious this all is, and all I could do was pray myself to sleep–praying that God would restrain evil, confuse the efforts of evildoers, and to pray for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people and the safety of those seeking to flee to refuge. I also pray for our leaders and others in the world. How does one communicate firm and believable resolve and yet work to contain and quench a fire that could destroy much of the world, without fanning the flames? I’ve known God to give wisdom in the moment, and so I pray that God will give in spades that kind of wisdom to those who act on our behalf.

Having said my prayers, all I know to do is get on with my life, to keep showing up in my work, to sit down with gratitude to meals with my wife, to tend to our home, cleaning up fallen branches and reveling in the coming of spring. There are the evening walks, rejoicing in sunsets, watching children play and praying over the homes in my neighborhood the blessings of God. I remember that we never truly have the promise of tomorrow, only this moment, and the opportunities of the moment. For all I know, the garden I plant and tend may be left to another. One day, for sure, it will be. But there is goodness in this day. And I will keep tending that garden in hope of flowers and vegetables.

The day of my birth marks both the anniversary of Hiroshima and the Transfiguration. I live between the powers of destruction and the one who makes all thing new. Some wonder how one can press forward under the cloud. I do as well. How do you live when the push of a button can wipe out our efforts? The Transfiguration reminds me that all our efforts aren’t about results but are at best foretastes of what’s to come, and more often, I think, simply rehearsals for our work in the new creation.

Do You Hear Your Mother’s Voice?

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Do you ever hear your mother’s voice in your head? I do at times, and one of the messages I hear most often is, “you don’t have to say everything you think.”

I’ve gotten tripped up more times than I’d care to admit when I’ve ignored that voice. It might be that testy thought that I share in a discussion with my wife when it would have been better to hold my tongue and use my two ears instead. It could be that unkind word about a colleague who is not in the room that gets back to them, leading to a much longer discussion.

Then there are the comments in online discussions. I’ll see that patent falsehood or cruel remark about another person. And it is SO-O-O-O tempting to jump in. Usually, that is a great way to waste a day, leaving me thinking, “why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut.”

I’m the admin for a book page on Facebook (also called Bob on Books). Most of the time it is a pretty pleasant place and most people participate to get away from the unpleasantries of the world, or even the rest of Facebook. We have a “no ad hominem attacks” policy toward any person–politicians, authors, or each other. Yet I still find I have to deal with the comments of the person who uses the most innocuous post to attack a public figure they don’t like (but that others might). I find myself wishing they’d heard their mom saying, “you don’t have to say everything you think.” She probably did at some point.

Then there are the people who like to spoil others’ good time. We may be talking about mysteries and in the middle, someone feels they just have to let us know, “I don’t like mysteries and never read them.” Couldn’t they have just scrolled past?

The one thing I wish I’d asked my mom would have been “when do you speak up about what you are thinking?” There are times when our silence is assent to something that is terribly wrong and against what we hold most deeply. I recall a time in an online conversation where a person known to me in real life as someone who shares my religious convictions was mocking someone for a physical disability. I felt I couldn’t let that pass and wrote that I felt this was unbefitting of his professed faith. I still saw political statements I couldn’t agree with, which was fine–the world doesn’t have to agree with me. But no more like this, and thankfully we are still at least Facebook friends.

Then there are the times when a thought or an insight as your team grapples with a difficult question may be helpful. My own approach tends to be the “reflective observer” approach. I like the saying, “I read books and I know things.” Sometimes, it is actually important not to keep them to myself but to put them out there, not as pronouncements but as proposals: “I wonder if something like this might help…?”

I think what our mothers (and our wives!) were (are) trying to teach us is what is often called EQ or emotional intelligence. My wife will sometimes turn to me after a social gathering and ask, did you see what was really going on in that room? I’m learning that when you don’t say everything you think, you end up paying more attention to your context, what is really going on, and not just what is being said, which may not be the most important thing. Then you have a better chance that when you do speak your thoughts, they are worth hearing.

I don’t think not saying everything you think will solve global warming or bring world peace. It could make the online world a bit more pleasant. Often, though, the best reward may just be all the time you save by not having to clean up your verbal messes or trying to defend them. Mom knew what she was talking about.

The New Wave of Book Banning

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I’m interrupting my usual posting of book reviews to write about a troubling trend occurring in towns and state legislatures across the country. Book banning. There have long been challenges to books selected for school classes, usually centered around race, gender, and sexuality. In the past, it was a parent or group of parents. Rarely was a book actually banned. Rather, it was challenged. I joked that it was really just a ploy to sell that book. Booksellers featured “banned books,” sometimes bolstering the sales of books that likewise would have not gotten a lot of notice.

It’s not a joking matter any more. States are threatening criminal charges against librarians who place certain books in circulation. Books, such as The 1619 Project, which chronicles the presence of slavery in our country’s earliest history, and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, have been banned by state legislatures on ideological grounds. It extends to novels as well, including Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and even, in Washington State Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, recently voted the best book of the last 125 years by The New York Times Book Review.

It seems to me that the fundamental notion is to protect students from exposure to certain ideas and materials. The problem is actually a version of my joke about bans promoting sales. When Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic fiction work Maus was recently banned in a Tennessee school district, the book immediately topped Amazon’s best-seller lists. One comic bookstore in Tennessee has offered the book free to anyone in the school district.

What is most troubling is the use of state power to dictate what books will and will not be permitted in libraries and classrooms. I am troubled because it seems that the targets are often frank discussion of matters of religion, of race, and sexuality. To limit the ideas that may be explored and discussed seems to me to be a profound abridgement of the First Amendment.

I know. Years ago, I was associated with a group facing loss of its privileges for what I would call view point discrimination. One of our allies was a First Amendment attorney who disagreed with our perspective but believed we needed to be free to hold and advocate it. I believe the same applies with books. We may not agree with the content of books but I believe we need to fight to protect access to those books.

You may have wondered about the picture of the Bible associated with this article. At least some who are seeking to criminalize defying a legislative ban claim to be Christians. I wonder if they understand how vigorously through history many governments have banned ownership and distribution of the Bible, and people have literally died to make the scriptures available or to obtain even a portion of the Bible.

And it can happen here, especially if we cross the bright line of protecting free speech in written as well as spoken form. The Bible, if one actually reads it, is not a tame book. It has unblinking accounts of rape and violence as well as elevated discourses on the nature of love. I know those who believe it is actually a danger to society. And I can easily see that if it becomes acceptable to criminalize the distribution of certain books, the same argument could be applied to the Bible. And any student of our politics knows that the pendulum will swing. We, of all people, should most oppose bans on books.

In the past, at least, the solution for speech that offends is not to ban it, but to allow more speech, where this does not incite violence or slander or deliberately mislead to the harm of another. It is to allow discussion and protect difference. With students, it is to teach them how to think critically–to recognize fundamental premises, to understand various rhetorical devices and when rhetoric substitutes for reason and evidence. The sad thing is our social media echo chambers only allow for more speech that agrees, that echoes the prevailing view. The danger is that we want to turn schools and universities into the same kinds of places, echo chambers of the left or right, rather than examine argument and counter-argument, narrative and counter-narrative. And so we perpetuate and deepen the divides so troubling us.

Working in college ministry, especially in the age of the internet, I’ve learned there is no way to “protect” people from ideas. As a parent, I concluded that we could not protect our son from any idea. Rather, we talked about them. And if I didn’t like the choices of books in every instance (and many times I did like them and discovered he was reading things I was interested in reading), I would share about others I thought were better. The truth is that to this day, we don’t agree on some things, and I’m glad. I oppose cloning human beings, especially our children!

Ultimately, the use of state power to ban books seems both to open the door to tyranny and is a concession of the weakness of the ideas behind such efforts. Instead of the power of an idea, we resort to the use of force and threat. And what we have lost as we do so is our democratic republic. Tyrannies of both the left and the right are tyrannies. The banning of books is the first step in silencing and marginalizing the people we don’t like. It is but a further step to strip them of their rights, and then their humanity or even their lives.

As I conclude, I would speak to my book-loving friends, many of whom cringe at even the destruction of books that cannot be sold. We have varying tastes and varying convictions. At very least, we ought be committed to affording protection to those of others that we would want for our own. None of us wants to see a beloved book banned, whether that be Fifty Shades of Gray, The Invisible Man, Pride and Prejudice or The Bible.

We cannot take comfort with the libraries with which we’ve surrounded ourselves nor the friends with whom we talk books. If this movement grows, we too could become a danger to the state. These efforts need to be resisted, challenged in court, and subverted, as did the comic book salesman, or those who slip banned books into Little Free Libraries or those at great risk who have smuggled Bibles or as those in Fahrenheit 451, who memorized great books. After January 6, 2021, I’ve concluded that the unthinkable can happen. Edmund Burke’s warning does not seem cliche’: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Pandemic Reflections: The Omicron Edition

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I did not think that in January of 2022 that I would still be writing pandemic reflections. Now, I’m beginning to wonder when pandemic reflections will be a thing of the past. Right now, I wonder who else I will learn has COVID when I open Facebook each day (perhaps opening Facebook is my mistake!). I keep hearing Omicron is milder but we’ve never had so many in the hospitals where I live. Right now, over 700 are dying each week in my state. Tests are hard to get. I suspect there are far more infections than those recorded on our state’s dashboard.

Against this backdrop, it is hard for me to hear talk about “new normals” and “I’ve got to live my life.” When schools scramble to get teachers in the classroom and bus drivers to get the children there, when restaurants close because all their servers are sick, when sports teams cancel big games because of “protocols,” this hardly seems normal and I wonder what kind of life we are trying to live when it requires a lot of people to get sick for us to live it, or equally when it requires us to get sick. This all sounds off to me, somehow. It makes me wonder what “living my life” means.

For me it has meant a two year respite from getting on airplanes. It’s meant growing closer to my wife who is my bubble-mate! It’s meant treasuring those times when we have gathered with others. It’s meant working on our home. It’s meant near daily neighborhood walks, glorious sunsets, changing seasons, and getting to know people along the route. So many of my work years have meant getting on a plane or jumping into a rental car for a trip and I haven’t met many of the people in our community beyond my immediate neighbors. I’ve participated in virtual pilgrimages with people from all over the country–times to walk, and meditate on scripture, to listen to stories, and to pray. I’ve written nearly 600 blogs, engaged in hundreds of online conversations, worked with over 30 talented writers in my work, hosted online conversations with a variety of authors and online book groups, and read a few good books along the way (actually more than a few!). I’ve enjoyed plein air painting with my wife and a group of artists in good weather, and actually felt I improved. While I can think of things I wish we could do, I’ve lived, and I think lived well these past years. I even weigh five pounds less than at the beginning of the pandemic (not much, but I’ll take it!).

And by God’s grace, we’ve remained healthy. I don’t presume it will continue when I hear reports saying nearly everyone will catch this latest variant. But neither am I going to run out, plunge into a big, maskless crowd and “get it over with.” That’s the vibe I get as I listen to the media. When I talk to friends our age (late 60’s), we feel like the tornado sirens are blaring and right now we are going to our safe place until the storm of this latest wave blows through. We’re getting good at this. We’ve had a lot of practice and many of us have found the richness of life on the other side of “safe at home.”

Here’s how we look at it. No illness is “milder” when you get older. It takes longer for anything from a cut to a cold or the flu to heal. Even if our vaccinations and booster mean we don’t get sick enough to go to the hospital, that can still be pretty sick. And it is a crapshoot when it comes to after effects. And getting exposed and sick adds to the strain on testing, on our primary care docs, pharmacists, and if we get sicker, a host of others at a time they are all being pressed to the wall. As far as it depends on us, we’ll try to avoid becoming another case.

What’s hard is that as you get older, it is easy not to think of yourself in that way, especially when you see the world around you trying to get back to “normal” in the middle of a wave. It’s easy to start questioning whether you are too cautious. It helps to have other older friends who tell you that you are not nuts.

So for the time, we do takeout. We shop early, and only as necessary, don’t linger, and wear at least a KN95 mask. We won’t do any indoor, unmasked gatherings with a significant group of people. Perhaps for the next few weeks at least, no indoor gatherings outside our bubble.

We don’t take talk of things “levelling off” or “lessening” at face value. We watch infection rates as a rough benchmark. At one time in our state, our governor wanted to get below 50 infected out of 100,000 (1 out of 2,000) over a two week period (and we actually got down to 19.2 per 100,000 last summer). Today the rate in our state is 1818.8 per 100,000 (nearly 2 out of 100) infected in the last two weeks (and because of test shortages, that number is probably low). That means in a group of 50, at least one person is probably infectious. That feels to me that we are amid a storm.

When it was a few hundred cases per 100,000 we did discretionary shopping, and some indoor dining at off hours. Probably, we’ll wait to see things go below 100 per 100,000 to go back to “normal,” perhaps with an Omicron booster.

At the end of the day, I realize there is no sure thing about any of this. The choices we make, we do so out of prudence (God never invites us needlessly to imperil our health or life) and love for each other. My choices affect my wife, other loved ones, and indeed a wider community. But they finally do not make us invulnerable. I live each day grateful for this day’s life (something the pandemic has taught me that is itself a gift). As a Christ-follower, I do believe that someday I will rest in peace with Christ and be raised with him in glory. So I act, not out of fear but rather as one who both lives in hope and cherishes each day of life. I’ve also learned with this pandemic this wisdom of James 5: 15 which says, “Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’ ” It seems that any predictions of what this virus will do are folly, and the best we can do is say, “if it is the Lord’s will.”

This reflection is neither an argument or judgement on other choices. Some of the choices we’ve made, we realize, are not possible for others. It is simply a reflection of how we are thinking and acting at this stage of the pandemic. If it’s helpful to someone else, I’m glad, and if you see things differently, I have no interest in a quarrel. We have to get through this thing together, so a fight is counter-productive. I suspect whenever this relents, we’ll all have a lot of sorting out to do, and who knows but that we may end up helping each other–or at least forgiving each other the unkind judgements we have made upon one another.