In dependence

Following tradition, this day we will find our son wherever he may be, and play for him John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."

Liam could not wait to be born on the Fourth of July 24 years ago, so he showed up July 3. We celebrate the red white and blue today, and the holiday everyone else celebrates tomorrow has since seemed like dull aftermath.

It was easier to find him back then. We'd wake him up earlier even than he had planned to wake himself, and play the song as loud as we could on his little primary-colored Fisher Price™® tape recorder with the cartoon karaoke microphone attached.

That's how we presented him with this birthday gift when he was three, by showing how loudly it could play "Stars and Stripes Forever."

It's a bit harder to reach him now. Cell phone will have to do, and a CD in the stereo in the living room, loud enough for him to hear over digital space. He's with friends at a cabin for a long holiday weekend he had planned. Somehow, sometime today we will subject him to Sousa.

I don't think Liam will mind if I hijack a chunk of his day to talk about this country with whom he (almost) shares a birthday. Because this country confuses me.

Funny to say that now, with two-thirds or three-quarters of my life done — who's kiddin' whom? — but I thought I'd have a better idea.

Sweet land of liberty. Funny how liberty, and freedom, get carried around, as weapons. One person's freedom turns out to be another's limits. Freedom isn't free, goes the overused aphorism; someone has to pay. Though not in the way that adage is meant.

We wander in retrograde, me and my country.

The Supreme Court this week ruled that Hobby Lobby and other privately held businesses don't have to provide employees certain kinds of birth control through the Affordable Care Act if it violates the employer's religious beliefs.

Hobby Lobby supporters hailed the decision as a victory for religious freedom. I don't pretend to argue the particulars, though I find them silly. I note how the freedom of a relative few — the owners of these businesses — means the loss of freedom for many, the employers who would use these certain items of birth control under federal health care. The freedom of some becomes the undue influence into the private lives of many.

This is a narrow ruling, or so I read, though I also read the ruling isn't really so narrow and I can't believe it won't open the door for other monied interests to exercise various interpretations of constitutional freedoms while in the same sweep taking away the freedoms of others.

Target®© stores this week told gun owners they should not bring in their weapons for all to see, in states where owners are allowed to carry them out in the open. Angry moms had to tell the stores this is a stupid idea, apparently; Target™ couldn't see that on its face.

Gun owners couldn't see for themselves this gesture of exercising their interpretation of rights is a bad idea? That they have responsibility not to scare hell out of shoppers, who don't know whether they're gun lovers with some kind of exhibitionist complex, or angry people with easy means and opportunity to carry out grudges.

Last month I helped out a family in need — help in the loosest, most ludicrous meaning of the word: We bought the gas for their car. Which was also their home. For a lot of unsatisfying reasons, we weren't able to help more.

The man in this family of adults works a full-time job, but can't afford a place to stay. He and the other two take turns sleeping in the car. Other factors may be at play, I'm sure, but how can it be someone works a full-time job in this country and can't put a roof over their heads? How is it my dad, a generation removed, worked the sole job and bought a home for his family, and fed his family every day, never wanting?

Irresponsible gun owners overshadow responsible ones. Monied interests trump our votes, better feed our elected representatives — literally and figuratively — direct our daily lives, make up our minds for us, drive our foreign policy, send us to wars, make us poorer in spirit and fabric.

Or so I gather.

That's just it: I don't know what I know anymore.

I read, I listen, I watch. I could be a better devourer of news, but I suspect the ingredients. I distrust what I'm devouring.

Name one thing you know about the United States that you didn't get from some form of entertainment, and these days I include most so-called news outlets as entertainment.

I carry with me a Disney®™-based view of America, spawned in youth. I'm being unfair to Disney®, I know, because it alone didn't establish that idealized state of mind, that "Morning in America," golly-gee-whiz, Vaseline®-on-the-lens, sunnier-than-all-reason, greatest country in the world. Norman Rockwell did his part too, but Rockwell circled back on his national view and reacted to and amplified its deep flaws too.

The news I get about my country assumes that sunnier-than-thou state. It's almost all good, except when it's bad, then we are to gawk at it for entertainment. If it's too hard to explain, news explains it poorly or interviews Scarlett Johansson®™ about her new movie instead.

Like me, you probably get more and more of your daily information from facebook®© — more than you'd like to admit — from people you've only met online. Many share their view of the world, their particular opinions on it; most are supportive; some post inspirational posters, for coping with life. It's a strange meta-filter, because you don't know what — or who — you think you know. You take it on faith that what you're reading is what really is, and you try to assemble a puzzle from these pieces.

I get more and more confused, trying to figure out my country from what I know, what I aggregate. I try to reconcile National Public Radio©®, playing behind me as I write, with the newspaper I'll peruse in an hour, with more facebook®™ trying to sift truth from entertainment.

I wonder if the confusion keeps me — keeps us — from caring, keeps us from knowing, keeps the money in power, keeps freedom slavery. We seem to be going backward from that ideal state.

Or perhaps it's always seemed so. My country has gone through tremendous turmoil, most of which, of course, I have missed. Maybe the scale of our turmoil today pales in the face of what's come before.

Maybe my country is like a curveball, which arcs surprisingly through the air in the incessant battle for balance, high pressure below the spinning ball seeking roomy low pressure above. Maybe we're in the high pressure of this backward shift, and that enlightenment and reason will return.

It wasn't until our daughter Mo arrived in Ireland earlier this week and contacted us — our family astronaut, reporting back from the moon's surface — that I realized, like it or not, she was representing her country.

I wonder what her Irish hosts think of her country, of what goes on here. I wonder what she'll tell them.

Sally Fourth.

Falling up somehow*

On Saturday, a 15-year-old boy near Albuquerque, New Mexico, shot his mom dead with a .22-caliber rifle as she slept. He told police his mom had annoyed him, and that he thought of suicide and homicide.

Little brother, sleeping next to mom, didn't believe the boy had shot her, so the boy showed little brother her bloodied face — then shot and killed little brother. Then he shot and killed two young sisters. This is what he told police, the Associated Press reports.

Next he grabbed a semiautomatic assault rifle from his parents' closet, and waited in a downstairs bathroom for his dad, a church pastor and volunteer chaplain at a county jail, to come home from helping at a rescue mission. The boy fired multiple rounds, killing his father as he walked past the bathroom door.

The boy put two guns into a family car and thought of shooting shoppers at a Wal•Mart, but went to his girlfriend's house instead. He also told police he thought of killing his girlfriend's family. Instead he told congregants at his church that he had killed his family.

Oh, well.

When you're upholding our absolute right under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms, sometimes these things happen. It's too bad, but what are you gonna do? Call it … collateral damage.

Also on Saturday, five people were accidentally shot at gun shows in three states. The Associated Press reported three people were injured in Raleigh, North Carolina, when the owner of a shotgun accidentally fired it as he unzipped the gun from its case at a security checkpoint. A man in Indianapolis, Indiana, shot himself in the hand as he was leaving a show. A gun dealer in Medina, Ohio, accidentally pulled the trigger on a new purchase and injured his friend.

Saturday was Gun Appreciation Day.

What?! They were appreciating their guns!

On Wednesday, two high school students in Albany, California, were shot by assailants apparently interested in taking their basketball shoes.

That's old school, and old news. Happens all the time.

So it goes.

I'm waiting for the gun lobby to accuse gun-control advocates of orchestrating these heinous shootings and exercises in social Darwinism as a misguided effort to demonstrate that guns galore create environments for heinous shootings like these.

In these days of galling lies and stunts and hoaxes from the people we're expected to believe and admire, I wouldn't be surprised …

(Callow and cruel digression: If you owned multiple guns, including assault weapons, and you heard 27 people, most of them small children, had been shot in Newtown, Connecticut, wouldn't you say to yourself, "Hey! I have just such weapons! And I have children! Maybe I should be careful about where I put my Constitutionally guaranteed weapons, and about who can get them?" 

Wouldn't you take steps to make it so? Wouldn't you see the possibility of disquieting parallels?

Wouldn't you?)

People are killed by knives and hammers too, says the gun lobby. Should we ban them too?

I'm going to take a wild guess here, but I think killing with a knife is hard work. A lot of strength is involved, you have to swing or jab many times, you have the inconvenient problem of the victim not wanting to die, fighting back. Same goes for hammers.

Guns are immediate and distant, an instant expenditure of rage. Household with a troubled family member = Anguish and anger and confusion and heartache and impotence and a threat to family resolve. Now dangle a gun.

Ban automobiles! They kill too!

But the primary purpose of automobiles is not to kill people — and those who kill with cars are most often impaired, not intending to kill. Laws are imperfect to limit those deaths, but laws and regulations exist; they are upheld, and they work.

We own guns, the National Rifle Association and advocates say, to prevent tyranny, a noble notion imbedded in the Constitution. Nothing, therefore, can change gun policy. No ground may be given up in debate. No consideration for limiting access to guns. Absolutely, tyrannically, none.

So who decides tyranny? Who determines it's time to raise arms? Who determines the target? Who organizes this well-regulated militia, whatever that is?

It seems many opponents have made a straw tyrant of Barack Obama since he became president, with a talking-point vitriol and Orwellian newspeak I had never heard before in my life.

What of teapot tyrants? Do we start shooting when a town council denies a zoning permit? When animal control tells me to leash my dog? When are assault weapons justified here?

The brother of the New Mexico pastor shot and killed by his son said we shouldn't make the killings a political issue. So, it's just the tragic fate of a troubled family, then.

Just add guns.

*"Marker in the Sand," Pearl Jam, a jabbing satire of Bush administration war policy, which I'm sure not enough people heard.