Influence peddler

Five hundred hashmarks, it turns out, takes a very long time to make.

This is blog post No. 500.

High time, then, to examine how I've done in changing the world from my little virtual outpost these last five years.

Not all of these posts have been phoned in. Not even most. Oh, they comprise so much navel gazing, of course, but almost always in thoughtful consideration of the fuzz therein. Occasionally I have looked beyond myself, out into the crazy beautiful stinking tragic foregone world, rolled this blog into a megaphone and used it to shout at the world: Hey, fix that!

And how did that turn out?

Let us review: I, in chronological order:

• Got Jerry Brown elected governor. That has turned out rather well, especially considering the Schwarzenator he replaced. Third time being the charm, Brown is the older crank caretaker who doesn't really care what you or I think. He loves high-speed rail despite the cost, wants to build tunnels shoveling precious water to Southern California with greater ease, and could possibly be on the new Bay Bridge when its corroded cables snap in a massive CG effect gone real, but other than that, a nice change of pace. The guy who'd rather live in an unfurnished apartment his first time around now will move into the old haunted governor's mansion in which he was raised, remodeled with oodles of high-end restaurant-style kitchen appliances, but we'll give him his due.
  
• Stopped our sycophantic Yankee adoration of the British royal family. We only pay attention to Queen Elizabeth and her kith and kin now when one of them has a baby. Or gets engaged. Or married. Or breaks off the engagement. Or divorces. Or says something inappropriate. Or breathes.
  
  Of course, I showed the world how to make money off it all.
  
• Exposed the great wine fraud. It all comes from one source, and "winemakers" use the power of suggestion to get you to believe different "wine" "varieties" taste different from others. Again, you're welcome.
  
• Ended war in our time.
  
• Sustained the Occupy Wall Street movement by sheer force of will, and reduced the owners of our money to the petty government-sponsored thieves that they are. Our political landscape is forever changed. You're welcome, once more.
  
• Gave veterans and public education all the resources they need.
  
• Finally saw the light and heard the screams, and stopped war in Syria. ("Ending war in our time" still results in stubborn little skirmishes, like spot fires). Oh, and turned the tide for equality in marriage. Apathy is over!
  
  Though — funny thing! — war was harder to end than I had given it credit. But I finally made our leaders tell the truth. President Obama thanked me for making it so, which was nice.
  
• Changed Scouting policy to include Scouts who are gay.
  
  All attempts at facetious self-deprecation aside, I feel like I was on the "right side of history" on this subject, or at least in the right place at the right time. It's one of the few issues for which I can speak from the heart, about which I know more than a little.
  
  Of course, I don't really expect to move anyone's thinking on anything I write here, just to turn my own thoughts to concrete. Part of me — the ego part — couldn't help but wonder if I could, somehow, compel someone to see another side of an issue. Maybe that's why I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote — and wrote — on the matter.
  
• Stole Christmas. And good riddance!
  
• Ended gun violence … stopped the unbelievable tragedy … before it could get any worse … mopped up the blood … so much blood … really, a lot of blood. But now it's mopped up. All is well.
  
• Made government transparent. And not just that thing President Obama did, where he said his government is transparent when he meant, no, it is not. Now our overseers are exposed to daylight.
  
• Shortly after, brought peace and common sense to our government.
  
• Sorted out our official religion, the National Football League. Now we play nice.
  
• Set our minds free.
  
• Ended drought in California. Taught homeowners the error of their false bounty.
  
• Trumped presidential aspirations, for the good of the country.

It stands to reason all this saving the world stuff can be overwhelming to process, which is why I peppered the blog with bits about swimming and Giants baseball and paid doodles.

Now, if you'll excuse me, time to work on No. 501. But really, what problem could possibly be left to solve?

That is, except for determining if this counts as a blog post.

Sent packing

I don't know.

You don't know, either.

When and where in this country will we change, that people no longer use guns to kill others, in anger, in hatred, in profit, so profligate?

When will we change our minds, when will we change our actions, and stop not only the terrible mass slaughters by which our country is known the world over, but the daily killings so common they barely make Page 3 in your newspaper?

I don't know. You don't, either.

A kid unloosed from reality, and heavily armed with gifts he was given, slaughtered little children and their teachers at a school in Connecticut. Little children, their teachers' arms trying to shield the rain of bullets. We ached and wrung our hands and pointed fingers and called names, and bought more guns.

A man, who evades whatever help might have come to him, finds his solution by shooting into a darkened theater in Colorado, those about to die probably thinking how real this promotion for a new action movie seems to be.

How awful! we say. What a weirdo! we say. Concealed handgun woulda taken that dude down! we say. End of story!

A young man, mad at the world, goes to a university and shoots and kills innocent stand-ins for those he decides have made him miserable. Which university? Take your pick, unfortunately: You have so many slaughterhouses to choose from.

Now a young man, too young really to be so angry about anything, had seemed to pray with a Bible group before killing nine of its members, including the pastor, Clementa Pinckney, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

If someone in that church had packed a gun, I heard immediately in the aftermath, lives would have been saved. If teachers had been carrying, they could have rained their own bullets on the killer and and slowed or stopped this bloodshed.

Guns in the church, where people try to practice peace. Guns in the classroom, where children spend much of their childhood learning to try and get along.

More guns, against guns. That cannot possibly be the solution. I know it. You know it.

We are so, so far into the insanity of gun deaths that they have now taken on genres, different except for their common intractable solution: We won't get rid of our guns.

Killing a classroom of children hasn't been enough to move us, except to rail at questionable parenting and mental health services. Killing university of students makes us tsk! tsk! and that's about it. Almost killing a congresswoman at an informal meet-and-greet in front of an Arizona grocery store wasn't enough.

Nine church members dead becomes about racial hatred and the still simmering prejudices and fears we hold. It is still not enough.

Each different, each the same: Get more guns.

I don't know what to do. You don't either. People kill more people with guns in the United States, by far, than the rest of the developed world. We accept guns as a constitutional right, almost an expectation. We act as if ultimately we'll make peace through a continental standoff, each of us holding a gun on the other, until the shootings ends.

I do no more than write this and exorcise my confusion. I do not write my Congressional representative. I do not rail publicly against the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby. The debate is so convoluted and bitter and well-financed and entrenched that reform feels like folly.

I'm not advancing the debate here, late as I am anyway to comment, with nothing new or insightful to say.

I do no more than try very hard to treat others as I would like to be treated.

It is not enough. I know. You know.

We have witnessed the solution. In the most grisly and heart-wrenching fashion imaginable, we have seen it: It is love.

The members of Emanuel A.M.E. church accepted their killer into prayer with them, invited him into their holy place. Their grieving survivors immediately forgave the killer.

Churches over the weekend said they would not lock their doors, would not turn anyone away, would not do what anybody would reasonably expect them to do. They would welcome all with love.

The only name I have invoked here is Rev. Pinckney, pastor of the A.M.E. church and a state Senator in South Carolina. By all accounts Pinckney embodied love.

He spoke to a group visiting his church two years ago, telling them the history of his church and the story of Denmark Vesey, a leader of the church who plotted to lead a slave rebellion 193 years ago and was executed for it. Pinckney said:

Could we not argue that America is about freedom — whether we live it out or not? But it's really about freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness. And that is what church is all about: Freedom to worship and freedom from sin, freedom to be full of what God intends us to be, and to have equality in the sight of God.

And sometimes you got to make noise to do that. Sometimes you may even have to die like Denmark Vesey to do that. Sometimes you have to march, struggle and be unpopular to do that.

Ultimately, love will win out. At great cost, we have seen, and more devastating cost to come, no doubt. But love, corny and simplistic as it sounds, is the answer.


Boy Scouts — all about trying to get along — learn to shake with their left hands. The tradition of the standard handshake is that two people, upon greeting, have emptied their weapon hands: I will not harm you. The left-hand shake supposedly comes to Scouting from the Ashanti people of Ghana; warriors hold their shields in their left hand. To present the left hand in greeting means: I trust you not to harm me.

The answer is in your hand, empty and held in greeting. I know it. You do too.

If not now

I wish to God I knew the answers.

I wish to God it didn't take a new mass killing to renew debate, when so many — so many — die daily by guns in the United States. In my city. Within 10 minute's drive. I shrug. We shrug; worse, we don't know. We don't care.

I wish mass killings weren't so commonplace, a nightmarish norm, real reality TV. An entertainment.

(There's the crime scene, the shrine … now the grieving angry family members … the recriminations … the essayists parsing the causes … ooh look, the gun lobby fires back, so to speak: Don't blame us! The script is familiar.)

I wish to God a grieving father reaching out to another grieving father for solutions actually put us on the path to solutions.

I wish the solution was to send a postcard to your representative, "Not one more." Can't hurt.

I wish to God their reaching out — the father of a victim to the father of an alleged killer — would be enough to make us lose our breath, and in shuddering to catch our breath, make us reconsider ourselves and what we support as a society.

Besides indifference and inaction.

I wish to God my first thought wasn't just, "Jeeezus!" and that my second thought wasn't, "Glad it's not me/my kid/my family." I wish still I could think of something more useful.

I wish to God the critics, the bloggers, the trolls, the spin controllers, the status quo, would all just shut up for about a week, roll their hyperbolic, vitriolic tongues back in their mouths, and consider these fathers' pleas.

I wish it wasn't the out-shoutin', sound-bitin',  gun-rightin', trash-talkin', Sarah Palin, what's-that-have-to-do-with-anythin'? yell fest we get now instead of reasoned discourse.

I wish to God the National Rifle Association used its considerable influence for reasonable solutions — rather than attack any and all calls for change as a threat to all freedoms. They're not.

I wish the Second Amendment wasn't so poorly written. Or such an anachronism.

I wish to God people who feel need to kill others out of vengeance, retribution, loss, anger, torment, justice, loss of reality — what have you — get help they need without losing their human and civil rights.

I wish guns didn't so readily become the help they think they need.

I wish critics didn't say, "Should we ban knives too? Dude killed with knives too! Where you gonna draw the line?! Sharp pencils?!" I wish I had an answer for them.

I wish the alleged killer's roommates saw the signs and saved themselves, or knew how they might save their roommate. I wish the alleged killer's family got the help they sought for their child.

I wish I didn't agree with Michael Moore, who said of the Santa Barbara shootings, "Enjoy the rest of your day, and rest assured this will all happen again very soon." Moore made the flawed but essentially true documentary "Bowling for Columbine," examining — without solving — why gun deaths are vastly more prevalent in the United States than in other countries.

I wish to God our country wasn't exceptional in this way, but in the way we still talk about ourselves, even the most cynical of us: The greatest country in the world, the best, the most innovative, the ones who can figure this out.

I wish to God we didn't think these deaths are the price we pay for admission.

Bang the gun slowly

(I could pick many fitting examples at random, as you can see from today's news … I choose these):

On Saturday, police say, an Iraq War veteran shot and killed two other veterans at a Texas shooting range. They included Chris Kyle, a renowned Iraqi War veteran (author of "American Sniper," an account of his unprecedented success killing the enemy) who had devoted his civilian life to helping other veterans. 

He and Chad Littlefield had apparently been trying to help Eddie Ray Routh, a Marine reported to be suffering from post-tramautic stress disorder. Target shooting can be part of "exposure therapy" for afflicted veterans, affording them the familiarity of guns, and the cacophony — if not the danger and dizzying horror — of battle, to throttle back their anxieties as they return to the world.

Routh allegedly shot Kyle and Littlefield with a semiautomatic pistol, then fled in Kyle's pickup truck before he was captured near his home.

We elect leaders who fabricate causes for war — a tragic habit in my lifetime — and we go along with the plan, calling dissenters un-American. Next we count on a fraction of less than 1 percent of our fellow citizens to prosecute that war; we set it and forget it, forget them. The result not only costs us trillions of dollars we could spend on our crumbling society, but shreds the bodies and minds and hearts of the warriors who fight — and return to fight, time and again — in our stead. But we can't or won't give them the jobs, can't give them the breaks on their financial obligations while they're fighting for us, can't give warriors like Chris Kyle the support he needs to administer true healing to his brothers and sisters in arms — can't give Eddy Ray Routh aid and comfort. We count on Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield to do that for us.

And a gun was supposed to give him comfort.

Last week sometime in a foothill town two hours from here, a man shot and killed his teen son and daughter, then killed himself, sheriff's authorities report. The children were found shot in the head, sitting on a couch, and may have been sleeping.

The father Philip Marshall, had been a pilot who said he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and wrote books describing what he called a Saudi conspiracy behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Divorce and child custody issues with his ex-wife had been contentious.

It's impossible to know the depths and degree of anger, despair, delusion, disillusionment, rage, impairment — impossible to know what unleashed this devastation. Except that it did, and a gun solved it.

On Sunday, The Sacramento Bee wrote extensively about the Lemon Hill section of South Sacramento, telling the not-uncommon account of a community in fear of guns. Residents spoke of hearing gunfire daily … of forbidding their children from playing in parks for fear of gunfire … of school providing brief safe haven from the drugs and crimes and gunfire. 

Several residents told Bee reporters they doubted gun control would help them, because the guns on these streets are likely illegal, stolen, untraced and untraceable. Criminals will still get the guns, these residents said.

[By the way, when we lose newspapers such as The Sacramento Bee, we lose their power to stand up for us in matters that matter. We lose their power to be the Fourth Estate, our watchdog.

[Many readers badmouth The Bee — that's a newspaper's lot — but Bee reporters found suspicious conduct in tests on the safety of the new Bay Bridge under construction … and discovered more than $50 million in taxpayer funds that California State Parks officials squirreled away while parks were closing over budget shortfalls (money, by the way, that individual parks can't get in cash, only in in-kind service, because doing so under state law would constitute an unconstitutional gift. thank you, squirrel-brained parks officials …) … among many other costly secrets that would have remained secrets without the reporters' vigilance.

[But. I. Digress.]

On tour of the Sacramento Underground this week, a fourth grader asked if people in Gold Rush Sacramento had guns.

"Oh yes," I said.

"Oh," he said. "You know what? I'm a hunter."

He wasn't bragging or taking a stand, just relating to a historical discovery. It was the result, I take it, of a family discussion which concluded that reasonable people can own guns.

When it comes to solving the gun crisis — wherever you stand, it's a crisis — I'm well toward the back of the line with a working solution. It isn't long before the complexity of gun use, gun crime and gun ownership in America makes me weary, makes me marvel at those who carry on in hopes of drafting a solution.

What I know — what I've always known — is that if nothing is done, then Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield, a distraught family in the quiet Sierra foothills, a hellish city neighborhood are the prices we will continue to pay for it.

We must ask if that's what we accept.