Liberty, Lethality & Guns: An Attempt at Moderation

I have often wondered if the two sides of the gun control debate are missing each other on many levels. I have gone back and forth on the issue myself, because I don't think either side has an open and shut case and because it is an immensely complicated topic with tendrils of meaning wrapping their slippery fingers around deeply valuable virtues; virtues that are worth fighting over.

On the conservative side, I find it hard to believe that we have evolved as a species beyond our need to balance the playing field between systems of control and human liberty.  On the liberal side, the ease with which one can take a life is and should be disquieting.  I would like to take a moment to remind myself, and anyone with a strong opinion in either direction, why these two extremes both have good intentions (even when some of their representatives do not).  Then, I would like to dream a little bit about one way that the bridge between these virtues might be found.

First, pro-liberty.  "Time flows like a river."  Even if you are arguing that all guns should be burned, you would be remiss to forget the historical significance of these weapons.  In oppressive systems, the technology of the wealthy is frequently what keeps the power in their hands.  If I have a warhorse, steel armor and a steel sword and you have a pitchfork, you are going to pay me more taxes than you should.  But the power of the gun is, even if mine is a little bit of a newer model than yours, you still have got my attention enough to where we can talk about cutting that tax on tea.  Without the musket, there would be no America. Guns made the powerful just as vulnerable as the weak and that's a good thing.  I shouldn't be able to rule over you just because I am richer and can afford better weapons.  And I'm not just talking about the politically powerful.  A 250 pound man has power of a 120 pound woman just just because of a weight difference.  Does that seem right to you?  But, if you put a gun in each of their hands, that power gets spread out pretty quickly.  And from what I can tell, we still need that balance.  We have not grown up enough as a planet to trust each other not to take advantage of power.  So, removing guns or even restricting them to the degree that the weak can no longer have confidence in their ability to protect themselves is irresponsible at best and an attempt towards tyranny at worst.

Next, pro-life.  There is a reason my neighbor should not be allowed to own an atomic bomb.  It would be way too easy for her to wreak death on a global scale.  Moving down the line, there is a reason my neighbor should not be allowed to own an attack helicopter.  If he wakes up one morning grumpy (and psychotic) and decides to shred through a few dozen of those drywall boxes we call houses, a lot of people are gonna die needlessly and tragically.  Is it ok for my neighbor to own a kitchen knife?  Definitely; even if he does have that psychotic break while holding a kitchen knife, while he may still be able to do some serious and horrible damage, it probably will not be on as large a scale and definitely will not be as easy.  We have decided as a culture that there is a line of acceptable risk for weapons technology.  The question is, on which side of that line are guns?  It is pretty damn easy for the will of one individual, driven by the freight train of a semi-automatic, to cause soul-harrowing loss and death.  This ought not be.  Guns distribute death too quickly and too easily.  We should make it harder for psychotics to kill us.

So on the one hand, we cannot yet make guns go away because we would quickly descend to old systems of oppression; arguing otherwise may make you guilty of historical amnesia.  Still, this only gets guns to the point of a necessary evil; not exactly the moral high ground.  So on the other hand, we cannot keep guns around because I shouldn't be able to decide who lives and who dies just by moving my finger on a small piece of metal which causes a hammer to strike a pocket of explosive powder launching a metal projectile into another human's vital organs.  Stubbornly refusing to acknowledge their inherent danger just on the grounds that "Guns are as American as Apple Pie" may make you blind to the victims of your precious heritage.

Where does that leave us?

I suggest that the best compromise between these two extremes is to intentionally and drastically increase the efficacy of our non-lethal technologies.  Rubber bullets, while noble, lack the accuracy in most conditions in which one would need self-defense.  But, if you and I were able "set phasers to stun," this divide would be much closer to a resolution.  I don't use that example to make light of this problem, but to get our imaginations pumping.  What if we had a long range, highly accurate way to make someone instantly fall asleep?  Our 120 pound woman doesn't have to wait to use pepper spray until her attacker is within striking distance.  She can knock him unconscious from 60 feet with a push of button.  Certainly this technology could be abused in a number of ways, but those who do get punished with jail time and their victims wake up the next morning to tell the story.  And I'm pretty sure I could still mount a hell of a revolution against an oppressive government, without extraneous death. By the time our tyrant has had a week's worth of mandatory naps, we've got our case made to the world that his reign should not continue.

Of course, we are a ways from this kind of technology and so will have to make due with what we've got.  I don't want to suggest that we ignore the tension of these two virtues until we have a permanent and ideal compromise.  That means we continue to wade through the bog of gun control legislation, recognizing the need to keep the powerful honest and balancing that against the frightening and destructive capability of these tools.

But that doesn't mean we can't imagine a little bit as we go.  What we really need is a liberal who can start a social media movement (I think there are a few who know how to do that) that is funded by a rich conservative (there may be a handful of them) awarding grants to engineers who make non-lethal technology more accurate and widely available.  Then maybe the defense of liberty and the value of human life can find common ground; God knows they should be able to.

From Chaos, Discovery

Hands down, this is one of my favorite themes in art, music and literature.  I could probably spend all day talking about different instances of it.  It is all over the pages of my favorites novels, emerging from my favorite albums and hitting you over the head in my favorite movies.

From madness, peace.  From terror, enlightenment. From chaos, discovery.

Struggling to only name a few.  A very simple example can be heard in Cursive's, Gentleman Caller.  The release that comes in the second half of the song makes the moral of the song that much more relevant and accessible.  "The worst is over."

Radiohead is constantly executing this theme well, but the clearest example is probably Paranoid Android.  Here, they are back and forth between chaos and discovery.  The haunting lines "The panic, the vomit - God loves his children" right before Jonny Greenwood kills you on guitar.

I couldn't find it online, but you have to listen to Midsummer's Impalpable.  The harmony of strings and drums at the end is ten times more lovely because of the cacophony that precedes it.

Though more difficult to sample online, literature is oozing with characters that emerge from the pit to absorb the light of discovery.  And I'm not just talking about climax and resolution, but the ah-hah moment that characters experience when their pain makes freedom taste sweeter.  Potentially my favorite character ever, Alyosha of The Brothers Karamazov suffers through the implosion of his narcissistic family and the death of his mentor, Father Zosima.  Unable to control or even predict his environment, Alyosha weeps only to find that he weeps for everyone, sympathizing with the pain of the planet and longing to see it healed.  "He fell to the earth a weak youth and rose up a fighter."

In a difficult instance of our theme (and in a foreshadowing of theological musings to come), Paradise Lost shows us a different kind of Satan.  Indeed, you can almost sympathize with his intention (that is, if he ain't lying) to reveal the depth of God's mercy by bringing low humankind into the cesspool of sin.  For only from this rank perspective can the Father demonstrate his Glory in his willingness to suffer any humiliation in order to win us back.  Is it fortunate that we fell?

Read 100 Years of Solitude.

And finally, cinema: Sometimes I get greif for being such a fan of Donnie Darko.  But it isn't the dark fantasy coming of age theme that interests me most.  It is the scene where Donnie shoots Frank in the eye and then turns to tell Frank's friend with tears in his eyes, "Go home!  Go home and tell your parents everything's gonna be okay!" And it is (spoiler alert: only watch until 1:30 if you don't want the ending ruined) this moment.

I also get asked how Magnolia can be my favorite movie and its because of the scene where William H. Macy's character, broken-mouthed and bloodied by the frog the strikes him in the face admits at last, "I really do have love to give.  I just don't know where to put it."  And her smile in the last frame of the movie makes you know, that all the chaos was worth it.

Its that glimpse of sun and sky from the concrete corridors of downtown LA. Its the moment (in real life) when a student wakes up from the stupor that surrounds him, the smug, entitled, self-infatuated fog that seeps into our bones in California to see the joy that comes from considering someone else's good before your own.  Its that year of therapy when a girl casts off the emotional shroud of abuse and neglect to demand more for herself and for her children.

From pain, growth. From chaos, discovery. From the cross, Resurrection!

An Imagined Conversation with My Grandfathers: Chapter 1

I don’t think its possible to know whether or not someone else is going to heaven.  I believe I can know for myself, because I can, at least to some degree, know myself.  I can see through the hole in my heart and know that I am not worthy of the Vision that waits.  I can bear witness to the Spirit of the Living God in me that repairs it whole and gives a sidelong glimpse at the Vision.

It is really easy for us to see the holes in all of us.  Even though the junior high girls scream at us across social media, “you don’t know me” we do and we can see.  For those of us willing to look and willing to admit it: we are, all of us, broken. 

But the fixing is harder to know when we are looking across the table instead of in the mirror.  We can guess and there are strong indicators in another’s history (where they came from and where they are now), their habits and where they spend their resources (time and money), but we may not be able to ever know.  At the very least, I am not sure if I can know.

One of the greatest failures of the human imagination is the notion that heaven is boring.  Even if you don’t believe in a god or any kind of heaven, it is criminal to think that eternity in such a place would ever become dull.  I do NOT think it will be static, repeating the same lines of the same hymn over and over again.  There are so many more songs to be written to pay homage to the Great Songwriter.  Can you imagine the tunes we will come up with when our musicians have all the time in eternity to collaborate in endless ways with, as yet, unimagined instruments?  Or what about the additional wavelengths that will be audible in our heaven-sent ears?  Another ten octaves on each extreme that we will have to play with! 

And that is just the music.  Do you know how many ways there are to pay respects to the Creator Artist God, who made the Turritopsis Nutricula, a jellyfish that has the potential for biological immortality?  Like patrons in a gallery, we stop to stare at His genius and marvel at His creativity.  What we will see then that we cannot see now?  Will we fly through the sun to see its explosive engine at work?  Will we dance along the dark matter to finally know its name?  Will we follow a quark as it skips across space-time? 

And despite my attempt at heaven imagination, I still haven’t thought of things God has waiting to reveal…

If you ever catch yourself thinking that heaven is a drag, you haven’t exercised your creative muscles enough.  Your imagination is getting fat.

I wonder if I will be able to meet new people, chat with them for a while about what the earth was like when they walked it is a mortal.  Naturally, I will have to schedule appointments on calendaring software that counts decades like they were days.  But I won’t feel like I have to rush and no one will be bothered if I have to reschedule. 

We will bring a smile to the face of the Storyteller when we stop to hear each other’s narrative, how the Storyteller wove pain, hope and Resurrection into each one of our tales.

I hope that I will have the chance to sit down for a year with Dostoevsky and ask him about his time in exile.  He will finally be able to look back on it without cringing, since there will be so much beauty surrounding us in every direction.  He will tell me how the darkness of that time on earth has only served to make the Light here seem stronger.

I wonder if (if, because I cannot know he will be there) I will be able to catch up with President Lincoln.  I want to hear the part of his story when he first got the news that the South had seceded.  What does the weight of a shattered nation feel like?  What measure of Hope was kindled in his heart to see him through that war?

I hope, someday, to spend time with my Grandfathers.  I was a child when my Grandpa Zuercher passed away and I was barely an adult when my Grandpa Bryson breathed his last.

There are so many things that the husband/father/pastor/man in me wants to ask them…

When Altars Are Raised at Sunset

My wife and daughter dream silently upstairs

while I read stories about other worlds

on the couch.

The silence of Job plays backward

in my brain, echoing in the kind of misery

only those dieing of starvation know.

I can feel the Holy Spirit, a tow truck

dragging my broken down Chevy of a soul

back out of the Denny’s parking lot

and onto the crippling life-giving highway.

With no room left for worthless calories,

I can but pack my diet full of meaning meat:

sacrificial anonymous giving,

powerlessly vulnerable honesty,

loving people what they are, knowing they were made for more

If this were a movie, this moment

would happen at sunset.

If this were ancient Israel, I would

build an altar.

I walk out under the stars, slinging out poetry at

the Present One, Who never once sat on the couch

except to tell about the stories He’d lived.

For some future summer's day

I'll welcome warmth like a newborn's breath:
to feel the sun bleed against my skin
indifferent to the distance between she and me

The cold I love, though not for long.
It drives my love and I together; we watch
the wind and rain from behind pajamas, blankets and a fire.

But I look for some future summer's day
when we welcome you and your newborn breath
into our pajamas, blankets and a family.

with deep, long breathing

Life, like jubilant song
from the mouth
of some Loving God,
cracks through the darkness.
We watch with sighs
and smiles,
with deep, long breathing.
The borders of our plastic days
wish it were not so.
They raise
an advertising hand
against its relentless advance.
Often it makes me feel
nothing,
which is the worst kind of god.
The tragedy of it,
those life-blockades, these soul boxes
are invisible and spring-loaded.
I watch the life
and if I blink,
imprisoned I become behind insecurity,
behind video games, behind my own
wandering eyes.

But Life,
like wind from the ocean
through the dancing pine branches,
reaches me.
We get rescued
from the siren (the need to be respected)
and rescued from ourselves. The progressive
bright life will be there when we look,
driving us mad, driving us
color blind. For this Life
is worth more than any kind
of real estate investment.
It crashes through my addictions
as if they were paper currency
or electronic love.
It echoes to us
from heaven of a great,
more florescent hope.

Life after the Surrogate Crisis...

Spoiler Alert! If you are interested in being surprised by this movie, read no further!

Jen and I saw the new Bruce Willis movie, Surrogates, tonight. It was an interesting concept about a world where humans use robots, called Surrogates, that they control with their brain and through whom they experience everyday life. Through the movie it becomes clear that humans are now dependent on the invulnerability and anonymity that comes with Surrogate use (by the way, this is a fascinating metaphor for modern day internet use! But that is another post). A rogue group who religiously oppose the use of Surrogates, known as Dreads or Meat Bags, resist the trend and create "humans only" reservations in order to escape God's wrath upon the machines and their users. Eventually, Bruce Willis, super-agent, becomes increasingly disillusioned with the benefits of Surrogates and unplugs himself in order to experience the outside world through his own senses. In the end, he is able to permanently shut down all active Surrogates without harming any of their users. The final scene is people walking outside in their bath robes to a city full of crashed cars and dead robots.

Jen and I both thought this was a slightly entertaining movie that could have done with some better writing. They took a few shortcuts in the plot for the sake of expediency which sacrifices some tension in the overall mood. However, what was even more disappointing was that we both felt like the movie ended at the start of a potentially very good movie. We wanted to know what the world would be like after the Surrogate Crisis was over. Do the Surrogate Corporate overlords relaunch a new wave of robots and draw people back into their addictions? Did people adjust to the new vulnerability of life without Surrogates? How could one even drive a car knowing that a crash could be fatal, after the immortality provided by Surrogates? Do the Dreads seize power and dominate the now weaker Surrogate-dependent humans just as they were once discriminated against? All these are questions we felt should have been answered in a completely different movie.

You don't even need Bruce Willis in it. There should be a sequel to this movie that would for me become the far more interesting plot than robots who look like humans jumping around like spiderman!

Come on Bruce, recognize what a real story is...