That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas
are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens.
There is more than enough tragedy to go around.

"What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning.

I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it.

There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent.
We are a racist society, like most human societies.
We are a society in the midst of enormous changes--
social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it.
We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich,
and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor.
We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people,
cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets,
idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools
and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies.

Our political process is almost useless.
There are good people in Congress, but there are, also,
so many blatheringly mindless blowhards
and laughably shallow posturers that one could as well
ask third graders to write tax bills and trade pacts.
They think that doing nothing is worth being paid for.

One might as well allow sticks of dynamite and free beer
at Fourth of July celebrations as the mix we have created.

Politicians and citizens do not ask,
"What is going on here?".
They construct absurd conspiracy theories instead,
and propose that more guns will settle the problem of too many guns.
They fall in line behind get-tough cowboys who howl for war,
pretend that their own special brand of stone-age religion
is superior to other people's stone-age religion,
flex their cranial muscles and announce that anyone
who does not look like them ought to be sent back to England or Sweden
or China or Belgium or France or Nigeria or Guatemala,
without recognizing that everyone is from there.

If school teachers could pack heat, they say,
then when a crazy comes into the school with an AK-45,
the kindergarten teacher and the HomeEc instructor and the janitor
could open fire in return, and everyone would be safe.
The kids could duck under the desks
where they used to be told to hide from atomic bombs.

We need to do the things that will cause most people to say,
"We have a good thing going here!", you know, like jobs,
affordable and effective education, health care for everyone,
better bridges and trains and water systems, and a whole system of things
that will cause people to know that the system is fair
and that when it is time to retire they can turn it over to the kids
who might make things even better still.

Fair. Fair to everyone, as well as we can do it.

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

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