Morning Fog

Wine Or Guns? Which Is More Dangerous?

The most recent tragic school killing in Florida generated considerably more active response from the young people who were targeted, raising hope that some of the most egregiously self-destructive aspects of U.S. gun law might be moderated. 

They are learning how tough a battle they have chosen to engage in.

They were kept away from a planned meeting at the state capital in Tallahassee because of fears for their safety. (Well, I guess we already knew Florida, like many other states, can't protect its schoolkids from random shooting.) 

Those who met with the President, who only the day before had at least said he would have his administration look into" banning bump stocks, faced a wooden-faced NRA-manipulated Charlie McCarthy who revived tired and preposterous notions like incentives for teachers who learn to use guns. Don't teachers have enough to do? Do they also have to enlist as part of a military force to protect their own students? And if they do, don't they really become the National Guard, that selfsame "militia" that the Constitution defines as the reason for Article 2, and which the strict constructionist Supreme Court mysteriously wrote out of the picture years ago?

The enraged chieftain of the National Rifle Association has declared that anybody who doesn't agree with the NRA "hates individual liberty."  Yet he in effect decrees that we, the people, have no individual liberty to challenge his views.

Well, as predicted, not much has changed. As one commentator recently said, when it comes to firearms, we are a corrupt failed state. Yet. In the long run, things are bound to change, and stonewalling and insane rage against change is only likely to make change, when it comes, far more radical.  Mincing steps to require everyone who buys a gun to have a background clearance will no longer suffice.

Meanwhile, I have lately been working on a charity event involving a wine tasting. In Virginia, these things get a little bit complicated because a retailer who may bring a wine to a tasting, at an event outside his own shop, may NOT sell bottles of that wine at that location. He has to take orders for pickup at his shop a day or two later. If there is any justification for this (one is not immediately evident), it appears to be that the customer might drink his wine on the spot and could become dangerous to others. Think of it as a kind of waiting period. No such worries about guns, though! 

School Shootings On The Rise?

Another "big" school shooting, this time in ... gee, hard to remember without checking, there have been so many ... I think this one was in Florida.

And people are up in arms about it. (Or is that a poor choice of words?)  We definitely know of some who, far from being upset, maintain an amazing degree of equanimity about the problem. Those, of course, would be our Republican elected officials, including the most prominent of them, Ryan and McConnell. (Trump too, though he isn't really a Republican and we are getting less certain whether he was truly elected.) 

Even here in the lowly Virginia Assembly, where elections last November brought a tidal wave of Democratic wins that came within one seat of wiping out (drat! wrong choice of word again!) the 30-some seat Republican majority, we are seeing that legislation on anything involving guns is radioactive, despite the fact that we've had our own school shootings here over the years.

Just a while back a four-year-old shot himself dead with a gun he found at his day-care center. One of the new Democrats in Richmond floated a bill that would simply have required day care centers to ensure that any guns they have lying about are kept under lock and key. Seems reasonable to me -- after all, if they really need them to control the kids, they can always run and get them. The Virginia Republicans shot it down (oops, another poor choice of words?) in committee. No reasons were stated but no doubt they wanted to ensure the four-year-olds' Constitutional right to procure weapons with which to kill themselves. Or maybe just cut down on "needless" regulations.

I don't have kids of my own, but somehow I don't feel all this killing is quite right.  One idea that occurs to me is that the Florida shooter (we won't glorify him here with a name) should not have survived. Most of these kids seem to want "suicide by cop" anyway, so maybe this one just screwed up. And there seems to be no such thing as taking personal responsibility for one's actions anymore. But given the chance, which in this case they clearly had, the cops should be sure to shoot him dead. It would not solve the problem, but it would give the parents of the victims a little closure, and it would sure save us all a lot of money. Learn his motive? Why should we care about his motive? "Troubled?" We don't know how to fix that but it doesn't give him any legal justification to murder, does it?

So, what is to be done? Not much, really. It's hard to see anything constructive happening until a senior Republican legislator's own kin (grandchild maybe, since they're all ancient) is killed.  Then maybe.

Meanwhile, for those of you out there who do have kids and grandkids, the most positive development I see is somewhat counterintuitive - the very frequency of these school shootings means that young people all around the country are "gaining" personal and first-hand knowledge of the issue.  A few more incidents, and hardly a kid in America won't know at least one person who was shot at his/her school.  Those who do manage to survive will be voting very soon.  Very soon. They can target (right word!) their "my-gun-right-or-wrong" supposed representatives in state and national legislatures.  Or run for office themselves.  

This just in: Rumor has it that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has a draft bill ready to go for Monday - raising the legal voting age to 50.

Is Winter Great Or What?

Morning Fog has skewed heavily toward politics, but it's time to lighten up a little, and winter is the perfect time for that.

The proximate cause of this outburst is all the great events, full of excitement and spectacle, that come our way at this time of year. Starting with the various turn-of-year holidays, we get  the Superbowl, the winter Olympics (if only every four years), and Valentine's Day. It's all fun, but there is a deeper and more important circadian meaning.

You might say it took a college education for me initially to appreciate winter's charms. Sure, even when I was a kid there was Christmas, but at the time I thought of it only as a time of gift-giving (fairly joyous but not karmic), or in the eyes of some people I knew (not in my family), a religious observance.

But it was only in college that I arrived inductively at understanding the real joy of winter. In late December before Christmas break, I would sit at a desk at my west-facing window, studying or reading, and watch the sun gloomily disappear, earlier every day. Then I went home for Christmas. And came back about three weeks later.

Lo and behold, my first evening at study, I noticed it was 5:00 pm, maybe later, and the sun was still on the horizon! Wow, a revelation -- here, clearly, was the real joy of winter. No WONDER primitive humans beat the church by a country mile in realizing why this season was special. They never knew, until the "turnaround," if that ol' life-giving sun was really coming back from year to year.

Winter is not my favorite season (that's fall, for me) but winter is the season of hope and joy. Not spring - by spring the return of light and warmth is no longer hope, it's already reality.

 

Disgrace

I feel sure no one - left wing, right wing, or buffalo wing - will be surprised that President trump decided to release Congressman Nunes's memo alleging political bias behind the FBI's investigation of Our National Embarrassment.  Hey, it's divisive, it's self-serving, it's untrue, it's partisan, and it insidiously sows mistrust of the core institutions of our democratic government.  WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE?

In talking about his decision, Trump offered a comment: "Disgraceful!"  Yes you are, Donald. But we would expect no less of Little Donnie, whose button may work but is very obviously miswired. Do keep in mind that for everyone but you in your narcissistic fog, your terror of this investigation only suggests that you have something  to hide. A LOT to hide. Gosh what was that old movie in the 60s? Was it the Manchurian Candidate ... or the Muscovite candidate?

 Anyway, this latest kerfuffle takes me back to the State of the Union address. Trump was well behaved, even sedate (they must have really doped him up), otherwise unremarkable except for his corpse-like insincere grin and his rhe toric that seemed designed to destroy the "union" he has said he wants to defend. But it occurred to me how much he resembles the beautiful corporations he so much admires (but never quite succeeded in joining as an equal). Like them, he is completely without morals, ethics, or national loyalty, and he requires the Supreme Court to define him as a "person."

The Dow dropped more than 600 points today. It's premature to call it a trend, and pundits are out there trying to explain it in economic terms. But the market is extremely sensitive to political instability, and I cannot help but think that when our little-p president seeks to destabilize the country he is sworn to defend, markets react.