It is argued that, under or adjunct to an until-now nonexistent “well regulated militia,” the Second Amendment contemplates armed citizens rising up to clean out a corrupt America government.  In addition to the complex command, control, and logistics supporting such a “popular uprising,” its actions and consequences are deeply troubling!

What is the line between righteous uprising and seditious insurrection?  Envision 30 or 40 million AR-15 armed Rambos patrolling America’s streets.  Who would lead?  Who would follow?  Who would they shoot?  Lay siege on our Capitol?  Firing squads for suspect members of Congress?  Good Guys and Gals rounding up undesirables, Liberals, neighbors?  Someone takes exception, unlimber the trusty ol’ Assault Rifle and blow ‘em away! 

It is impossible and terrifying to imagine the consequences of a mindless, chaotic assault on America’s democracy.  Anarchy or dictatorship seem logical outcomes, certainly not freedom and democracy.

Choosing not to air the House January 6 committee’s June 9^th hearing, Fox “News” remains true to its motto, adopted from mushroom growers, “Feed ‘em horse shit and keep ‘em in the dark.” 

If I were Master Spy Vladimir Putin, I would take down America from inside.  Flying in the face of the majority vote, leading my High-Tech Guerrilla War I would reinstall my amoral, crooked, big-mouthed, Sixth Grade Bully in the Oval Office.  Attempting again to take over our government, on my Puppet Dictator’s command, his Mindless Minions could again challenge the validity of America’s Congress, Executive, Judiciary, and Constitution itself!

My spooks would infiltrate the Worldwide Web.  On Social Media and “Dark Web,” in clever irony we would implementing our concocted scheme with concocted claims that a nameless, faceless, Left Wing Cabal plots to take away Americans’ “freedoms.”

The massacre of nineteen children and two teachers at Rob Elementary School raises a potpourri of issues around Americans’ “right to bear arms.”  Where to begin?

When the United States’ Bill of Rights was ratified, in 1791, America’s defense force comprised a citizen’s militia.  Therefore, the Second Amendment specified, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

With a blind eye to the Second Ament’s first phrase, today’s gun rights defenders adopt the second as a mantra.  Okay, NRA, Wayne LaPierre, and Gun Lobbyists, is your notion of a “well regulated militia” an eighteen-year-old with two AR-15s and thirty round clips ‽     

Texas Republican legislators say school children would be safe from LaPierre’s “a bad guy with a gun” if teachers became “a good guy with a gun.”  Envision a 53-year-old female English teacher whipping out her trusty 38-Special and taking down a 17-year-old male in body armor totin’ an AR-15 with a 30-round clip! 

At Robb, Elementary Wayne’s “good guy with a gun” faced its acid test.  The school Security Officer was absent.  While ten year old Amerie Joe Garza repeatedly pleaded with 911 to send the police, with firepower to take out a infantry platoon, nineteen cops cowered a school hallway.  One hour and seventeen minutes after the gunman entered Robb Elementary, defying orders to stay out, two Border Patrol officers had the balls to confront and kill the gunman.

To ensure the “common good” and “promote the general welfare,” from food and drugs, commerce and workplace safety, and air and ground transportation, Americans recognize the necessity of laws and regulations. Seven in ten believe firearm ownership should be subjected to commonsense regulations.  Three in ten hold firearms exempt from any restriction whatsoever.

To this aim, it seems the only Congressional lobby with more clout than Big Tobacco is Big Guns.  A boy who barred from purchasing cigarettes freely bought two AR-15 Assault Rifles and 30 round clips!

To emphasize the insanity of America’s public safety policy, “Everytown for Gun Safety” contrasts our regulation of cars and guns.

Cars                                                              Guns
Title and tag at each point of sale             Not title and tag
Training                                                        No training
Written test                                                  No written test
Practical teat                                               No practical test
Health requirement                                     No health requirement
Liability insurance on each car                  No liability insurance on each gun
Renewal and inspection at intervals         No renewal and inspection

We will never know why that boy vented his rage on Robb Elementary children.  Two facts come to mind.  First, researchers tell us the brain’s prefrontal cortex (PFC) does not mature until around age 20.  According to Wikipedia, “The functions of the PFC project future consequences that result from current actions.  PFC functions also include override and suppression of socially unacceptable responses as well a differentiation of tasks.” (My italics.)  Second, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness Psychiatrist Eric Fromm maintains, rhetorically, as memory serves, “People have to make a dent.  If nowhere else, they make it in someone’s head.” 

Without adult supervision no one under the age of 21 should own or use a firearm.  An assault weapon, never!

Why can’t we just get along?

Why does Vladimir Putin choose to attack and attempt to put Ukraine under his control?  Why did Donald Trump choose to orchestrate a coup and attempt to put Government of the United States of America’s under his control?  Why did Dick Cheney choose to invade and attempt to put Iraq and its oil under his control?  Why did Adolf Hitler choose to conquer Western Europe and attempt to put the world under his control?  Why did Joseph Stalin choose to invade, annex, and put Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan under his control?  Why did Alexander choose to conquer and put the world under his control?      

We conquer other countries because we covet their land, minerals, oil, timber, agriculture, workers.  Too often we view conquered and others who speak, believe, and behave differently than we do inately defective, even sub-human.  Nazi Germany considered Jews as a mongrel race.     

I resist clichés, but it’s important to understand that presidents, caesars, emperors, czars, kings, prime ministers, dictators, and warlords are the visible ten percent of the iceberg.  Below the waterline, the rest of us maneuver and manipulate. 

For humankind’s earliest progenitors, life depended on controlling our environment and cohorts.  Bears and wolves viewed Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons as dinner!  Logically, the biggest, badest, caveman tended to survive.  Hunkered by the campfire, survival of individuals and our species hinged on the strong and clever claiming dibs on the last scrap of roast beast and unrestricted liberty to pass on his genes.

On the heels of our cave-dwelling experience, humankind’s need to control grew more sophisticated and clannish.  Through the Dark Ages and Renaissance warring fiefdoms conquered distinct areas of what became Europe.  This scenario predated and played across Asia and Africa. 

From caves to continents, Cave Bears to Atomic Bombs, our need to control other people is rooted in fear.  Rationale thinking recognizes wise and tragic sides of fear.  Our caveman experience validated the wisdom of fear.  Fear of nature, fear of people who appear, speak, believe, and behave differently than our Clan.  We teach children “stranger danger.”  Wise, because a tiny fraction of people wants to hurt us.  Tragic because the vast majority do not!          

Regarding Anne Meara, his wife of sixty years, funny man Jerry Stiller observed—as memory serves—she’s “not hard to live with. You just have to put up with her.”

Will humankind ever realize Jerry’s wisdom and  “just  .  .  .  put up with” each other?

“I am an old man and have had a great many troubles,
but most of them never happened.”
Mark Twain

My initial sense was that my “troubles” are (1) fear of being punished, (2) worry that I’ll screw up, blunder, make a mistake, (3) guilt over something I did or failed to do.  On further thought, all my troubles subsume under Fear.  An irrational, childish fear that, ten days after my eighth birthday, I somehow caused Daddy’s death.  I am responsible and deserve to be punished! 

I just turned eighty-five.  Claiming that my troubles are rooted in Daddy’s death seems a stretch, a copout.  This said, anyone who’s had a parent, child, spouse, sibling, or close friend die knows the emotional impact of a significant death dims and evolves but never “goes away!”  It becomes part of who we are!  Decades after a significant death, a mundane event: picture, sound, smell, touch, triggers those old emotions.

The “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-5” recognizes “Dissociative reactions (e.g. flashback)” as symptomatic of “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”  Labeling flashbacks a “Disorder” seems open to question.  My online Marriam-Webster defines the “transitive verb disorder (my emphasis) .  .  .  (as) 1: to disturb the order of, 2: to disturb the regular normal functioning of.”  But, what is more in “order,” more “regular normal functioning,” more rational, than emotional reaction to an in-your-face, too-close-to-home, reminder of a traumatic experience‽ 

To appreciate why I link my fear, worry, and guilt to Daddy’s death, it may help to understand that I view my first eight years as idyllic.  I cruised down Life’s freeway in a new Lamborghini.  Suddenly I hit head-on with a Kenworth eighteen-wheeler!  I sustained life threatening injuries.  The scars never go away!  Something bumps, a flashback!  It hurts!

I have solid reasons to label those formative eight years “idyllic.”  On July 3, 1931, thirteen months after my parent’s marriage, my sister May was stillborn or lived a few hours.  Five years and nine months later, April 3, 1937, I subjected Mama to twenty-some hours of hard labor.  Despite my rude entrance, after losing sister May, it is easy to appreciate my parents’ joy at last having a healthy baby boy.

Evidence of my parents’ love includes an 8x14x4 inch Book of Remembrance: my ”Notification of Birth Registration,” hundreds of pictures, greeting cards, newspaper clippings, a family tree with photos, pages of individuals’ birth, marriage, children, and deaths back, in some cases, more than five generations.  Mama left a 2x2x3 foot blue metal trunk with a shoe box containing my baby clothes and string of wooden beads which may have been my “teething ring,” a wallpaper-on-cardboard covered collection of “Deans  Compositions,” a half-dozen scrapbooks, albums containing once significant black-and-white “snap shots” of now-anonymous people.  What to do with it all?

Back to fear, I should note that rational fear evolved for damned good reasons!  When we lived in caves, lions, tigers, and bears were clear and imminent threats to life.  Looking into the jaws of a charging Grizzley, the old flight-or-fight response was eminently rational!  In our “civilized” world, with urban gunfire a staple of the Evening News, looking into the muzzle of an AR-15 of 357 Magnum, fear is our rational, go-to choice!

In the end, viewed with Mark Twain’s wisdom, the bulk of my troubles, my fear, worry, and guilt, are wasted energy. 

A Facebook photo has two man wearing tailored jackets and skirts.  Ignorant of correct wardrobe vernacular, I label their ensembles “suits.”  As usual, I can’t find the Facebook post.  As I recall, of the over two hundred comments, the majority subsume under sentiments like “ugly,” “ridiculous,” “can’t believe it.”

In Grandpa’s era exposed female anatomy was limited to face, hands, and feet.  A photo of a woman in black, ankle and wrist length swimwear was labeled “indecent.”

When I was a lad, decades before “Father Knows Best,” literally and figuratively, in families at least, “men wore the pants.”  Women wore a dresses or skirt and blouse.  In the backwater where I grew up, ladies wore “slacks“ only to picnics or camping.

Post-WWII, Esther Williams’s swimsuits evolved from one-piece with shoulder straps to two-piece.  Then a strapless one-piece and “Just wear a smile and a Jantzen.”  Despite being labeled “risqué” and “scandalous,” banned from the Miss World Pageant in 1951, the Bikini proved irrepressible.  Then the Thong!

Today my observation is that casual, business, even formal and in church, the majority of women wear, in a word, “pants.”  Styles range from baggy, holey, and designer jeans, to casual and fashionable trousers.  Younger—sadly some not-so-young—females wear “tights” leaving nothing to imagine but the crack.  At the Mall, I observed a sweet thing in red, thigh-length, shorts which, with a swatch of cloth at the crotch, might have been painted on.  

If a yesteryear Life magazine had published photos of today’s Spring Break at Fort Lauderdale or Palm Beach with near-naked females cavorting in the sand, or Olympic Games Beach Volleyball with near-naked females diving for a ball, 1950’s era readers would have gawked in shock and disbelief.  Learning how, seeing men wearing skirts, we now gawk in shock and disbelief, will future generations smile at our quaint notion of who wears the pants?   

The easiest, cheapest, and surest way to destroy a country is from within. There is far more compelling reason to doubt QAnon’s bogus claims than to believe the Kremlin is QAnon‘s headquarters.

Monitoring lab test for the United States government, a young man falsely certified a positive marijuana urinalysis as negative.  For this foolishness, he served 27 months in federal prison.  Now middle-aged, the erstwhile offender bears the stigma and consequences of being a “convicted felon.”   

January 6, 2021, President Donald J. Trump orchestrated and ordered a seditious assault on our United States Capitol, Congress, and Constitution.  In the aftermath of this attempted coup, Attorney General Merrick Garland is pursuing upward of 700 Trump MAGA minions.  Around ten percent have received criminal sentences.  The rest await trials or plea agreements.

Their Commander in Chief, Donald J. Trump, remains unindicted.  Before confronting would-be King Donald’s Legal Eagles, it is imperative the Attorney General builds a proverbial ironclad case, cross every “t” dot every “I.”  He must not screw this one up!    

Chiseled above the portico of the United States Supreme Court building is, EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.  If, for falsifying a single document, the Law locks away a young man for over two years, and Donald J. Trump remains unindicted, rampantly spewing his lies and vitriol, in Mr. Bumble’s words from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, “the law is a ass – a idiot!”

Fox News asked Donald Trump, “What should we do about Ukraine?”

Trump’s answer, “Well what I would do is, I would, we would, we have tremendous military capability, and what we can do with our planes, to be honest with you, without forty-four-year-old jets, what we can do is enormous, and we should be doing it and we should be helping them to survive and they’re doing an amazing job.”

Well, there you have it!  Plain and simple!   

If Donald were president, instead of shooting, poor ol’ Putin would be sweating bullets!