We Can Only Be Killed Once

The recent news of wrong-address shootings had me thinking about some of the jobs I had that involved driving to strange addresses and knocking on people’s doors, risking my life to earn a living. I was a taxi driver, cable TV installer, Census "enumerator," pizza delivery driver and attempted door-to-door salesperson (I sold nothing). I also did some volunteering for political campaigns, and when I was twelve years old I went door-to-door on Halloween with my sister raising money for UNICEF. We got the most money in our school, being the only ones who took a real interest.

Most of these jobs weren't very dangerous, but the cable job required me to go inside people's homes, which sometimes got tenuous. I got a pretty good sense of the wide variety of mental conditions in this country. It was not good, and is far worse now. 

The most risky work I did, as it turned out, was for the U.S. Census. It was tedious work, going to unfamiliar towns, attempting to get people to answer a list of questions about their lives that they didn't want to answer. Sometimes I had to return a second, third and fourth time to question people further about information that they didn't give in previous attempts. Sometimes this enraged people and they refused to cooperate. 

The worst was a guy in a town south of Madison, who ordered me off his property in a threatening manner when I knocked on his door. Knocking was no easy task, since he had one of those prison bar-type screen doors. It was dusk when I got there, and his house was completely dark, no porch light, no signs of life, with an ominous atmosphere not unlike what one sees in horror movies.

I wish I had written down what he said, but it was something to the effect of him giving me thirty seconds to get off his property. I left without argument, not willing to die for the $13 an hour the government was paying me. No amount of money could have made me insist on getting the answers I needed.

I moved on to the house next door, and the couple there was real nice, and invited me in. I told them about what happened with their neighbor, and they said "Oh, he's a Libertarian! He doesn't believe in government! When his son was born he had him tattooed across the chest with an American flag and a black line drawn across it, making sure he didn't grow up to believe in the government either." I called it a night after this enumeration, and went home, glad to be alive.

I wonder how many people like that are out there. More, I suspect, than we can imagine. I'm glad I don't have to work anymore. I did things like the Census and substitute teaching when my regular job was slow, which varied with the seasons. 

The country has become more hateful, and it isn't as simple as the spread of the "right wing." We have a violent history, marked most clearly by slavery, Jim Crow, genocide of indigenous peoples and the brutal treatment of workers as the country began and grew. We celebrate violence in our entertainment with football, wrestling, various crude martial arts, crime dramas on TV, and militaristic action films in movies. We celebrate obliterating people in one way or another.

In concert with this obsession with violence is the increase in gun fanaticism. I grew up with guns and hunting, but didn't encounter any gun fanatics until I worked in a trap and skeet range in 1966. The range sponsored a shooting league, similar to a bowling league, and there was a team of disgruntled losers who complained about their scores. They also grumbled about the State of Illinois' new law requiring gun registration, and the requirement that gun owners have an ID.

One evening things got threatening, and the owner, who was a paraplegic, got into a heated argument with the "leader" of the malcontents. Angry men with shotguns complaining about their team standing, led by a hothead. Nothing came of it, and everyone went home, the sore losers having to face their wives in defeat. I found out years later that the leader of the sore losers was a wife-beater, and when she left him he shot himself to death, ending all his grievances. 

I knew the guy. He was a year behind me in grade school. The only memory I have of him from school is that he was one of those kids that people laughed at, derided him for not being in the "in" crowd. He was not taken seriously as a valued human being. Kids called each other by their last names, and his was always said with disdain. In a strange irony, as an adult he was strikingly handsome, movie star looks, someone people would take notice of and automatically respect.

What is clear at this point, is that we have a lot of angry people in this country, and some of them are suffering from some form of mental illness, and are violent and dangerous. Some channel their anger into political activity. "Leftists" call them the "right wing," as if they are walking incarnations of a set of ideas, and that they somehow make an organization. This organization poses an ominous threat, and their intention is to create a fascist state.

Maybe, but my view of this mass of people is that it is more a mob than a political organization. A mob needs a leader, an inciter who can stir it to action. Such as Donald Trump. The January 6, 2021 insurrection is a perfect example. He still tries to incite people to mob action.

I am optimistic about Trump's prospects for using a mob to overthrow the government. His popularity is fading, and he is losing his mind. I believe he depends on drug stimulation to function - especially anabolic steroids - and that as he ages his mental and physical health will fail. He is also facing numerous lawsuits and criminal prosecutions, and he won't be able to organize a mob soon enough and large enough to overcome these obstacles.

That leaves his mob leaderless, defused, disempowered, emasculated and disincited. Its "members" are still dangerous, but a lot of their energy will be diverted to domestic violence, barroom brawls, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide and in some cases a new perspective on life.

Political paranoia only accounts for a portion of the threat of gun violence in this country. What predominates is the desire to kill people. In combination with the proliferation of guns It only takes a few to kill many. Gun manufacturers have advanced technology to enable the murders of large masses of people by a single shooter.

Ahh, but we have the Second Amendment to the Constitution. In 1998 I did some volunteer calling for the Ed Garvey campaign for governor. Garvey was a decent candidate, the former executive director of the NFL Players Association. He had no stance on gun control, but rumors spread that he was going to "take people's guns away." I wrote a guest column in 2019 for Madison's Capital Times, describing the experience. 

I was stunned by the responses when I called potential voters in the smaller towns in Wisconsin, and "Up North." Man after man was angry bordering on hysteria when I mentioned Garvey's name. They were gun nuts. Their "right" to have all the guns they wanted was a religion. The Second Amendment is sacred scripture to this cohort. 

No matter that they completely misunderstand what the Second Amendment says, and why it was enacted. It was created at a time when the country was young, when threats of invasion and war were real, and militias of ordinary citizens were seen as necessary. Organizing citizen militias would be problematic it they had no weapons, so our early leaders thought it was necessary for people to have a right to own weapons.

The Bill of Rights, enacted in 1791, consists of ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The Second Amendment states "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." It is a complete statement, explaining the reasoning behind it - the need for a well regulated militia. The right does not exist independent of the need for a well regulated militia, so the claim of an unlimited right to own guns is mistaken and dishonest, no matter the complicity or our corrupt Supreme Court.

Nothing lasts forever. This includes gun fanaticism. There is an asymptotic limit. If enough few shooters kill enough large masses, the only masses left will be other shooters. It will be like the Shootout at the O.K. Corral, on a massive scale . 

This is the theoretical limit, but in practical terms change will take place long before that dire circumstance. We have an interconnected, interdependent large mass society. If killings with guns reaches a certain critical mass the society will collapse. Nothing would work, basic human needs would go unfulfilled, and chaos would ensue. It would be the end of our civilization.

Today's grandstanding politicians will be long gone by the time we reach that point, and a vacuum of good intentions will need to be filled. Necessity being the mother of invention, maybe we can invent something that works.

Good luck. It would take a systems approach, looking at a myriad of factors that make a functioning society. The number one factor is not guns. It is climate change, and we have already shown our incompetence in dealing with it. As biologist Paul Ehrlich put it, we're through. We have about twenty years left, and then it is the end of civilization as we know it. Guns won't matter much when we are inundated with floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, forest fires, sea level rise, plant and animal extinction, mass starvation and economic collapse.

And more madness. Great masses of people losing their minds. Guns or no guns, a situation of great masses of people losing their minds will be horrific. A good mantra for the future is we can only be killed once.

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Here's a song. Here's another. Tom Petty. The Black Crowes. Blind Faith. Bob Dylan. The Chambers Brothers. Creedence. Spirit. The Beatles. Bob Dylan. The Traveling Wilburys. The Grateful Dead. Another from the Grateful Dead. Jackson Browne with Jesse Ed Davis on guitar (Kiowa/ Comanche/Muscogee/Seminole). Donovan. The Allman Brothers. Los Lobos.

R.I.P. Harry Belafonte. He lived a great life. Here's an album of his songs. They make me feel young again.

R.I.P. Gordon Lightfoot. This song was a comfort decades ago when life was a bit tenuous.

This interview covers some of the most bizarre history of our nation's intelligence agencies' nefarious antidemocratic schemes domestically and around the world. I wonder what the schemers felt about their antics at the end of their lives. 

Here's another great interview. 

Here's something I wrote about the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election that wasn't good enough for either the Madison Capital Times or the Wisconsin State Journal (C'est la vie): 

To The Editor: 

It should have been predictable, knowing the worldview and strategy of the "Republican" party, that Daniel Kelly would speak so disrespectfully of the victorious Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz. Various observers of the liberal or "leftist" persuasion called him a crybaby and sore loser, but I see it as something more pernicious. 

I believe the "Republican" party is a criminal organization, and as such everything they do is with criminal intent. If we look back to the Walker era, there was no ideology, just various successful attempts to disenfranchise voters through intrusive ID cards, eliminating unions, gerrymandering, closing polling places and threatening voters with prosecution. Then came the reward: impunity for corruption, the Foxconn deal, relaxed regulation of polluters, cutting state spending on vital services. 

Kelly may indeed be a sore loser, but as a participant in the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election he showed something much more sinister. A loser who disrespects the will of the people, he attempted to delegitimize the election, stating clearly that Protasiewicz was an illicit new member of the Supreme Court. "Republicans" have been at the game of trashing democracy for a long time, and now it is all they have left. Look for them to try to defund the University of Wisconsin as revenge for students voting against Kelly. They won't stop until they are no longer a force in state and national governance. It will take time, but Janet Protasiewicz showed the way to do it. Defeat them soundly, repeatedly, statewide (and nationwide). Eventually our democracy will regain its health. We have a start.

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Here's some explanation of what has happened to the "Republicans."

Many are speculating on the prospects of the malevolent and deranged criminal sociopath Donald J. Trump becoming our next president. My response to this speculation in the New York Times made it into print.

It might be a little easier to read below:

Anyone can come up with a time or date when Donald Trump started to lose. Some can make a living opining when or where. I can provide the best one. The day he was born. It has been a wasted life. He has done only harm. 

As for his candidacy for president, who cares when he has started to lose? He is the presumed, or awarded nominee by mainstream news media. He is good copy. Trump versus Biden. Play it up. People will tune in, read, text, buzz, talk. 

I think the easiest way to look at the likelihood of Trump being the "Republican" nominee is the tide of history. Trump, a mediocre and deranged criminal sociopath, became president by demagoguery, deceit and collusion with two foreign powers. He is an accident of history. The entire planet is onto him. This accident won't happen twice.