Samhain Moon of the Winter Solstice
It was 1985. A century and millennia ago. I worked on the West Bank of the Mississippi River across from the University of Minnesota. My ministry involved community organizing, economic development and affordable housing development. The West Bank at the time had a collection of old leftists, Communists, new leftists, holdovers from SDS and a new type of political activist, neighborhood organizers. (this is not the same as Alinsky style organizing.) It was work that put me into contact with lots of different people from many different walks of life.
A young couple came to me, too long ago to remember names, wanting to get married. This happened a lot though I rarely ever led worship and never had a congregation. They were just folks. I don’t even remember the wedding. Probably it was in Murphy Park. That’s where a lot of West Bank weddings happened.
They went off and formed a family, but I never saw them. No congregational life. They moved off the West Bank into a neighborhood south of the West Bank, either Powderhorn or Seward. I got a call.
There had been a shooting. A woman was dead. It was the woman, the mother, the wife. She had been on the back balcony of her second floor apartment clad in a pair of coveralls. A 22 shell found her, penetrated her heart and fell spent, stopped by the back cloth of the coveralls. Investigation found that two boys playing with a rifle in an alley over a half mile away had accidentally discharged the gun.
At her funeral I said then, and believe now, that these kind of deaths are meaningless, absurd and unnecessary. The only way to make these deaths meaningful is to use them as evidence for serious, strong gun control legislation. Some with real teeth. We worked at it for a while, but got nowhere.
Just this last month a man shot, a clean kill, a young girl and a young boy who had broken into his house. He was 61, a former State Department employee. A Seventh Day Adventist minister in Rochester shot his own granddaughter. Today’s paper told of the probation given to a man whose 4 year old son found his loaded gun under his pillow, took it out and accidentally shot his two year old brother.
I also read this week that now over 80% of Americans find global warming a serious threat and want something done. I raise this here because it is the same cabal of right wing ideologues, in one case the NRA and in the other energy companies, who have intentionally, note that, INTENTIONALLY, given misinformation, slanted data, paid lobbyists and no doubt have paid the kind of people who can be bought to convince us that gun control is a weak, politically dangerous idea and that global warming is a hoax.
Both of these groups should receive serious blowback for the years of lies, cynical deployment of persuasion and for each life lost, each forest murdered, each animal dead because of their calumny. These kind of public actions should have serious and public consequences, starting right now.
