Samhain                                                           Moon of the Winter Solstice

Samhain                                                         Moon of the Winter Solstice

found on Mother Jones:

“Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to insure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.”

Samhain                                                       Moon of the Winter Solstice

Rush Limbaugh was quoted, “The liberals will find a way to blame this on conservatives or Republicans.”  Yep.  And I already did.  But, let me narrow and focus that a bit.  There was, once, a breed of Republican and a breed of conservatives who focused on economics while exhibiting a libertarian stance toward social issues.  It is the devil’s bargain begun under Nixon with the creation of the southern strategy that yanked this venerable political position off its market based approach and onto what will soon become, I believe, their own third rail, social issue politics.

The Republican and conservative insistence on visiting women during their most intimate decisions surrounding birth and pregnancy and intercourse, their repeated and cynical claims about homosexuals, their insistence on the 2nd amendment as some holy writ demanding every America keep a gun in case of government tyranny–not its original purpose at all–peculiar for folks with an originalist view of the constitution, has twisted what was a reasonable party of opposition into a caricature of politics, politics turned a sour  moralist sideshow.

Perhaps now, with the bankruptcy of three of their most dearly held ideas evident:  no new taxes, no gun control, and no global warming these folks will retreat back into the caves where they hid before the latter part of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st.  Let them mutter around their fires and create self-righteous havoc in their own families and congregations if they wish.  But, for the rest of us, conservative and liberal and radical alike, lets not let these folks have any more of the public debate than their numbers deserve.

Samhain                                                          Moon of the Winter Solstice

To show you.  I forgot the Batman shootings in Aurora, Colorado.  I was in Colorado, in Aurora, not three miles from the theatre.  That was this summer.  This summer.  Also this year, the shootings of Sept. 27, 2012 in Minneapolis at the Accent plant.

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.