thoughts early Thursday

This is The South -> practically everyone I know has and loves guns, firearms, rifles, pistols, shotguns. Mostly to hunt. Some love to collect. Others for protection "just in case". I don't know how it is for boys anymore, but for me growing up was all about guns, playing Army with Americans against Germans* and Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, every boy had cap pistols and little red rolls of caps to shoot in them. 

Next to chemistry sets, guns was the page I most drooled over in the toys section of Sears & Roebuck Catalog. I remember the Christmas my beloved grandmother gave me the double-holster set I had so coveted and begged for, although by then it was Wartime, metal was in short supply and the pistols were not the cap guns I wanted and anticipated, but a new type of faux plastic that was so brittle they broke in two, both barrels broken off by the Day after Christmas.

It didn't work anyway: not finding a double holster set, Mom had bought me two right hand holster sets, which of course didn't work, but I never told her; and of course I never told her the pistols' barrels broke off before the Christmas Tree was down.

A bit older, we all had Daisy BB guns like unto Alfie's dream Red Ryder rifle. You had to buy tubes of BBs, readily available at the Western Auto Store and other places. What did you shoot at? Bottles on a fence up back by the woods. Birds when nobody was around watching you. Squirrels. After shooting a blue jay in the chinquapin tree in our back yard, and having it fall to the ground, and I picked up a feebly fluttering baby bird that died in my hand, I was so sad and ashamed that I never again shot at anything else alive.

At some point I was the neighborhood envy with my air pistol - - which unfortunately I let Bill Guy talk me into his borrowing the very next Halloween. When I went to get it the next morning, Bill had tossed it to ditch the evidence while being chased by some victim, and I was out of my weapon. My angry demands that he replace it he dismissed, responding, "Bubba, you can't get blood out of a turnip." A total respect and trust changer identical to my experience lending, at her begging, my prized drum key to another snare drummer in the Bay High Band; she lost it and when I asked her to replace it or pay me its cost she retorted, "You can't get blood out of a turnip." But that's not what this morning's blogpost is about. The aim on the air-pistol was way off anyway, you had to compensate way to the right to hit anything. It fired BBs with air pressure.

By about twelve, thirteen or so, early teens, every boy who wanted one had a 22 and was learning to hunt. Our father was never a hunter to encourage or teach me, and I never went that way, although Walt did, with friends.

There's a strong firearms culture here in The South, always has been, always will be. To some extent, it gets moronic: anyone carrying, even permit concealed, is stupid if they take a gun into a bar, saloon, because alcohol loosens idiocy and somebody's going to get mad, and somebody's likely to pull out a gun and shoot, and somebody's going to get shot. It happened here in PC yesterday with an angry boozer going out to get his gun from his vehicle, shooting at the bar, and getting himself shot and killed. So, what else is new?

It's way centuries and generations beyond, there's nothing to be done in America about our gun culture, or gun ownership by fools; and as long as there are drunk cowboys and angry hotheads, somebody's going to shoot and somebody's going to get shot. How to make sure people "get it" that we don't constitutionally have guns so you can grab it and shoot when you get into an alcohol-fused rage or somebody cuts you off in traffic? I don't think it's possible to avoid that in America, and nobody's going to voluntarily turn in his gun just so some damn fool doesn't misuse his.

And how to sort out that some people with guns are legally carrying but chip on shoulder waiting for an opportunity to use it legally. Yesterday's "stand your ground" self defense comes to mind?

Who, What are we? Minuscule specks on a grain of sand we are, self-important, only aware of ourselves we are. Usually I'm looking out into the Universe with a "Your God Is Too Small" perspective. Sometimes looking inward, I like to think of our human likeness to warring anthills, but an article in Smithsonian had pictures of life inside a drop of seawater (above and below) 

Did you know those creatures are in there, having relationships? Whatever consciousness they have has no mind of us whatsoever, of what we "know" is important, or that we even exist. 

What's "important" is relative, there's no objectivity to it except perhaps in the mind of God, who may regard each of the unseen creatures in these drops of seawater as highly as regards each of us. Remember,

 maker of heaven and earth,

    of all that is, seen and unseen.

In the Universe around us, we are specks on a speck

perhaps somewhere in the middle of the range of specks giant and infinitesimal, including live and aware specks like us and the creatures inside drops of seawater. 

The human experiment is questionably successful. We are not godlike. We don't need to hate and kill each other, war with each other. In the grand Universal plan of enormous to sub-microscopic, we are not as significant as we imagine ourselves to be. Specks on a speck in an instant of Eternity, we could do better with Time and our Beings to make God smile. Maybe we will. Maybe in Time our evolutionary destiny will take us there, to whatever really is the image of God. 

IDK. 

T 

* in any war game, most of us boys were Americans, but there were always boys, including me, who were willing to be the German enemy in order to "staff the battlefield" with antagonists. Realizing, it occurs to me that the play enemy were always Germans, nobody ever thought of being "Japs" indeed it would have been inconceivable to us even to play at being members of a different race. So there can be an element of unconscious racism even in boys' play. I wonder whether boys during and after our American Civil War played at war and, if so, whether some were willing to play Yankee soldiers against our soldiers of The Cause.

Thinking back, from our Time, say 1943, back to 1863, 80 years, is the same length of Time as from our Time, 1943, up to 2023. I remember personally, and even still hold, some of the hatreds; and in that Time, my fathers and grandfathers remembered and still held the hatreds of their Time. I think one has to have been there and lived it to understand.