Imagine a world without guns . . . if you can.

https://vimeo.com/308018265

Imagine all the people

Living for today

Imagine all those children - dead -

who deserved to be playing today.

Imagine all the friends they would have made,

all the things they would have learned.

Imagine their parents spared the horrors of grief without end

for the child they loved.

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

Imagine Martin Luther King realizing his dream in real time.

Imagine President John F. Kennedy growing older in the White House.

Imagine his brother, Robert, raising his many children to follow in his footsteps.

Imagine Mahatma Gandhi becoming a wise elder on the world stage today.

Imagine words of those who survived a bullet:

"Getting shot hurts." President Ronald Reagan

"What I was I will never be again" press secretary, James Brady*

"Political violence is terrifying, I know". Congresswoman Gabriel Gifford

"I did stand, with a majority of the white people, for the separation of the schools. But that was wrong, and that will never come back again". Governor George Wallace

“Wait, wait, wait” then fist pumps to crowd. He mouths “fight” three times – a move met with cheers by the crowd".** Former President Donald Trump

Imagine words of those who pulled the trigger:

“Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants,”)*** John Wilkes Booth upon killing President Abraham Lincoln

"I don't know why you are treating me like this. The only thing I have done is carry a pistol into a movie".**** Lee Harvey Oswald

"This was evil in my heart. I wanted to be somebody and nothing was going to stop that." Mark David Chapman.*****

On 8 December 1980, John Lennon was shot four times in the back outside of his apartment building in New York City.

He was 40 years old.

You may say that I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only oneI hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will live as one

imagine if we had a real conversation about guns in America . . .

I wonder if you can?

*Federal Background Check law known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act

**https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/14/politics/what-was-said-on-stage-after-trump-was-shot/index.html

***https://www.britannica.com/event/assassination-of-Abraham-Lincoln

****https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/lee_harvey_oswald_184587

*****https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2022/11/07/mark-david-chapman-john-lennon-killer-was-motivated-by-fame/8295823001/

Simply living . . .

With all the focus on the Supreme Court's ruling on Presidential immunity, the other controversial ruling* affecting the plebeians slipped between the cracks, which is routine for the many who live on the streets of our country. Florida's ruling** against homeless folks came first, of course. Now, yet another ban reaches beyond this backwater to all y'all.

If you are reading this, most likely you like me, have not had to spend a single night without a roof over our heads or food to eat. That makes it hard sometimes to take in the reality of even a single day. I appreciate that, and want to share a lovely true story of one person who made the choice to find out for himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnO2351Ncdw

*https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-homeless-camping-bans-506ac68dc069e3bf456c10fcedfa6bee?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share

**https://legiscan.com/FL/rollcall/H1365/id/1378217

https://www.flgov.com/2024/03/20/governor-desantis-signs-legislation-to-address-homelessness-and-protect-the-public-and-quality-of-life-for-floridians/

This is not your Mother's America!

Or even your Grandmother's if you were born after Y2K, one year before 9/11, the day like no other that left its mark on the American psyche. Never forget became the rallying call to never allow such an atrocity to happen in the homeland again. A whole generation grew up in that shadow. Never forget belongs as much to them as to those who suffered loss of loved ones because their loss was that of innocence.

I'm thinking today about my my grandchildren and my daughter who will celebrate her birthday four days after the Fourth of July, the day all Amercans celebrate hard-won freedom fought for by other generations who refused to be oppressed by a King in another land.

Their refusal created a country of freedoms that some of us have enjoyed like none other. Birthing freedom required long and hard labor pains. Your mother or grandmother can tell you how long she labored giving birth because she will never forget. Ask her! Some things stick forever in our minds. Some things that should never be forgetten succumb over time under the weight of life events.

I, like you, have memories that I will never forget, no matter what. Still, the most significant and meaningful and needed and important and sacred truths are dangerously close right now to being forgotten in this "land of the free" in 2024.

We have forgotten so much of who and what we were becoming, and are coming so close to forgetting who we are as Americans. Waving the flag right side up or upside down is not the point. Having a flag is the point! Generations upon generations have stood up for that flag on too many battle fields around the world to let it have been for nothing. There will be others as we sadly know. Nobody should give their life in vain: To lose our freedoms on top of losing loved ones who fought for those freedoms for us is undemocratic. It is my contention that if mother's had charge of the world, all war would cease: No mother would agree to send her children to die.

Our mothers and grandmothers know a lot about hard won freedoms. The generations raised by these women have benefited greatly, until recently, from their efforts to gain rights they believed were meant for all, not just for some. By the time I was my daughter's age of 33, I had more rights than women who had led the way: I was educated, I was in the workforce, I was paid at least a minimum wage. Today's granddaughters and daughters have been on a backward slide from where I started five decades ago. Worse though, is how they started from a point of lost innocence. To be sure, when my sisters and mother and grandmother and I shared this earth together there were global threats. But, we knew, or thought we knew where those real threats were lurking far from home as they had always.

( Of course, it must be said that being in the white majority gave a sense of false security that others understood differently from threats faced here at home.) As I came of age, we knew who the "good guys and bad guys" were and where. I remember vividly the nuclear arms race with Russia and the S.A.L.T. (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) for which I slapped a bumper sticker on my car for the first and only time. That was a foreseeable real threat that opened my innocent eyes to possible dangers to my homeland. When you are young and feel threatened the loss of innocence is at stake. When older, threats against everything held dear with the benefit of hindsight can be paralyzing. An alternative to facing grave fear is flight.

Traveling again across the ocean the past two summers, I have noticed the same scenarios in Germany as in the UK that I see in the US. "We the people" are living it up! Yes, COVID was a killer in every way, and the backlash is still being sorted through from work-life to leisure. Yet, for all the whining about a bad economy, we are out in the restaurants and bars and shopping at break-neck speed for luxuries. We are living it up while the world burns up and the migrants float over (if they're lucky), and the courts defer cases against an ex-President who wants his old job back in the next few months! The highest court in our homeland, shocking even conservatives, has given him a leg up in their ruling of immunity against his own misdeeds that threatened our democracy in real time. RBG must be rolling over in her grave. The founders would be rolling over in their graves to see how perilously close to the edge we have come to losing all that they believed to be "our sacred Honor:" ". . . We hold these truths to be self evident . . .A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people". If in her wise and courageous dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Sonia Sotomayor had written the word "Tyrant" rather than "King", violations against the Constitution on January 6, 2020 would have been crystalized forevermore.

There is no other summer in my lifetime, or our country's, that has been on the verge of losing all the rights and freedoms fought for and won, over two and half centuries. Yet, we are off to the beach as if this might be our last chance for "the last perfect summer". As the poet wrote in the summer of 1914 ". . .summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division"* History shows that those who died in WWI and II had lived it up while they could as if what was ahead could be forestalled. We should know better. We do know better. When we look in our hearts we know all that will be forgotten if we cease to be a Democracy. There comes a moment when you feel the sea change, hear the tectonic plates moving under the ground you call home. This is such a moment. Never forget this day for it might not come again in our lifetime, or the lives of our daughters and granddaughters.

*Thomas Hardy, After a Journey