Month: November 2022

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Guns & American culture: till death do us part

I hate guns. I don’t care what the U.S. Constitution says. At this point with mass shootings every day in our country, I don’t see a reason for citizens getting to have and to hold guns like they’re married to them. Self protection is maybe less than a one percent chance; most police work their whole careers without ever firing a shot. There’s no need for us to hunt for food anymore. And the sport of hunting is legally marked by certain seasons and is not legal every day everywhere. No, the only reason for guns, in this country, is to kill people and lots of them quickly. We’re the only nation on earth whereby our total freedom includes guns and bullets to kill people.

I know that only a third of Americans own all the guns. But now most right-wing public protests feature guns visibly worn by the protestors. It’s a menacing show of force. It’s to tell unarmed counter protestors to shut up or they’ll shoot. It is intended to be a threat and should be illegal. Threatening a person’s life is illegal. So why does the law allow people with guns to shop with us at Walmart or walk around armed in any public place? It can’t be to play hero in the event someone starts shooting. The hero scenario never happens. We only know about hundreds of innocent people being shot to death or disability while minding their own business at parades, holiday shopping centers, churches, and mostly school.

And now that we know only four percent of mass shooters are mentally disturbed—meaning all the other shooters are just regular guys—why do Americans need so many guns? In the U.S., there are enough for every child, teen and adult to have three apiece. Yes, we have three times more guns than people.

The common military-style rifles used in daily shooting massacres were once banned in this country. But our elected officials in Washington, D.C., let that ban expire around 2003, when we were scared senseless by Islamic terrorism and whole hog supportive of two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Live by the gun, die by the gun

I don’t believe in guns. It was a decision made in the 1970s, being influenced by pacifist TV shows like Lou Grant and All in the Family. I was convinced that a gun in the home leads to accidental shootings especially among kids. And that fact remains true and indeed increased dramatically during the stay-home orders associated with the pandemic.

When John Lennon was shot to death in December 1980, Americans wondered why someone so famous would choose to live in New York City. Everybody thought New York to be the most dangerous place in the U.S. Ha, what a laugh today with American shooting massacres occurring in hundreds of cities and small towns across the land.

My thinking about America’s repulsive ‘gun love’ is more about the human brain, the last of the major organs scientists are beginning to study and hopefully understand someday. See, the brain thinks everything it sees is real. That may not make sense, but just think about it. We agree that our minds are influenced by what we see, right? So if we see dozens of murders on TV or in movies and video games, does our brain think it’s all real, that it all really happened? My theory is we made ourselves a culture of hyper anxiety—our first reaction to a situation we don’t like is ‘Shoot!’ Think I’m wrong?

In the year 2022, what do we all have in common now that we collectively know of hundreds of shooting massacres while seeing even more through the mass media of TV, internet, movies and video games? What do the victims, the assailants and all of us casual observers have in common? We’re all American for the most part, share the same culture that loves guns and believes they have solved all our perceived problems, and our eyes watch a lot of entertainment involving guns and shooting bullets.

We’ve always romanticized the Wild West and admired 20th century mobsters like Bonnie & Clyde and characters like Scar Face. From childhood to old age, we’ve ‘seen’ time and again how the one with the gun calls the shots, so to speak. The one with the gun is in charge, and the ones without loaded dangerous firearm are helpless. And ACTION.

Going back to the 20th century with full speed to today, it’s our mass culture of visual entertainment that filled our brains with the power of the gun especially when in the hands of a good person or a bad guy. For generations now, we’re replaying what we’ve been conditioned to accept. We are trapped in a loop. Someone gets angry about something, easily gets a gun made universally accessible, then shoots everybody to death until stopped dead himself.

Don’t believe me?

How to get out of this American nightmare? That I don’t know. I’ve made my decision to not believe in guns and have nothing to do with them. With each passing day and year, however, I know I may come into contact with a shooter—some young guy conditioned by our shared culture that guns are part of life and death—and never seeing any other way.

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Ms. celebrates 50 years of sharp focus on living & working as female

Ms. didn’t have to ask me to subscribe or donate to its 50-year anniversary. They had me at ‘Ms.’ Young people and especially females may not know that women used to be either Mrs. or Miss when addressed in letters, documents, news articles, party invitations, awards, etc. They were either called by their husband’s name, such as Mrs. Brandon Fields, or by their publicly implied spinster status, such as Miss Sylvia Hag. Yep, men were Mr. Man in every respectful address, their marital status left unknown, but a woman’s marital status had to be made into a Big Fat Deal. Tired of the hypocrisy and double standard, in the 1970s a lot of us collectively decided: Women don’t have to change their last names anymore just because they’re married. And from now on: Just refer to us as Ms. It’s no one’s busyness if we’re married.

If you can believe it, 50 years ago many people—men and women alike—felt as if we who decided to call ourselves Ms. were saying ‘Go to hell!’ Really, we weren’t. We’re actually a bunch of nice old ladies—yeah, our iconic feminist leader Gloria Steinem, a founder and editor of Ms. Magazine, is marching toward 90—who as younger gals decidedly determined to take charge of our lives and go all out as independent career women.

But for decades being a Ms. had its drawbacks. In the 1980s one of my male college professors always referred to me as Mzz. Bell for some reason. I don’t know how I came across as a die-hard feminist because back then I appeared frilly with long hair meticulously styled and wearing mostly skirts and dresses. Yet this professor marked me as a Ms. He never called his other female students that. Must have been my independent streak, my ability to be a straight shooter, questioning him perhaps, and blunt conversation when talking about dating … because he always asked upfront “How’s your love life, Mzz. Bell?” And stupidly I’d tell him the highs and lows of college dating. Exasperated I recall often concluding about men: “They all want the same thing.”

A long way, baby

Ms. Magazine was a nice staple to see at the checkout aisles among magazines that promoted sex appeal with cover girls in skimpy clothes, glitzy hair and makeup or the dubious tabloids and magazine covers with ideas for creative cakes, home decorating and crocheted thingies. Ms. should have been among US News & World Report and Time. Ms. took itself seriously from the first issue, featuring the cover of Hindu goddess Kali juggling with eight arms all the tasks set upon women (work, house cleaning, ironing, childcare and baby production, cooking, driving errands). Personal fulfillment was not represented, out of the picture and out of the question in the early 1970s.

Ms. went on to report the straight dope about women’s lives. It was different back then. The magazine and being a women’s libber (as liberated women were called—I include myself from age 10 at the magazine’s founding) was often joked about on TV and even preached against in churches. Preachers maintained women who were feminists had a lesbian spirit. I didn’t know what lesbian meant but understood feminists were made out to be homosexual. If you were a feminist in the 1970s, the majority of American males and many women thought you were a man hater, didn’t want to marry, had something wrong with you.

No, after living the life of career woman and proud Ms. (which we can now choose to be called on most applications along with Mr., Mrs. and Miss—a rather recent development in the modern business world—but really, there shouldn’t be a label at all)—there’s nothing wrong with me. But there was a lot wrong with our society. Still is.

That’s why Ms. remains relevant to reporting on strictly women’s issues in the U.S. and around the world. There’s plenty to spotlight. Just off the top of my head, investigative reports should include: still unequal pay for equal work, the not-yet-approved-nationwide Equal Rights Amendment, the pandemic’s unfair burden on mothers with young children, tax laws that support married couples more than single adults, that financial problem for the elderly living on Social Security who lose money if they ever marry, the tremendous backlog of rape cases with DNA evidence still unanalyzed and unprosecuted, the fact that one in every three females have been sexually molested, the recent reversal of federally-protected abortion rights and even employer blocks against contraception, and addressing generational poverty caused mostly by unwanted teen pregnancies.

It’s never been easy living the life of a woman, feminist or not.

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The vicious cycle of angry voters

As for me and the mid-terms of 2022, I’m hoping for a ‘Pink Wave’—WOMEN voting in droves; more women than men voting, heh heh; and voting in candidates who support the reproductive rights we used to have instead of state by state or like here in Texas community by community, encouraging nosy neighbors, relatives and strangers by paying them $10,000 for hauling in a female resident who had an abortion.

I, like Beto O’Rourke, have had enough of Gov. Abbott’s and the controlling State Republicans’ illogical and mean-spirited abortion laws, nonchalance over nonstop mass shootings across Texas, and presiding over the unfixed and deadly-in-winter Lone Star power grid.

There used to be a saying among working-class Americans long ago who were as ‘mad as Eddie Chiles’ and weren’t gonna take lousy no-count selfish elected leaders anymore especially in Washington, D.C.: THROW THE BUMS OUT.

We don’t hear expressions by fed-up voters anymore because now elections are a blood sport; you can taste the animosity. The fangs are out. Republican candidates show themselves in campaign ads brandishing machine guns, implying, no saying outright they’ll shoot anyone who gets in their way. We just accept this murderous pledge? People are gonna vote for them? Yes, gunslingers get loads of votes. Our nation is so angry.

Americans are mad and rightfully so when it comes to inflation we haven’t seen since the disco era. Who’s to blame for the economy? Always the party in power. So President Biden, who knows this, is gonna have to take it on the chin, like President Bush in 1992 when Bill Clinton won (by sticking to an in-house campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”)

Yes, the economy appears to be a major problem to many voters if not to everyone. It’s not my number one issue though it has been in the past. My concern as a voter is eroding 50-year rights and dismantling our form of government, these issues over economy—the latter which in reality has little to do with who’s the U.S. President, don’t you know?

Economists tell us there are many issues that impact the economy. The big picture is we are part of a global economy, and the pandemic upended business around the world. Come on, billions of people could not work for one reason or another: They were ill or dying, taking care of the ill and dying, living among the ill and dying, and quarantined—weren’t allowed to work for months. The brakes were put on every type of business … in the world. Whiplash was bound to occur. It’s painful and takes some time to heal, we’re finding out.

And wake up Americans! We just fought two wars on the other side of the world for two decades! We gotta pay for that. We gotta pay for two wars for a long, long time. Taxes were going to go up no matter which political party’s in charge.

Having spent most of my life paying attention to American politics since, say, the 1970s, and still never forgetting a day of the ’80s’ Reagan-Bush years, I find that every time a Democrat gets elected President, economic messes are cleaned up—not quickly in a year or two, but quite a bit during two terms. It’s remarkable how slow and steady wins the race. But hold on. Then a Republican gets elected President, and the formerly economic ‘conservatives’ in the U.S. House & Senate spend ALL our money like they’re drunk on … power. I can’t say I’ve ever witnessed ‘tax-and-spend’ liberals of whom Republican leaders criticize.

But I have witnessed the Republicans signing ‘American family’ pledges which master plan featured a list of filthy adjectives to ALWAYS use whenever talking about Democrats, those elected to office, at first at the national level and now all the way down to county clerks, mayors and school board members—and finally just any Democrat in the nation, half the population.

And with the free speech internet, Americans have turned ugly more than they are angry.

American anger is misplaced. Blame the national economy and inflation on all the merchandise still sitting in ships off the coast of California, the world’s manufacturers forced to stop producing for a year or so, Americans not wanting to work millions of jobs (some requiring expertise like nurses and physicians, police and teachers) and related anti-immigration policies, and yes residual effects of the pandemic leaving mostly mothers at home to care for their youngest children. And don’t ever forget about two decades of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—costing at times a billion dollars a month.

The enormous, enviable and wildly rich and prosperous U.S. economy has always appeared a mess (like finding out 60 cents of every tax dollar goes to the military), save a few glorious moments in relatively recent American history. We can vote all Republican because we’re angry Democrats haven’t fixed everything in two years. Or we can be realistic and honest and suck it up: Our nation owes a lot of debt. We can cry over spilled milk, say bitter grapes, throw a pity party, hold our breath till turning blue. But voting in an election requires the calm reasonable mind of a mature adult not an angry temper tantrum of a spoiled brat.