Who Needs an AR-15 When You've Got a Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet?

In the annals of adaptive re-use I propose that every home be equipped with cast iron skillets.  You can (if you are of that ilk) cook anything from a roast to vegetables to cornbread in them, and when your husband gets on your last nerve (as mine has) you can employ them as a disciplinary tool.  (I believe in corporal punishment for grown adults.)  Plus, even a good skillet costs far less than a good gun with all the ammo and licenses and camo.

I live in a state that is home to hunters.  All kinds of people hunt here.  Enjoy it.  Part of how they were raised.  yadda yadda.  I have no problem with any of that.  But where and why did all that morph into these Army of One nuts who sleep with one eye open because the government (and it's just a matter of time) is gonna get them?

In my limited experience, here's how the government of the US of A gets it's domestic enemies:

1.  RICO (racketeering) prosecutions,
2.  infiltration of organizations via wiretapping and informants thereby sowing the seeds of mistrust, e.g., COINTELPRO, and letting vanity, ego and paranoia do the rest,
3.  persistent and relentless auditing by the IRS.

By the time the gov'mint whips out their guns, most of the damage is done.

So what if you haven't paid all your taxes?  You just aren't that important, fella.  Your hypervigilance about your own personal safety makes me wonder what you are so afraid of?  But what is more worrisome to me than the kind of naivete that leads to thinking your door is the one getting kicked in at 4 am is the indifference of many of these folks to what we so quaintly used to call the common good. For them there are not even any arguable issues to be considered to balance the tension between individuals' possession (and use) of firearms and the safety of those who don't.  And yeah, I've read the 2nd Amendment and could spend the rest of my life reading the judicial decisions that have flowed from it over the past 200+ years, but this has long since escaped being a jurisprudential argument and has become something else.

Animal You're Most Like?

I finally figured it out:  I'm a hermit crab.  Met the little buggars walking to the beaches of St. John.  I don't know what sets off their sensors -- perhaps changes in air pressure as you prepare to step on them?  They retract into their shells, and like infants, think themselves disappeared.  As you can imagine, it hasn't been working all that well for me either.

My vow this year is to do less.  That translates into less studying (but more learning), less eating (period), less worrying and less carrying the same old baggage in the same old ways.  Some days are different; others a repeat of the past.  No need to catastrophize, though, I must try again.

So, yesterday, in the spirit of Doing Things Differently I went to a workshop organized by New Haven's Just Moves and I danced.  You could say it was dancing for social justice, which doesn't make any sense if you haven't done it yet, but the longer I've lived here during a time where there has been so much violent death, the more the work of Elijah Anderson and others I've read, the longer I've been conversation with people who classify disfiguring and murderous violence as a public health emergency and a human-made disaster, the more I am convinced that smart policing alone is only part of the solution.  Part of the solution comes from the heart (connectedness) and the belly (having a primal hunger satisfied in communion with others).

So, here I am a self-professed human crab who cooks two times a year (if pressed).  This should be an interesting experiment.  to be continued ...

A Tragedy's Anniversary Without Press Coverage

On the 4th Tuesday of every month I attend the general meeting our our neighborhood's community association.  It's something we've done since arriving in New Haven and finding out about the group.  My ties to West River have grown and deepened, and the neighborhood's initiatives toward community building have done the same.  That particular night, my friend, Ellen, Lilli and I were walking home the block and a half from Barnard School and we were overtaken by a swarm of teenagers.  They quickly parted around us on foot and on bikes and we could see that they were heading towards my house.

Four houses down we met A, who had been at the meeting, too.  He is by temperament both cautious and suspicious.  Perhaps for good reason; and perhaps he is this way as only people who have given others reason in the past to be cautious and suspicious can be.  He was getting ready to call the police.  I told him wait, I saw my neighbor, Eric, in the crowd, talking to kids, keeping an eye on things.  We went down the street and a hunch I'd had since the first teenagers overtook us was confirmed.  It was a year ago that Marquell Banks was murdered in the house 2 doors down from ours. These kids, some who knew him, some who did not, collected to grieve, and to discharge an inchoate, unspecific anger towards the house's tenants.  I'm sure if Eric hadn't been there some kid would have tried to get inside the house.  (The tenants coming home saw the crowd forming and left to sleep elsewhere.)

It is that palpable anger that made A want to call the police immediately.  Even a wise cop can only ameliorates it briefly.  And wise cops are rare.  But, it's a year later now and these kids are still angry, still looking for the answer to the problem of one of their own killing another of their own.  Marquell's family is traumatized.  The tenants, who have young children of their own, are traumatized and stigmatized.  (This is not conjecture on my part.  This comes from conversation and witness.)  The teenagers who came to mourn are traumatized.

We, the adults of this street in particular, and this community in general, need to reclaim the obligation that we've assigned to the police.  We've demanded, in the name of public safety, that they also fix what's broken in the social fabric and by doing so wash our hands of responsibility to each other.  As a community we've made great strides in that direction when the issues address a material lack, we fall short when it involves matters that are made more difficult by a lack of trust and no belief in agape love.  When those events happen we resort to calling the cops and deluding ourselves that the problem's been solved.  It hasn't, and I expect to see some of those same kids back again next year.

The Interrupters

This documentary will be showing July 29 through August 7 at IFC and Maysles Cinema in NYC: