Tending Our Garden
My friend Bob Meraz, who runs Basement Hip Hop, a hip hop record store and label in the San Fernando Valley, sent out an open letter to his customers about the shootings at Virginia Tech. I thought it was quite moving, and worth sharing more widely. Here's Bob, from his open letter:
I fear that many of us will dismiss this shooting as a case in which a disturbed young man “snapped” and in an emotional state went about his violent rampage. Now while this may be a fitting description - and if this young man was captured before he took his own life, I would be the first to demand swift and stern justice - let us not neglect our moral obligation to turn judgment’s eye upon ourselves. Would we not hold responsible the gardener who allowed a weed to go undisturbed to the point that it destroyed the budding roses? As I age in mind and soul, it has become abundantly clear that America has bred a culture of violence. We’ve become increasingly callous and cynical. I’m afraid that we have lost sight of the big picture. And not until we learn to extinguish the plurality that divides us, will we begin to gain sight of the ultimate goal of peace among men. Is the sense of loss and grievance reserved for only the families and friends of those that were murdered, or perhaps family, friends, and family friends and friends of friends? It is only when we develop the sensitivity to truly and sincerely empathize with the pain and suffering that our fellow citizens endure, no matter the distance in time or space, can we earnestly claim to be “One nation under God.” Imagine the level of concern that each of us would feel if this was one of our neighboring colleges. Well… I believe “neighboring” is simply a matter of perspective. When one views the landscape from the peaks of the Himalayas, all villages are connected.To this end, I hope that the massacre that took place in Virginia at the very least caused each one of us to stop and reflect and take stock in our contribution to this collective consciousness. I wonder how many of us watched the highlights on the evening news and then eagerly prepared for the next episode of 24, not giving this tragedy a second thought? Let us take responsibility and start carefully tending to our garden. Whether it is being patient with a new waitress on the job, a polite honk instead of the slamming of the horn and waving of the middle finger, or perhaps choosing not to cheer for fights during hockey games, every day presents us with opportunities to make a difference. I must admit at times it is quite difficult to take advantage of these opportunities; too many times the moments are fleeting, like the pigeon that zips past our windshields while we sit in traffic, but we must be committed to doing our best to bring about the winds of change. As the mighty Ox plows through mulch and mud, we must tread this path with steadfast determination. As Mahatma Gandhi pleaded, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” As for myself, after this recent tragedy, coupled with the violence that persists in the Middle East, I have seen enough and yearn for a change of scenery.
To those now grieving lost ones in Blacksburg, I am sorry. Sorry for the suffering that you are experiencing and sorry for not tending better care of our garden.
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Comments: 33
I don't think there's a comparison between human beings and weed here.
We (all) are gardeners, and the weed is our words and actions.
We've been pounding the mean drum for a good decade and a half now. Do that at the end of a night of hard rock and roll and fights break out in the parking lot. Experienced bands know it and don't do it. It pushes the edge cases to the other side of the line, and the rest just follow.
Again, Linda Mealy: sociopathy is a frequency dependent behavior in populations. Until media people and other leaders get that, expect more and worse. To paraphrase Gandhi, be the change you want to make.
"Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden."
Face it, the shooter was clearly identified over a year ago, and our gutted mental health system let him fall though the cracks. Nothing kept a clearly disturbed student from buying semiautomatic guns with high capacity magazines full of hollow point rounds. No amount of of civility or niceness will stop this. Being nice to Charles Mansion would not stop him and would probably enable him.
A certain (hopefully) small percentage of any population is psychotic and in the absence of government will wreak havoc on the rest of society. One of the primary reasons we maintain police and a justice system is to contain such people and allow society to function. What we are seeing is a breakdown of basic government functions due to increasingly bizzare doctrines.
But is violence really caused by a "culture of violence", or is the culture of violence a reflection of an underlying violence, a violence under the surface of society and ultimately under the surface of a lot of individuals.
Take games and movies. If people didn't have some deep rooted violent tendencies then people wouldn't look at violent video games and movies and go "cool!", they'd wonder why such games and movies were ever made (assuming they ever were made in the first place).
Look at human history - it's bloody, very bloody. And it was very bloody for a very, very long time before games and films came along. If anything, humans are slowly getting away from violence, and oddly enough it correlates to an increase in access to "violence substitutes" (such as sport, games and movies). So perhaps instead of calling for people to not cheer on fights at hockey matches, it would be better to call on people to cheer on fights at hockey matches and then to leave the hate and the violence inside the arena.
Indeed.... Violence hasn't increased as much as folks would like us to believe. Media coverage of it has!
I can remember watching hockey 40 years ago. There were fights. I don't recall anyone shooting up my school after watching a hockey game.
Is there any evidence that Cho Seung-hui, had ever watched a hockey game?
Let's not blame sports for people's inability to control themselves. Let's not blame television, the movies or video games for people who can't tell the difference between reality and the demons in their minds...
Blame PARENTS! Blame the selfishness of the individual... Place the blame where it belongs!
A couple of reminders: Bob was writing to a hip hop audience, a culture which has celebrated violence. He shows great courage in speaking out.
Second, "blame television" isn't the point. But I will point out that our media's focus on negative stories doesn't help. I thought it was telling that in my local paper, the horror stories were all on page one, while the story about the 76 year old professor, survivor of concentration camps and oppression in Romania, who held the door shut while his students escaped through the window, and then was shot and killed, was buried on page 16.
As Kurt Vonnegut famously noted in Mother Night, "You are what you pretend to be, so you'd better watch what you pretend." As a culture, we no longer particularly aspire to heroism or goodness. We celebrate riches, and getting ahead, and we are shocked, oh so shocked, at the violent stories that we titillate ourselves with.
But that's not really Bob's point. I don't think that this is a "blame the media" thing. My brother once summarized Aristotle's definition of virtue ("control of the appetites by right reason") as "knowing what you really want." When Bob talks about self restraint and kindness in everyday life, that is also the beginning of thinking more broadly about what we really want in other spheres. Aristotle also recognized that virtues are skills that you practice, and get better at by that practice. If we don't practice in small things, we never have the strength to practice in big things.
And those big things include our social priorities. As monopole noted, our mental health system has been gutted, and our social safety nets too. We can spend hundreds of billions on a war in Iraq because it was supposedly in our national interest, but do nothing about the genocide in Darfur, because we have nothing at stake there -- except our self-respect.
There are no easy answers, but it's worth raising this stuff. For example, the whole "code of conduct" discussion led to people speaking out about sexism in the spock presentation at Web Expo, when formerly they might have stayed silent. (It was amazing how many people sent me private support for the code of conduct idea in email, but made no comment on the blog itself, where the dialogue was ruled by opponents crying "censorship" at even a call for self-regulation by bloggers.)
The image of tending a garden is a good one. Gardens can be beautiful in many ways, wild or orderly, but they are the result of steady care.
Ironic that this passage came from a person who owns a hip hop record label. Isn't your friend supporting and nurturing more weeds "in our garden?" Hip Hop today is not what it intended to be as in its original art form when launched as "old school" in the 80's. Being a "label" to hip hop artists today is also keeping great artistry tied up in contracts and legaleese when the internet continues to show the way around the "long tail" for all artists to be emancipated. It is time for your friend Bob to grow; maybe his words will inspire his evolution.
Bob's words show true wisdom. The analogy of gardening doesn't necessarily mean being nice or civil, more...recognizing the results of our collective actions and our collective mindset...ie: the gardener missing the weed. The weed(s) are our lack of attention to the overall garden while we chase other concepts of "importance".
Certainly mankind has had a bloody history (present today)...but mankind also has in it's nature, an aspect that includes a vision of peace, health, safety and prosperity for all...and the recognition of our oneness. The more collective effort we apply to tending the garden, the more beautiful that garden will be.
We're seeing more and more evidence of this all the time, especially in this crowd as we observe more and more community cooperation, community contribution and the power and momentum that creates. In our history, the last decade and a half of connectivity is truly just the beginning of something new to mankind, which is the ability to for everyone to communicate with, and to join those of like mind.
That of course goes both ways, and human nature will play it's way out in that arena as well. I personally have a strong belief that our consciousness is evolving and ultimately our higher nature will prevail. In reality, this is just the beginning of the process with our newfound connectivity...right now as we share information peer to peer vs the broadcast messages of past, we are just starting to really talk about where things are broken...communities are being formed, etc... The proof is in the pudding so to speak. May we truly be the change we would like to see in the world.
Tara, you're making an awful lot of (incorrect) assumptions about the kind of music Bob publishes, and how he works with his artists.
Bob's post is genuine and correct, but unfortunately he cannot make followed by the Film and Game Industry maniacs who would publish any rotten and debased thing for a buck, no matter how demented it causes some people behave nor however deeply it causes other cultures hate us -- one and all.
The idea that, "maybe if we just tried a little harder" things would be different is a very Human one. It is, however, generally not quite right.
You cannot stop a crazy person from being crazy. You just can't. Some people just cannot exist in civilised society, and no amount of happy pills, or removing every video game or movie that offends you, is going to change that. They had murderers 1,000 years ago, too, and there will still be murderers when we've all passed on.
Unpredictability is what makes lunatics so dangerous. I really don't think there is some grand lesson to be learned, here.
Also, Flotsam, not a single video game was found in the shooters home.
Phil,
There is one grand lesson: gun control might help. I was reading somewhere that in Japan, when they have crazies, they usually go wild with a sword, which means that they get one or two people before they are stopped.
While I have sympathy for the idea that "if you outlaw guns, only criminals will have guns" I do think that unfettered access to weapons in the US makes us considerably more violent than other Western nations.
What's more, while this particular incident is one of a "crazy" person, there is so much violence in our inner cities that is definitely the product of an untended garden, a society that provides violent role models and crime as a promising exit from a bad situation. Meanwhile, our mainstream looks away, and neither liberals nor conservatives have answers for how to rebuild a society that works. (I wish we could get away from extremes, and find the middle that works, with ideas from both the liberal and conservative canons, and science rather than rhetoric and special interests guiding our policies...)
I think our society has gotten much worse in terms of shootings. There were never shootings at schools when i was a kid. Now as a parent you send your child off to school and wonder...
But i had to tell a another story about violence and goodness in our society. i was sitting in a waiting room at the San Francisco Medical Center waiting for a friend to get out of surgery. I was there for several hours. There were 5 women of color from different races: all mothers or grandmothers with children babies and they were talking. It turns out most of them were from Oakland. One woman asked another how many children she had. She said 4 living. A daughter was mudered several years back. Another woman said her father was murdered also. And another woman said the statistics were that in every six families one family would have someone killed. Against this backdrop of horror, these women waited and held each other's babies when they cried too much, gave advice on how to talk to doctors, and supported each other with ideas on how to handle difficult health issues in their families. Their hearts were so open. And what they have had to endure is so unacceptable.
Excuse me getting involved in this discussion as a foreigner. Let me say first that people here in Europe re as shocked as in the US and feel with the families and friends of the victims.
I just wanted to remark a couple of things. They are not really connected, but I will try to explain them as good as I can.
The whole question about guns. Many Europeans are a bit confused about the discussion in the US which seems to go along the line "If more students would have had a gun, less students would have died." While this seems to be true when applied to this singular case, there is some extreme flaw in the logic of this.
The more people have weapons on them at all times, the more often they are tempted to "solve" a problem, not by discussion, but by threatening the other person with the gun - especially when they are afraid of the other person. And look into yourself. When meeting a tall muscular guy (maybe with very short hair and tattoos) on a night time stroll through the city somewhere in a darker street, don't you feel threatened. Now imagine he asks you for a cigarette. Hey, he might be a gardener or a pacifist philosopher who enjoys body building. Actually, most probably he is rather that and not a mass murderer. But still, for a moment we feel threatened - and in that moment it is good we do not have a gun, because otherwise something stupid might happen.
Now of course the more often these "stupid" things as described above happen, the more you have to expect any other person you have a discussion with, to have a gun. You have to expect them to draw their gun, which of course makes you (or me) more likely to draw your (or my) gun.
However, at the same time, it is not only the amount of guns available which are the problem. I currently live in Switzerland. Here all young men (or most) have a military machine gun and ammunition at home. Of course, sometimes these guns are used - and every time they are used is one time to many. That is why the Swiss parliament was discussing if those guns should be collected. However looking at the overall statistics, Switzerland is a very safe country and the risk of being shot with a military machine gun is minimal. This shows that there must be other factors. Of course Switzerland is an exceptionally rich country with only minimal social fractions. That might help.
As my last point, let me tell you a story, which happened here at a university. There was a young PhD student from Eastern Europe. He was fluent in English, but not in German. The local university wanted him to come to do his PhD here, because he was really good. However when he started to work at the institute, the professor and the co-workers refused to speak English with him. He could not do any research. He was socially excluded and did not manage to find other contacts. At some point he despaired. One morning he jumped of a building on campus. If he would have had a gun (or a different psychological standing) he might have killed other people before killing himself. Maybe the young man at Virginia Tech really was a psychopath. But when looking back at most amok actions I remember in Europe, the killers were beforehand excluded from society. This is not to excuse them. I strongly believe that humans have a choice. But I also do believe that, when Bob writes in his letter, that we can make a difference, that he is right.
Thanks for publishing the letter. It made me think.
Moritz
PS Sorry for typing and grammar mistakes etc.
Well, here we go. Guns are to blame. Yes, less guns would be the answer. Want to know the facts? How about more guns. Allowing people to defend themselves works really well. In a similar episode at another university a few years back, a couple of students got their guns out of a car trunk and disarmed a potential killer - without a shot. Why are schools so vulnerable? Because everyone knows no one has any defensive mechanisms at schools. Should they be allow to? Probably not, considering that guns and alcohol are a very bad combination. With the insidious drug and alcohol use at schools, there is probably no choice but to outlaw weapons. However, wherever weapons are outlawed, you deprive people of their ability to defend themselves. And Tim, the point about swords in Japan is just plain ridiculous. On the very same day, the Mayor of Nagasaki was gunned down in cold blood by a gangster. People should have the right to carry. It would have only taken one capable and armed person in that classroom to have totally prevented the Virginia Tech situation. I can tell you it wouldn't have happened at West Point.
The only thing that prevented Hitler from invading Switzerland was the fact that every Swiss household was armed and ready as a militia.
Of course, this isn't 1941 anymore and no one needs to be protected from government anymore, do we children. And if you believe that, you win a one way trip to Darfur.
Eric, Hitler attacked much stronger and better armed countries than Switzerland.
We certainly need to be protected from government, but if it comes down to a shootout, we've all already lost.
Tim,
About swords in Japan. It only takes one crazy to come into a home in Japan and stab a housewife to death. What is one to do without a gun? How does a woman fight back. Don't tell me. It happened to my friend. Outlawing guns means outlawing them everywhere. So in Japan not even a housewife or any woman is safe anymore in her own home. Samuel Colt, who invented the Colt revolver for this very reason called his invention "the great equalizer".
Tim:
Hitler knew that the Swiss were gun owners and that many Nazis would be butchered in the process of an invasion. At the peak of its mobilization Switzerland had 850,000 men under arms or standing in reserve, a fifth of the total population. . . . That Switzerland did not have to fight was thanks to its will to resist and its large investment of men and equipment in its own defense. The cost to Germany of an invasion of Switzerland would certainly have been very high.
It's worth noting that Switzerland's government issues guns and ammunition, and then visits homes to inspect them. In particular, if you've opened your box of ammunition and don't have a good explanation, you can go to jail. That's my idea of a "well-regulated militia". What we have now doesn't seem to be working out. Maybe we should try the Swiss method.
I'm also trying to imagine an armed campus, and shuddering.
I work at a metropolitan university with a small crime problem. Just last Monday, we had a purse snatching in our student center. Two students chased the snatcher down and caught him. Good for them--I think our department of public safety was wrong to say they should have simply called them up--but would it have been a safer campus if they pulled guns and shot at the guy?
I was well-acquainted with the victim of an on-campus murder, John Locke.
Was John Locke supposed to carry a concealed weapon to every meeting with a student? No--having to draw the weapon would have slowed him down. He would have had to keep gun on his desk.
Now, carry this to its logical extreme. Every class would have to begin by the teacher taking out the gun and putting it on the lectern. Do you want to attend that school? I don't.
Also, try to imagine what happens when not one but many students in a class all pull out their weapons and unload whenever something startling enough happens in the front of the classroom. Think about how many people are in the field of fire of each person pulling a gun, and think about how even trained policemen often go wild and unload entire clips for little reason.
The same faculty member that sent notice of the purse snatching to our listserv also sent, in the same email, a nervous note about two people in the student center in long black trenchcoats. What would have happened if someone decided, in the palpable nervousness that Monday afternoon, that those two guys needed to be confronted, with guns drawn?
I've had campus police confront me with guns in the last few weeks. I was leaving our offices late at night, and called campus security to let them know I'd be arming the alarm system. I did so and, after going down the stairs and turning the corner, saw an officer running toward me, gun drawn. Another came up behind me as I was taking the first one in.
I had the good fortune to have my hands in plain sight, and the wits about me to explain, quickly, what I'd just been doing, ending with, "By the way, is there someone dangerous around? Because you have your gun drawn." It turned out it was the first night for the guy on the switchboard who took my call. When the alarm went off on arming, he reported a burglary in progress.
I didn't feel particularly safer after that encounter, but I guarantee you I'd've felt even less safe if there'd been a couple of armed yahoos passing by who decided to help the police out.
As I saw expressed precisely elsewhere, A handgun is not a magic wand. It's a dangerous, sometimes useful tool, not a universal answer.
That said, the idea that guns are the problem is almost as simplistic a view as the idea that guns are the answer. Accounts of the young man who killed all those people show he had a long-term problem, though whether it came from the bullying at school or from some sort of neurochemical imbalance is unclear. Possibly something could have been done to help him long ago.
I'm told that I may have exaggerated Switzerland's policies:
When I was there (Switzerland) the basic combat loadout was blister packed (for convenience rather than security I suspect but it wasn't an issue) and subject to routine inspection - pass muster - but additional ammunition was freely (as in beer and speech) available and of course routine practice was encouraged and subsidized. The chance of going to jail for tampering with war reserves was minuscule compared to the chance of being chewed out - of course depending on the facts in the case.
If I was wrong on this specific point, I regret it. However, the larger point--that Switzerland has a different system, including universal service and training--remains.
A number of years ago a friend of mine was murdered on a California University campus by a crazy man who sneaked up behind him in a men's room and crushed his skull with a hammer. The University failed to report to the student body an earlier attack by the same crazy man. That failure cost the University a several million dollars in negligence damages and probably my friend's life. Virginia Tech it looking at the same problem times 30 people. Sadly to say, there is an economic value our legal system puts on a person's life. Little comfort to the children my friend left behind. This is the result we pay for by most eliminating state hospitalization of mental patients and trying to deal with it using medication.
adamsj:
What do you mean you "shudder to imagine an armed campus". You already have one. Your own example states that the guns are in the hands of the security people - who by the way probably make minimum wage exactly because they are not too bright in the first place. Yet you are satisfied to give THEM the guns. Think about that.
And no one probably disagrees with out about guns
being inappropriate on campus. We all know campuses are replete with drugged out, hung over, students. Guns and drugs or alcohol are a terrible combination. So, until people make up their minds to be responsible and stop walking around like toked-up, beered-up, prozac-primed, steroid-freaked zombies, we are going to continue to have ugly problems on campuses. I feel sorry that you have to endure that environment. If the same thing happens in a good business, 90% of people are out the door in a short time.
I'm willing to give the campus police guns.
By doing so, we have an armed security force, and not an armed campus.
The dispatcher's job open right now pays better than nine bucks an hour to start, and I believe the patrolling officers get more. They also get a fair amount of training.
I spent a fair amount of my life working for minimum wage. No one who knows me would say I'm "not too bright" and I wouldn't say it of someone else on such flimsy evidence.
I'm working at the university at about half the pay rate I got as an acolyte of Corporatnu because it is a wonderful environment. I don't recognize the place you describe.
In any event, guns aren't the main point of this thread.
What I care about--and I suspect I speak for Tim as well--is how to make a better world. Guns and gun control (and here I speak for myself only) are at worst a distraction and at best a minor tweak.
adamsj, allow me to reply please:
You say: I'm willing to give the campus police guns.
> And willing in the same breath to deprive others of their choice.
You say: By doing so, we have an armed security force, and not an armed campus.
> Apparently one that does not hesitate to point them at you.
You say: The dispatcher's job open right now pays better than nine bucks an hour to start, and I believe the patrolling officers get more. They also get a fair amount of training.
> And you accuse me of speculation?
You say: I spent a fair amount of my life working for minimum wage. No one who knows me would say I'm "not too bright" and I wouldn't say it of someone else on such flimsy evidence.
> You probably were actually not to bright at the time.
You say: I'm working at the university at about half the pay rate I got as an acolyte of Corporatnu because it is a wonderful environment. I don't recognize the place you describe.
> Well you ought to get out of Pleasantville a little more.
You say: In any event, guns aren't the main point of this thread.
> So why did you bring it up?
You say: What I care about--and I suspect I speak for Tim as well--is how to make a better world. Guns and gun control (and here I speak for myself only) are at worst a distraction and at best a minor tweak.
> It comes down to having factual answers, not fabrications and fairy tales.
OK, this is me stepping in as moderator. Despite the fact that the news now reports that as a person with documented psychiatric problems, the shooter shouldn't have been able to buy guns, and clearly failed the background check process, I shouldn't have brought up the topic of guns, as it's clearly a divisive issue that is becoming increasingly off-topic. Please do not continue the gun discussion.
Hey Monopole, thank you for your comment. You bring up some good points. In my letter, I wasnÔøΩt suggesting that if people were more civil towards Seung-Hui Cho this tragedy could have been avoided. Although there were some reports of him being bullied in high school because of some speech difficulties that he had. But that's beside the point, it doesn't matter how much he was bullied, no excuse for what he did. But let's imagine if we did increase our "civility or niceness", what would be the downside? I'll grant you that we have a small percentage of psychotic people within our population. But I'm sure that some of these people are on the cusp. In other words, I'm sure some of these people are borderline. Perhaps a little more civility or niceness towards them would better serve everybody's interests. O.K. I feel you, being nice to Charlie Manson is not going to accomplish much. But what about folks that are on the fence? At the very least, I can't see how it would behoove society to be mean to these people. I don't knowÔøΩ just a thought.
I guess ultimately, one point of my letter was that every little bit counts. That if we all do our best to be civil and nice on a micro level, this can make a difference on a macro level. Like the Chinese proverb about how the wind from a butterfly's wing travels across the ocean and becomes a hurricane. Hypothetically speaking, what if there was mental health director that could have attended to Seung-Hui Cho, but in reviewing his file simply rushed through it because he was annoyed and distracted by an earlier confrontation with an angry motorist at lunch. So this mental health director is pissed off and he just wants to go home and call it a day. He skims over young Cho's file and slaps and an "OK" stamp on it and then clocks out. I know this hypothetical is not drawn out well, but I believe the point is made. Maybe if angry motorist at lunch didn't piss off mental health director, mental health director would have taken his time with Mr. Cho's file and then Mr. Cho gets identified as a serious risk to himself and others and so on and so on.
Robert,
That was a thoughtful letter, and I'm glad to have read it.
Let me propose a different scenario than the one you line out in your comment:
A young woman, a single mother with a low income and a three-year-old child, goes to the local mental health agency, self-reporting suicidal thoughts.
The agency puts her into a three-day observation, then releases her. They give her a prescription for Xanax and the advice to come back if things get bad again. They don't send her away because she doesn't need their help, and not because someone had a bad day, but because they've had their funding cut repeatedly for twenty years. It's the best they can do given their constraints.
A few weeks later, with her father outside the door of her room, trying to talk her out, she blows her brains out. He rides to the hospital watching the meat that used to be a lovely girl.
This is the story of my best friend's daughter.
This happened six years ago, and he's only lately beginning to get past it. It didn't help that his wife was in the middle of a long, losing fight with breast cancer--and what a horror for her.
I don't blame the gun. I don't blame the Xanax. I don't blame the local mental health agency. I don't blame the no-good father of her child. I don't blame her father (who still blames himself).
If there's blame to place, I place it on those who made the decisions to cut such agencies' funding.
You are righ that we shouldn't lose sight of the role of ordinary kindness in improving the world.
Those of us who loved this family had, and still have--it's been a long slog, I assure you--the chance to exercise kindness in the wake of this dreadful event, and I don't think any of us would have done anything else. In particular, the girl's uncle has adopted that child and is helping him through all his struggles, despite the fact that he and the girl deeply disliked each other.
But simple kindness just isn't enough--it's so necessary, but it's not sufficient.
What is sufficient?
I have some ideas on that, and I bet so do you. I doubt that we have all the same ones. I'm certain that, once it's beyond just us, it becomes contentious.
That contentiousness is a good thing, or at least necessary to make progress toward the good thing.
That's what I have to contribute. It's not much.
People are increasingly coming apart at the seams under the pressure of our times. Mental equilibrium is drifting. Meditation is a key component of reaching a balanced effective relationship with ourselves and others in my experience.
What do you mean you "shudder to imagine an armed campus". You already have one. Your own example states that the guns are in the hands of the security people - who by the way probably make minimum wage exactly because they are not too bright in the first place. Yet you are satisfied to give THEM the guns. Think about that.
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Konrad Froitzheim [04.19.07 02:51 AM]
Yes, there is a lot of truth in Bob's letter. We have to work harder to reduce violence in our society. (Sports, Movies, Games, ...).
But the comparison of a human being - any human being however ill s/he is - with weed is not acceptable. History should have taught us: When it comes to humans, nobody should be a gardener. Nobody - government nor individuals - should deal with other humans the way a gardener deals with weeds.