[at-l] SUV's / Guns and Life's Lessons (Too Long)

[rmoak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Ronald Moak)]

Pog,

Unlike Tad, I do believe the article was directed at you, me and the
millions of others who own SUV's. I'll even include those of us who own guns
since you've stretched it that far.

No, I don't believe you're some gun welding maniac driving a massive SUV
over a bunch of kids on the way to some school to blow away anything that
moves in some last desperate act. I've read you post over the years and
responsible caring person who's trying to leave this world just a little bit
better than when she arrived.

I going to tell you a story, I'm not really sure just why. It's certainly
not likely to change anyone's opinion on either guns or SUV's for that
matter. But maybe it'll be at least entertaining to someone.

Somewhere deep in all of us lives a little demon. For the most part it just
lays there, patient as a saint, biding its time until the right moment. If
we're fortunate we'll live a lifetime and never have to face our demon.
It'll just follow us to our graves never able to fulfill its devilish
mission.

Sometimes in a moment of crisis when we find our lives circling the bowl,
the demon may arise and give us a taste of it's bitter fruit.

During the Christmas Holidays of '95, I stood facing my own life's crisis.
Just weeks before I'd be diagnosed with cancer. The dreaded disease that
strikes more than just fear. Even though I was told it was curable and had
started a three month tour of chemo therapy, deep inside I could never be
sure.

One day, racked with nausea from the drugs, I drove deep into the Oregon
Coastal Mountains, in my SUV, with my dad's 60 year old bolt action 22. Now
on the gun scale that's about a low as you can get. Still it is a gun,
deadly bullets could explode from its barrel. It could represent, at least
for a brief moment, power in an otherwise powerless life.

Prior to that day, I'd not fired the gun in over twenty years. Nor have I
felt the need in the 7 years since that day. That day I needed power, some
power, any power at all would do. I needed to know I had some control over
life and death even if it wasn't my own.

So for several hours I sat high atop a clear cut. Popping of rounds at
random targets. Hoping deep inside that somewhere in that terrain of jumbled
stumps, some critter would make a movement. Give me a target so I could blow
them into the next world. Fortunately for me no target presented itself.

During that period did I consider turning the gun on me and ending it all
there and then? I don't remember. We all carry with us a significant
capacity of self delusion. How easy it is to crowd out and forget thoughts
that sour our stomachs.

In the end the only real power I possessed that day was in the act of
pulling out great chunks of chemo weakened hair and unceremoniously
depositing it along the back roads as drove home.

I'm sure that by now most are wondering what the hell this has to do with
SUV's or anything else even remotely meaningful.

The point is that there are forces within us that we have little or no
control over. They direct us quietly down paths that often appear at first
blush to be lovely and serene. Only to deceive us in the end.

It's real easy to look at others and say "I'm not like that". I'm not a
racist, I didn't kill six million jews, own slaves, massacre Indians by the
thousands. But then life is seldom as obvious. Actions that seem logical and
even humanitarian look though the prisms of time to be gross an inhuman.

Yet are we not made from the same star dust as those that perform such
unspeakable actions? Is not their DNA is our DNA? Is their legacy of tragedy
that different from our own? What history will our great grandchildren write
of us?

No guns don't kill people, we do. Nor do SUV's in and of themselves consume
vast quantities of the worlds resources, we do. However both guns, SUV's and
many of the other trappings of our lives, can and do act like the Siren song
and lure us down paths we never intended with a sweet intoxicating melody.

It is good that from time to time we step back and take stock of what course
our daily actions take us. Even if we're powerless to alter it.

As Pogo so famously said "We've met the enemy and it is us!"

-Fallingwater