Midlife Meditation

Scary thing about this graphic: how many variations one finds when Googling "hearts guns." This is not my first time at the shoot-em-up rodeo. Many of the first essays I wrote in this space were about gun violence. They triggered fierce reactions from some gun enthusiasts I was acquainted with. For a short time, I humored those people by attempting to engage them in some back-and-forth conversation. A very short time. It quickly became clear that, as with any other matter of religion, politics, or addiction, the people who feel most threatened by those holding different views have got no thinking space left for listening to those views. I was talking and writing past them, rather than to or with them. So I quit answering their comments. Life's too short to spend it carefully crafting arguments the intended recipient will conveniently ignore as he or she throws out a fresh batch of distortions, false equivalences, and appeals to authority. Comment strings also miss ...

In Texas, it's all big. There are some who will insist that Texas is not a true part of the American South. Its historical identity as, for a brief time, an independent republic, its blended Mexican and cowboy culture, its prosperity relative to most other former states of the Confederacy--there are many reasons to consider Texas more Southwest than South. And yet, Texas was very much a member of the Confederate States of America, and the last slaves to be liberated, two months after the rebels surrendered to the Union, were Texas slaves (an event enshrined in the African-American holiday known as Juneteenth). Texans disparagingly refer to Northerners as Yankees, enthusiastically embracing a patriotism that both celebrates American identity and stubbornly insists on defining it militantly and rebelliously. The only part of the South I've experienced on a personal level is Texas, more specifically, Dallas. That's even more problematic than calling Texas representat...

Across the South, Confederate battle flags are coming down. Wal-Mart has pulled them from its store shelves. Online gaming companies have disabled games that feature the flag prominently. Aghast at the sudden repudiation of their "heritage," Confederacy buffs object that Nazi symbols are not receiving the same treatment, even though they clearly represent the Holocaust, while the Confederate battle flag is about honor, not racism. Try telling that to the families of the nine people who died in Charleston, the members of the black churches that are, again, being burned across the South, or any African-American who has a lynching in his or her family tree. In fact, as has been copiously documented in the last week, the Confederate battle flag rose to prominence precisely because it was taken to symbolize white Southern resistance first to the enforced empowerment of former slaves during Reconstruction and, later, to the battle against granting their descendants c...

From top to bottom: the Stars and Stripes, the South Carolina state flag, and the Confederate battle flag. The picture was taken in 2000, just before the battle flag was removed from the state capitol's flag pole. I struggle with flags. I learned flag reverence as a Boy Scout: how to present it, salute it, retire it, fold it and, when use had rendered it too tattered to respectfully display, how to burn it. The only proper way to wear the stars and stripes, I learned, was as a shoulder patch. To this day, seeing flags worn as articles of clothing troubles me. I'm aware that other cultures have different customs regarding their flags--the British, in particular, seem find with Union Jack underwear, hot pants, bikinis, etc.--but even so, seeing any flag displayed for purposes of ridicule, amusement, titillation, or symbolic disrespect gives me pause. I'm the same way with any symbol that has meaning to a group of people: seeing it desecrated troubles me. And yet,...

The day after the shooting, this headline, this image, and this ad appeared on the front page of the Charleston Post and Courier: That ad's a little hard to read in context, so here it is all by itself: In case you're still not sure what it says, here's the text of the ad: Ladies' Night THURSDAY! ATP Gun Shop & Range specializes in teaching ladies to learn to shoot for fun, sport & self defense! $30 GETS YOU EVERYTHING! Eye/Ear Protection, Souvenir T-Shirt, Pistol or Revolver, Range Pass, 50 Rounds of Ammo, Instructor  The morning after a young man, using a pistol purchased at a department store, shot and killed nine African-Americans at a Bible study, the local newspaper ran this ad, partially obscuring the headline announcing the killings. To its credit, the newspaper acknowledged the horrendous timing of the ad, as did the ADP Gun Shop and Range. What neither did was admit the irony of the juxtaposition--or make even the smallest admission that ...

Mourners pray at Emanuel AME Church for the victims of Wednesday's shooting. He sat through an hour of the Bible study. Once captured, he told police he was having second thoughts about what he was about to do because everyone was being so nice to him. But then he took out his gun, called the people who had just been so nice to him rapists, said they were taking over his country and had to be stopped, and shot and killed nine people, leaving one witness alive so she could tell others what he did and why he did it. The shooter's motives were clear for many reasons, most obviously the statement he made before opening fire. There were other clues: the confederate flag stickers on his car, the photograph that surfaced of him wearing patches of the flags of Rhodesia and Apartheid-era South Africa, and the particular church he carefully selected as scene of the crime, then drove two hours to reach. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church--"Mother Emanuel," to ...