Midlife Meditation

I really don't want to have a conversation with this guy. On my way home yesterday, I found myself behind a Cadillac with a vanity plate that nearly took my breath away: "NRA YES." It was accompanied by a half dozen right-wing bumper stickers espousing the standard NRA talking points--I think one of them said "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," and there was one about the Second Amendment, one about blaming Democrats for Obamacare (ludicrous, because it was concessions to Republicans that made the damn thing so complicated, rather than a clean, efficient Medicare for all)--and I was so struck by what I was seeing that, when we came to a stop light, I snapped a picture with my phone. I did this as surreptitiously as I could for reasons I'm about to go into, and the result is that only the license plate is legible in the photo, but that in itself tells the story quite well. That license plate and those stickers...

Last week, driving through Washington state, I saw this bumper sticker: My first reaction was anger. I remember well how, following the 9/11 attacks, my country went insane with bloodlust. We wanted desperately to find someone, anyone, responsible and teach those monsters a lesson. We wanted to bomb their camps, invade their countries, obliterate every human being who was in any way involved with any organization that might have had something to do with this attack on America. And when rooting out the actual terrorists proved more difficult than we'd bargained for, and capturing the mastermind of the atrocity an elusive goal that was to prove, for more than a decade, unattainable, we found a different target, and rained down our fury on Iraq, a country that had had nothing at all to do with the attack, but did have a real jerk for a president. Just to be clear: for all the empathy I may have felt for that reaction, I opposed it. I was living in a community called the Pe...