Midlife Meditation

"You're going to tell one of your stories! I can't stand to hear another one of your stories!" (Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln ) For a good chunk of my life, I was a preacher. Preachers use stories to illustrate. It's a practice that goes back millennia. Jesus told many a parable, as did Buddha. The points made by the stories are not always obvious, and in fact, it's often best if there's not a simple, one-to-one correspondence between the story and the lesson. Parables, in particular, are stories that come at a teaching from an odd angle, and may contain multiple lessons, some of them not even intended by the storyteller. The sign of a great story, as with any work of art, whether performed or visual, is the life it takes on independent of its creator. A truly masterful story will have a different meaning for every person who hears it. This can be frustrating for people who would rather have something simple, de...

That's Gyp Rosetti, a very scary gangster in HBO's Boardwalk Empire. He spoke that line during a tense standoff, one of the few times in the series when everybody having guns didn't end in a shootout. In Boardwalk Empire , guns exist to be used on others. It happens a lot. The third season climaxed with a citywide gun battle, bodies piling up all over Atlantic City. Everybody having guns is a symptom of everybody being scared. For the last twelve years, Americans have been afraid. Someone sent me this graphic in 2002:   With planes hijacked and crashed into buildings, anthrax in the mail, terrorist organizations plotting further attacks, perhaps we had cause to be afraid. In such a climate, it should be no surprise that Americans are buying guns, that people who previously would never think of owning a killing device would want one in the nightstand. But there are some real problems with that kneejerk reaction. First, none of the people we were afraid of in 200...