Midlife Meditation

May 12, 1983. I am 22 years old. In the next 24 hours, I will experience three rites of passage: my first taste of alcohol, college graduation, and saying goodbye to the best friends I have ever had. As passages go, this one's a tripleheader.   I've written elsewhere about the "Element Gang," one of the nicknames for the Group (which is how I always referred to it). This entire essay is going to be about how I evolved from that to this:    I took this selfie last Saturday, July 20, as I introduced my son Sean (who turned 21 in May) to the joy of beer. Joyful to me, that is; utterly unappealing to him. Two different beer festivals, and we couldn't find a single one he liked, though he did appreciate some cider. Now back to me. I was raised by teetotal Baptists. Don't let the Methodist trappings fool you: both my parents were born and raised American Baptist, and while my father did spend most of his career as a Methodist minister, he never gave up...

The gun lobby wants it both ways.  Whenever a child dies of an "accidental" shooting, whenever a disturbed individual takes a gun into a school to kill a dozen children, whenever anything happens that leads to an outcry against our lax regulation of firearms, the response is the same: don't blame us! We're the responsible ones, the ones who take safety classes, always lock up our guns, teach our children to respect them and never ever play with them. That would never happen in our home, my kid would never do that, it's the nut cases and the irresponsible gun owners who are the problem.  That may all be true. In fact, I'm willing to stipulate that the vast majority of gun owners are as obsessed with safety as a Tote 'n' Chip trained Scout with a pocketknife. But here's the problem: even if all the murders and suicides and accidents are exceptional, that's 11,000 exceptions a year, 3 exceptional deaths for every 100,000 people in this...