Running with Guns

Love rescue me 

Come forth and speak to me 

Raise me up and don't let me fall 

No man is my enemy 

My own hands imprison me 

Love rescue me

— Love Rescue Me, U2

"To eradicate God was not to make men equal — this is what many of us always pretend or are deluded by. The wisdom of those who have come to the conclusion that there is nothing but themselves have in the end usually little generosity to spare the masses. Even in the tavern talk of certain friends of the seventies, the new world, where we were all equal, where women were as capable as men of denouncing humanity (which was considered grave intelligence), there was always the idea that some would have to be eradicated, or left on the sidelines, or at least see our point of view. The secret we failed to grasp was that the only way we seemed able to have someone equal to ourselves was to diminish anyone who disagreed with us."

— David Adams Richards

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Dear Kate,

Another shooting.

I am not necessarily referring to the big one in the news.  We too have our little guns in our big minds, loaded and ready.  Our aim is true too, truer than anything, through the wonderful prism of cross-hairs we doodled.

We don't believe it anymore, that our trouble chief and derivative, first and last, is that we fell out with God: a fight, more than a slight disagreement on some finer nuance skin deep, the Fall.

I suspect we had never believed that.

Of course we blame our parents (who else?)  Their gospel sounded like poison, poisoned themselves and everything else, or at least was packaged badly, rendered the whole human resurrection business a slow death with no present redeeming relevance.

We can do it better.  After all, we now know so much more about ourselves, history recorded, genome mapped, impulses and actions explained, thanks to science and all her distant cousins, bastard kids.  We know we are in trouble.  "Doctor who treated victims at parade shooting says the dead had 'wartime injuries.'"  But what war?  Who's fighting whom?  Over what?  To what end?  Let the analyses begin and the overeducated ones compare mythologies.  "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief.

Ask the wise ones among us why we are in trouble.  We are running away from something they will say, from ourselves (most romantic), from each other (most affirming), from Nothing (most practical).  What we suspect is true, that the Bible should stop at its second chapter: we are running away from Nothing, and that's why we don't need each other, and for that we can never "find ourselves."

Well, maybe there's a God above

As for me all I've ever learned from love

Is how to shoot somebody who outdrew you

Yours, Alex