The Wisdom of Insecurity

The poet Gary Snyder once wrote to a Zen Master that he felt justified in keeping a .22 rifle by his bed in case some goon broke into his home and threatened to kill his wife and kids. His family, he argued, had a right to survival. And defense of that right justified taking life. The Zen Master wrote back: “If you must keep a loaded gun by your bed, perhaps survival is a bit overrated.”

What he meant is that life in and by itself is not the sole purpose of life; once human life is divorced from certain qualities and virtues, it becomes so inhuman that it is no longer sacred and self-sanctifying.

In our time, the Human Condition has become the Inhuman Condition.

That is why the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Washington D.C. gun ban is such a terrible ruling in favor of the growing rule of violence. The right to bear arms only makes sense in a context of preserving civil liberty and liberties.

I think of what that Zen master wrote every time headlines about the rise in gun violence in nearby Philadelphia tempts me to consider arming myself in defense of my family. I think that such an idea of security is surrender to fear and the anger this helplessness nourishes. So the right to bear—and, presumably, use—arms is not as great a measure of freedom for me as the right to privacy and free speech. It’s one of a basket of privileges that only have meaning when taken together. The right to bear arms should be inseparable from the right to vote. Liberty is defined in our Constitution as an ensemble of equal rights.

The Bill of Rights is a bouquet of liberties, an assemblage which only has fragrance and meaning in the sum of its parts, its entirety, and not any individual right divorced from the others.

Yet in a country where one in 100 men are serving in prison, the right to gun ownership has become the pivotal defining right for many Americans of their freedom. So we tolerate or deny terrible erosion of our rights to free speech and privacy then compensate with an exaggerated, animalistic emphasis on self-protection. Consequently, the right to bear arms has lost all connection with its original late 18th century meaning and context.

We have become, I fear, a nation governed by its insecurity—with no one to remind it, as that Zen master reminded poet Gary Snyder, that the right to self-defense is an expression of fear not courage when divorced from all other rights, especially those which defend a freedom based on caring and kindness and not alienation and self-centredness. The right to bear arms becomes a wrong when it is divorced from the founding aspirations of this country. What kind of freedom or security can be affirmed by gun ownership when all other sacred individual franchises are taken away? Fewer guns and more freedoms are what is needed for less troubled sleep.

Why not voting is a viable moral option

Dearest Danny,

There is a story I seem to remember about the unanimous-minus-one House vote to go to war the day after Pearl Harbor. One representative voted against going. When asked why, he said something to the effect that unanimity in politics is always dangerous and that his vote was a defense of that sentiment. I feel like my vote, or non-vote, is a defense of the neglected sanctity of the vote, of the idea and ideal that the choice we are given must be worthy of voting for in the first place. As I like to say about marriage, and its frequent patches of black ice, "If you can't love each other, love the vow."

I love the vote too much to squander it on fear or expedience. Through age, I have earned the right to consider the decision not to vote a valid exercise of that franchise. In the other, earlier phases of my life, the vote was about maintenance and preservation of a tolerable status quo. I was rendering to Caesar what was Caesar's, even in a land founded on the Declaration of Independence. But now it seems about something appropriate to a continuity of life that includes the departed as well as those who remain here. It is about honoring or dishonoring Zukofsky's "All"--All of It and All of Us.

Once poet Gary Snyder wrote to a Zen Master that he kept a .22 shotgun in his house and would feel perfectly fine about shooting a redneck intruder who intended violence to his family. To shoot, and possibly murder, was an expression of his family's right to survive. The Zen Master wrote back something to the effect that all this talk about survival to the exclusion of everything else made him wonder if survival was overrated.

In short, there are other reasons to vote or not to vote--and they are valid even if obscure or petulant or perplexing. Age and time and, hopefully, wisdom have allowed me access to a personal, possibly esoteric, but profoundly sensible residuum of motives for what I do. For me, not voting, unless absolutely convinced of the caliber of the candidate for whom I vote, is like a drunkard's first true, lasting step toward sobriety. There is no lonelier step. Please see the possibility of not voting as an act of courage which, at this late stage in the dissolution of America, could be needed and could, if examined closely, be redolent with laudatory virtue. See my not voting as offering you a steady hand to shake for the first time in decades. See it as renouncing or, better yet, letting go of the fear that has governed every vote I have ever cast for the presidency of our country.

Love,

David

P.S., I am tired of a Manichean world. I believe now that since good is gifted from God, and evil is merely 'allowed' by Him, virtue is the only legacy worth creating and capable of outlasting (as in outshining) us. The dust of the grave is heaven's refusal of evil and evidence of a rock-bottom, stubbornly compassionate forgiveness of sorts. I am, you might say, considering my vote as a citizen of heaven, as a returnee or aspirant to that Zion, whose only right of return (parodied here on earth by racist politics) is the preponderance of virtue in his life. I am voting for the weight of goodness in my/our life. I am voting for the feathery weight of virtue which is all that matters (is matter) and will endure of us to be permitted into paradise. It looks like not-voting here. But that's just another one of the dualities which are the coin of the Manichean realm.