My neighbour has guns. Lots of guns. Lots and lots and lots of guns. He has more guns than anybody. He’s so obsessed with them that some of his children don’t have shoes and can’t visit a pediatrician when they’re sick, but that doesn’t stop him from buying more and more and more guns.
Having the most guns isn’t enough. He doesn’t want anybody else to have them. Oh, he has a few friends that he allows some guns as long as they’re always on his side, whatever that means, but nobody else can have any. He says guns are dangerous in the wrong hands.
A few years ago, he bullied his buddies into helping him raid a house down the block. He said they had guns. Turns out they didn’t, but now he’s got their house and isn’t sure what to do with it.
Some of the other neighbours want guns now. Some of them want guns so they can acquire more houses, like he did, and some feel they need guns to protect themselves from the other people with guns.
My neighbour sits in the coffee shop and has earnest conversations with his fellow gun owners about how they can keep everybody else from acquiring these dangerous weapons. They have decided to blow up some houses to prevent this, since the raiding thing didn’t work out very well last time.
In none of these discussions have I heard anyone question why it’s a good thing for him to have guns and a bad thing for anyone else. His entitlement is an unspoken assumption: he has more guns because he has more guns because he has more guns.
Lots of the neighbours would like to move, but there’s no place to go.
of America’s position on who can have weapons and who can’t is stunning. And yet, it’s the kind of mainstream/bipartisan-consensus hypocrisy that many people cannot even see.
At one time, the military power imbalance between us and anyone else could apparently be justified by saying we’re the good guys and they are evil. But that seems less persuasive when such morally-bankrupt liars like Bush and Cheney and Rice are saying it. Hopefully that rhetoric will not regain efficacy after the current regime is deposed.
What are/should be the progressive positions on military power disparity and who gets what weapons?
I think we progessives (or whatever we are) should have long-term idealist positions and short- and medium-term pragmatist positions, and am interested in what people thinks about this.
Thanks for the post susan!
(it’s the kind of mainstream/bipartisan-consensus hypocrisy that many people cannot even see)
Now that really says it. It blows my mind that more cannot see not only the hypocisy, but the sheer and massive arrogance of such a stand. I don’t remember there ever being any world election that resulted in the US being elected Supreme Ruler of the Planet, but that seems to be the stance taken.
It was making me NUTS that news reports discuss sacntions against Iran, and nobody every queations the USA’s right to decide who ac have nukes.
Pissier yet is that Brazil has recently achieved a similar level of uranium enrichment as Iran has, yet no one says boo, let alone point out the inherent hypocrisy.
I’ve been disappointed that the blogs haven’t found much energy to oppose Bush’s proposed nuclear deal with India, which, btw, it’s still not too late to sign the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) petition.
Thank you, nine. That was exactly what I was thinking.
Concise and to the point.
Your last line pulls it all together.
Thank you. For most small nations, an interstellar move is impractical.
Thank you for the gift of the cardiovascular benefit science tells us we receive with every hearty belly laugh, at no extra charge!
And thank you for the wonderful article.
Maybe it will make some of this terrible neighbor’s older children think, while they still have the strength to do more than scavenge for food, minds capable of more than fear.
He does not treat his own children much better than he does other peoples’, if at all.
That is great. Please report to the Dept. of Homeland Security at 1500 for re-education. Thank you.
I have my meds, and am scheduled for a lobotomy if the electro-shock doesn’t work.
I’m forwarding this to my wife. Not a blogger, but I explained it to her and she was interested. Well done.
Excellent piece, Susan. Self serving, greedy, bullyish people like this guy can ruin a good neighborhood in no time flat, unless the rest of the neighbors get a bellyful, and run him out on a rail. (I’m heating up the tar and gathering the feathers as we speak.)
Thank you, scribe. I know the frog pond doesn’t need simplistic analogies to discuss US foreign policy, but I was furious at the national invisibility of the elephant (and it IS an elephant) in the room when the subject of nuclear proliferation comes up.
I think I disagree about the alue of simplistic analogies. We so often bury ourselves under moutains of words, words, and more words. Word fatigue can set in, at least it does for me.
And I know for a fact that many ordinary folks who are busily trying to survive out there do not have time, or do not choose, to read mountains of words about anything.
A nice, simple, clear analogy like this, can be the best, if not only way..to reach a whole lot of people. And you are very good at it!
That is heady praise indeed. I blush at such kind words from people I admire so much. Booman Tribune is home to some of the most humane, thoughtful, intelligent, and articulate writers it has been my privileged to read.
And that is why Jesus told parables, and why people like me tell stories. Sometimes they get the truth across in a way that a simple statement of facts can’t.
This was an excellent story, by the way.
Thanks for the post. Needless to say that I won’t be stopping by when I’m in the area.
Oh, haven’t you received your new body armour yet ?
this morning and a hotels.com came on declaring low prices for hotel rooms in many large major cities. My first thought was one of that lovely pessimism that seems to come off of me in fumes for the past five years ‘Wow, the dollar is going into the dumpster and still nobody wants to visit the assholes huh?’
Susanw,
Didn’t you know your neighbor is anointed by God? He’s the smartest. He’s the best. He is blessed. Of course, he can have all the guns, and all the money, and all the oil. Hell, (oops) he can probably have all the chocolate if he wants that, too.
He’s exceptional.
Not only do his kids not have shoes, but he’s taken out a second mortgage with the Bank of China to keep buying guns.
Some of his kids are asking each other whether they should run away from home. One says yes, the other says to knock him out, and tie him up while unconscious or asleep. The first is afraid he’d wake up and shoot them too.
Actually, your bad neighbour’s story reminds me of a true case a lot like it. You may have heard of it. In 1981, Ken McElroy was the town bully in Skidmore, MO. He terrorized the entire town, including law enforcement. Eventually, a group of local residents banned together and he was killed on main street in broad daylight. No witnesses were ever found, although 45 people were on the street at the time. And no one was ever tried for the crime, to this day.
You can read the detailed story here, or the Wikipedia version here. Books have been written about it, and the case has been made into a TV movie and a theatrical film.
So your neighbour can’t say he wasn’t warned about the price of bad behaviour, although his dying words may well be “Why do they hate me for my freedoms?”
I had forgotten about Skidmore.
And yes, the fact that we do all this on borrowed money makes it even worse.
Some of the kids have come to the conclusion that running away from home won’t help. Oh sure, they might be safe for the moment because they’re staying with a neighbor Mr. Gun Nut says he likes — today — but even after they run away from home, Mr. Gun Nut still has the guns, and his psychosis still affects everyone in the neighborhood.
I would not be offended, but flattered if one of the many fine storytellers here reworked this for another venue including the jibe about putting more guns on his Visa (or MasterCard….. I LOVE the resonance of the credit card names in this context) complaints that the neighbours “hate freedom”, and the other clever comments so many of you have contributed.
This story is pretty good the way you wrote it, but revising it after the comments are in sounds like a great idea.
Actually I thought this would be a great letter to the editor if all the really good stuff could be boiled down to the 300 words or so LTEs usually get have to be limited to.
I’m tempted. The idea that he charges guns on his MASTERcard is so appealing to my admittedly dark sense of humour that I long to work it in. The complaint that others hate his freedom could be a response to any suggestion that maybe everybody ought to give up guns altogether.
I’ll try to pare, parse and enrich, then send it to the paper. They print about 10% of what I send, most of which are shrill, bitter, feminist screeds (true, but shrill and bitter all the same), so there’s a good chance if I prune judiciously.
all at the same time. It’s sort of sad that I feel like I have had neighbors in the flesh that fit your description above pretty well. Now I put a really good suit on them and they have become my president.
Well, the important thing is, lots of good old boys would love to have a beer with him.
pals and friends who fall all over themselves to hang with him all day and would never dream of cluttering up his mind with any big words or cause any furrowing above his brow or God Forbid perspiration!
…”He does seem to have a lot of really good pals and friends who fall all over themselves to hang with him all day”
Butt sniffing brown nosed suckups and opportunistic puppetmasters, the whole lot.
Your neighbour is crazy. And his friends are sycophants at best. A real friend would sit him down for counselling. Or have an intervention. Or something.
Thanks for sharing, though. There are all kinds of people in this world, and, inevitably, some are crazy like your neighbour. We all have to learn to live with him. And figure out how to move ahead in this thing called life, without being dragged into the craziness. I know we’re smart enough to figure that out. After all, we’ve made it this far.
I believe some responsible advice was offered, but the counselor was sent off on Freedom leave without so much as a Freedom kiss, with “Surrender Monkey” (pardon my Freedom) ringing in his ears. Rumour has it that Freedom fries, Freedom bread, Freedom beans, Freedom horns, Freedom dressing, Freedom windows, and, worst of all, Freedom letters, have been banned.
This was just wonderful – clear and simple. Thanks.
I remember when I was in my late teens and early twenties I ws reading a lot of science fiction by many of the great sci-fi writers, (Theodore Sturgeon, Phillip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Roger Zelazny, etc.).
And I remember having a realization about why these writers were so skillful in illuminating simple, timeless and important truths in ways that scholars and philosophers couldn’t.
It became clear to me that these writers had learned that if you take the attributes and foibles of man and write about them as they play out in a fictional place in a fictional future, people will be far more inclined, to recognize truths represented this way than if they are challenged to confront those very same truths in the here and now of their own actual lives. By making the story about someone else, (an alien in an alien civilization, for instance), readers can absorb the dynamics without feeling the need to get defensive.
Your story about the “neighbor” illuminates this concept quite effectively.