Modest Proposal: Embrace the “Evil”
I was raised in a town made famous for fighting Nazis in court, so we wouldn’t have to fight them in the streets. I went away to college, returned to a cable TV internship and then moved away to a small suburban town where the residents were supposed to bow down to every idea and opinion of the guys who inherited third generation family businesses that they hadn’t yet run into the ground or sold out. It was there that I started my first newspaper, which ultimately suffered from the common lack of advertising support from local business. But we scored the biggest business in town, the local hospital, with a regular four-color full page ad and managed well enough outside the town’s borders to meet about four years of deadlines and help sustain an informed electorate while maintaining a solid commitment to strict journalistic ethics.
A spring thaw sometime between projects led to a protest vigil in the gravel parking lot outside a gun show at the County Fairgrounds near the end of a nice bike ride on the local mixed-use trail system. Gunhuggers outnumbered the vigilant but that figured, considering it was very much their turf. They reminded me of another religious cult I used to encounter back on the old college campus, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. I am not a spiritual person but the Hare Krishnas were at least into some kind of enlightenment, such as it is. They were actually kind of fun to hang out with, in limited doses, eating homemade vegetarian food in their trailer and chanting. But this cult of armed religious gunhuggers is driven by a weird persistent demand that everyone around them be consumed with a pseudo-patriotic terror of their fellow Americans in order to feel good about their dangerous fetish. All the socio-political divisions in our valuable political discourse — guns, abortion, race, immigration, anthropogenic climate change — reveal one consistent overarching grievance. The thing that the Right Wingnuts are really frustrated about is that no one is as afraid of them as they are of everything else.
So, eventually, I’ve come around to the narrative that it’s not the guns after all. Obviously, there is something uniquely evil about America and being American. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. And then, as the chilly air thawed all around the placards, banners, hats and bumper stickers, it hit me…