Let's Try Again about Guns

Let’s substitute anaconda for gun. Let’s put an anaconda in your house. Put it in a cage if you like or a box. If it stays in the box, you’re fine. But it might get out. It might get our and roam around your house for a long time before you notice. You might forget about the anaconda, and it might roam around your house for years. You may never see it. It may never eat you. It may never eat any of your friends or your family or anyone you don’t want eaten. But you would be safer if the anaconda were not in your house. Now it’s possible that at some point someone will break into your house and come face to face with the anaconda. It’s possible the anaconda will chase him away or eat him. And for those few moments, we can say you were better off having the anaconda in your house. It actually made you safer to have the anaconda in your house. But for all of the rest of the time, you’re much less safe having that anaconda there. You never know when it might attack. And the thing about the intruder is that most of us will never have to face that situation. And most of the time for the few of us who may be in that situation, the anaconda will not be there. It’ll be sleeping in the basement. Or it’ll slither around and never go near the intruder. Or it’ll show up at just the right moment but eat you and leave the intruder to go about his merry way. This is a surprisingly apt analogy for a gun. A gun may for a moment or two of your long life be just the thing you want. But that moment will probably never actually happen. And in all the other moments of your long life it will constitute a real danger. The moment you buy a gun you become less safe. And as long as you have a gun the most significant thing you can do to make yourself safer is to get rid of the gun. And no matter how you twist examples or cite tightly focused examples, you can’t change that. It’s a simple, demonstrable fact.

The Bugs and Balloons of Childhood--Oh, that awful windshield

Do you remember 30 or 40 years ago, you’d go on a long drive in the summer as evening came on and by the time you go to your destination your windshield was so covered with bugs you wonder how you saw through it. And if you tried to use the wipers, they’d just smear all over the surface and make things worse. On a bad night you had to pull into a gas station just to clean them off.
And do you ever wonder why that doesn’t happen anymore?

It’s not just global warming—that’s bad enough—but also the lack of biodiversity on the planet. Monocultures. Razing forests and ploughing up plains for crops. It’s killing the insects. And that’s why there are so many birds than you remember. People born in the last twenty or thirty years think this silence is normal. It’s becoming normal, this silent spring. But the skies used to be full of birds and the air with their songs. Now you hardly see or hear them.

And the lack of food and territory is killing a lot more than bugs and birds. One million species are threatened with extinction at this very moment. Humans aren’t. Humans are thriving. We’re the ones pushing out all those other species. But in the long run—we too are a threatened species. We need the bugs as much as the birds do. And we need the birds too, for both practical and spiritual reasons.

And is our government doing anything? Yes it is. Under Trump it is making it easier and easier to build coal burning power plants and drill for more and more oil—even though if we burn the stores we already have we’ll pass the threshold for viable life on this planet. And it’s making it easier for agricultural interests to convert more and more of the land to food production. Three cheers for the economy, Watch it expand like a big red balloon—bigger and bigger, with laughter and cheers. Like the balloons of childhood.