Thoughts Of A Nice Non-Gun Owner

I’ve always stuck up for the right to possess guns, mostly because I knew a lot of people who owned them and didn’t see a problem with that. But though I supported the rights of others to do so, my personal decision was not to own or even ever fire a gun. I guess that’s what you call tolerance. I guess that’s what you call being a decent human being, accepting for the sake of others what you yourself do not really like.

That’s what it all boils down to for me, but I think a lot of gun owners have lost sight of that fact: that people who do not have guns choose not to because they don’t like the things. And if we don’t like ourselves or our close family owning guns, just think of how we feel about Ted Nugent owning an arsenal. Speaking on behalf of non-gun owners, we support the rights of others to have guns not because we think it’s good for us, but because we’re basically nice people.

I’m guessing a lot of us non-gun owners view the gun culture in the same way we do cosplayers or dungeons and dragons enthusiasts: it’s kind of silly, but as long as they’re not hurting anyone, I’m okay with it.

Unlike people who dress up as superheroes, however, gun owners ask us to tolerate a hobby that’s potentially dangerous. If someone dressing up as Batman got behind the wheel of an automobile and tried to drive while having his vision reduced because of the mask, it begins to be a problem. It is at this point I expect responsible cosplayers to speak up and denounce irresponsible behavior. When they don’t, when they double down on their right to wear masks that impede their vision while driving, I start to think they care more for their right to dress oddly than my personal safety. Am I out of line in believing so?

Everybody, especially gun owners, especially gun nuts, knows someone with a gun who makes them a little nervous. We all know there are wife-beaters and dog kickers out there with a sizable collection of guns. This may seem an acceptable notion to gun rights advocates, but please try to see how it might appear less acceptable to those for whom guns have no appeal. Imagine how you would feel hearing a woman’s screams coming from the house next door: if you knew her husband was armed to the teeth, how willing would you be to go to her rescue?

Guns make gun owners more dangerous and intimidating. The mere fact that someone owns a gun and I do not makes them more secure against me than I am from them. They have upped the game, begun an arms race I and others like me felt no need to start. It’s like, “hello, I’m your new neighbor and I have a gun. If you want to feel protected from me, you should get a gun, too.” No, I don’t want a gun. You have changed a gun-free environment (my preference) to an environment with guns (your preference). Don’t tell me you are not asking anything from me.

I have literally never been in a situation where I felt more comfortable with a gun present. I can think of plenty of times where a gun could have made things plenty worse. This is not an argument, merely an observation. I did not live an entirely innocent childhood and have witnessed and even participated in my share of violence. Never once did I think, “Oh, good, someone with a gun arrived, now the situation will be resolved.” Guns, in my opinion, only escalate violence. Even when they do not, they elevate the intimidation factor. I never want to believe that people treat me with respect only out of fear for the weapon I carry. That is a false sense of security, the idea that my implied capacity for violence will make you accept me for who I am. It suggests that the moment they have the jump on me they should take that opportunity in order to be the one with greater power. I don’t understand that sort of thinking but I realize how easy it is for odd rationality to become engrained into our thought processes.

Only one time in my life have I been happy to have the police arrive on a scene, and then I would have been just as happy if they had left their guns at the station: they weren’t required. That means that in all my travels, from Cabrini Green to the backwoods of Wisconsin and Canada, I have never ever been glad to see a gun or someone with a gun. In simply every situation in my life, the presence of a gun has either made me feel uncomfortable or on some level threatened. I’m not asking you to agree with me, but to accept this is how I feel. It is comparable in my mind with walking around with a cocked fist and saying “just in case”.

Oh, I know, it is your Second Amendment Right. The key word there is “right”. The founding fathers gave you a right, they didn’t say it was right. So many gun owners walk around with the idea that they and they alone are heroes protecting The Constitution of The United States because they own guns. But what they mainly go around protecting is their right to own guns. I’ve never seen someone with a gun step up to protect the right of someone to cast their vote at the ballot box. Maybe if gun owners cared more for the rights of others rather than for their right to carry guns into church they might garner a little more public support. I can see it now, a cop trying to arrest someone for smoking a joint and a stranger pulling out a gun and saying, “Hey, leave that poor citizen alone, he’s not hurting anyone.” If a gun owner did that, he would earn major cred from me.

The idea behind the Second Amendment was to enable the people to protect themselves against an overreaching government. I hate to tell you, gun owners, but you have fallen down on your job. If it was your role as proponents of the Second Amendment to insure the other rights guaranteed in The Constitution, you have failed miserably. And if you think your ownership of guns is going to protect us from a government that has drones, tanks, and the ability to monitor virtually everything you do and say, you have been fighting the wrong battle. Gun ownership has not protected our liberties, it is merely one of the last to be given up, the permitted illusion of freedom they allowed you until guns were no longer a threat.

Last issue I would like to bring up as a non-gun owner: the idea that if the government were to fall apart that gun owners would be there to insure law and order. I do not like this image of the future gun owners have created. It is one where people with guns rule with violence and the threat of violence. Towards this perceived vision of the future you have bent your energies, leaving the idea of a peaceful and prosperous tomorrow behind. I do not like your vision of the future, and feel a gun culture and a gun-influenced ideology is leading us towards a bleaker tomorrow.

I don’t want to take away your guns. At the same time, if I woke up tomorrow to find every gun on the planet had vanished, I would think it was a blessing and not a curse. I think that’s pretty cool of me to go so far out of my way to tolerate your love for an item I find repellent. But you can’t always demand and never give back. You don’t need to show how tough you are, you’ve got freaking guns. We get the point. You should start demonstrating you’re acting in good faith with us non-gun owners who ask only to not live with the threat of being shot. Reign in the crazies, make some workable suggestions rather than going on the attack. Set a good example in the hope that you can make us see guns in the same way you see them, and accept the fact we probably never will. And get Ted Nugent some help.

Exploiting The Last Frontier

I remember a U.S.A. that used to want to save its precious mineral wealth. And so it did, by harvesting the mineral resources of other nations. It was cynical and ugly, but it made sense. Take from those who could not protect themselves, because those people at home were growing wise to the game.

So we left our oil in the ground and called it “reserves”. If anything unanticipated happened, we would have something to fall back on. In place of our own oil, we used what was in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere. We took their oil and in exchange gave them brutal dictators who went along with our scheme just so long as they got a slice of the oil revenue. The people in those nations, the vast majority of them, were poor and oppressed, but it was “over there”, so we didn’t think much about it. And when we did express some moral qualms, those who were profiting off the situation had a pat response to our questioning. They told us the reason people were poor in those countries and we weren’t was because the U.S. was the greatest country in the world and that’s why we weren’t suffering. Don’t want to suffer like those in country A? Then support freedom. Support the government and the military that defends our freedom to be fat and happy and richer than those poor people over there who are stupid and don’t love freedom the way we do.

So we did. We paid dearly in taxes to have the world’s largest military in order to suppress those people who thought stupid thoughts and tried to support governments that weren’t approved by Washington, which of course was only interested in freedom, which is best expressed through the free market. Because when they resisted our desire to take their natural resources instead of relying on our own, they were trampling on the American way. They were spitting on OUR FLAG, the very symbol of freedom that was the only way to bring happiness and prosperity to their pathetic country. Why, if they only lived according to our dictates, given all the natural resources they possessed, they too would be rich. But those stupid foreigners just didn’t get it. They insisted on opposing us, and the only thing we could do was to bomb them into submission. Maybe that would teach them to love freedom.

But in the last decade or so, something has changed. No, we haven’t stopped bombing those foolish resource rich nations, we’ve been doing plenty of that. What has changed was a sudden realization on the part of our leaders that we suddenly have to become independent of the resources of other nations because they have become too powerful and are a threat to us. So we have begun to tap into those resources we have here, hidden beneath our forests and lakes and oceans. From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream Waters, from the purple mountains majesty to the fruited plains, they were all opened up to the mighty corporations that made our nation so great.

And this exploitation of our natural resources and the irreparable damage that goes along with it is sold to us as rejuvenating our country, of making America great again. But what it is doing is taking us back to the time when our rivers were so polluted they caught fire, the days before we stood up against the powerful monied interests and said “no more”. It is taking us back to a time our ancestors found intolerable, a time when people joined together to demand limits to the very rich who used our nation’s resources as their personal playthings. In short, those wealth extractors are now doing to the United States what they have so long done to other countries.

The oligarchs have come home to roost. No longer content to strip every other nation bare of their resources, they now are doing at home what was once unthinkable.

Perhaps, just perhaps, those who profited from the misery of those in foreign nations were never really concerned with American interests at all. Perhaps it was the profit they were interested in all along, and they merely used patriotism as an excuse, used American exceptionalism as an excuse, used the stupidity and evil of foreigners as an excuse to abuse and exploit them. And perhaps they have grown so rich and powerful from their exploitation of others lands that they now feel confident and arrogant enough to set aside the mask they once wore in our presence. Perhaps they now just don’t care to pretend they’re one of us. Perhaps now they are willing to exploit their own nation for all it is worth.

You see, those cynical bastards never really cared about America at all, they just wanted to get as rich as they possibly could. America means nothing to them, and they will tear it down for quick profit, just as they have done everywhere else on the planet. After all, how can you care for a country when you are actively destroying the planet on which that country is located? Greed has no loyalty, no morality, no patriotism. The only thing greed has is a good public relations team.

Are Guns More Important Than What They Are Supposed To Protect?

A lot of people vote on the issue of gun rights because they want to make sure they can protect their freedom from an out-of-control government. I can understand that. I don’t agree with it, but I respect it. While I once thought the same way, I have grown to appreciate the path that people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi have taken in order to combat oppressive governments. I think ultimately the only kind of revolution that will bring about positive and enduring change is a peaceful one. Violence, as it is said somewhere, only leads to more violence. Violence used by one side justifies the violence used by another. When there is justice, no violence will be necessary, and when there is violence, there will be no justice.

But regardless of the approach, I appreciate those who wish to protect freedom from an overreaching government. And if having a gun makes you feel more secure in your protection of freedom, I can live with that. Most gun owners I know are responsible and peaceful people who have never given me a reason to fear for my safety. Most.

But like anything else, the support for guns can be taken too far. And just like anything else, the tool can sometimes take precedence over its intended use. As J.R.R. Tolkien once said, “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” Like any unhealthy fascination, it is quite possible to come to love the weapon for its own sake, to admire the skill that went into its creation, the genius of its design, or its ability to do its job. This can and does happen, and I’m sure we’ve all seen examples of it. Perhaps if we are to be honest with ourselves, we have witnessed it in ourselves.

Like any other aspect of our lives, we have to be careful that we have a healthy relationship with guns. If guns are a way to protect freedom, we must never allow the two—the physical weapon and the abstract idea—to stray too far from each other. When the concrete form takes precedence over the ideas it is supposed to represent or protect, it leads to idolatry and fetishism.

Even many thousands of years ago, people were aware of how we can lose sight of the abstract and the spiritual and get distracted by the concrete. The Bible warns repeatedly of the dangers of idolatry, the First Commandment being a warning against having false gods. And yet the desire to worship statues is apparently a strong attraction. Moses discovered this when bringing the Ten Commandments to his people, only to find them worshiping a golden calf. It’s hard for us humans living a physical existence to remember the ideas that help us live more fully in such a world. But they do. The ability to think abstractly is exactly what has made us the ruling species on this planet. Nevertheless, it is easy to backslide into forgetting complex ideas. A gun in the hand can seem more understandable than the nuanced concept of freedom.

Losing oneself in a symbol rather than what it represents is not merely a religious condition. Too often we see people elevating a flag over the ideas that flag is supposed to represent. If the flag represents freedom, then we should never try to restrict people’s freedom in order to show respect for the flag. And yet we see people losing their heads about it all the time. We forget that the flag is but a symbol for deeper, more abstract yet important values. Without such values, the flag is just a piece of cloth.

So too do we often times lose the idea of freedom in our fight to protect gun ownership. For example, if you support a powerful lobbying group that influences government and reduces democratic principles, you are undercutting the idea of freedom of all to act equally in a democratic society. The NRA is one of those special interest groups promoting an agenda through money and influence that is undermining our democracy.

If you vote principally on a candidate’s or a party’s position on guns, you may be undercutting the very freedoms you hope to protect with those guns. If not your own, then the freedom of others. And they matter, because when government comes for the rights of others, it is only a matter of time before it comes for yours, too. If you support politicians who want to send people to prison for ingesting whatever chemicals they choose, you are not only infringing upon their freedom to do what they want, you are physically incarcerating them as well. If you are a gun rights advocate who enjoys the occasional use of marijuana, you are restricting your own freedom in order to protect your right to protect your freedom.

When you vote solely on the issue of guns and do not think about the other issues, you can end up voting against the very notion of democracy. In voting for guns, you have voted for gerrymandering, which has limited competition for political offices. In voting for guns, you have voted for increasing the barriers people face to vote. In voting for guns, you have increased the power of special interest groups (such as the NRA) to influence elections. If in voting for guns you also voted for an increasingly militaristic police state, then you have undercut the very ability of your limited arsenal to fight against a state that has drones and armored vehicles at its command.

If you have placed the gun above the very things it is supposed to protect, you have lost your way. More than that, you have been distracted. Don’t feel bad, it is a classic ploy used by those who want to rule you. Rest assured that all of us are being distracted to a degree: the propaganda machine is very well funded and practiced in the art of manipulation. Nevertheless, it is upon you to look beyond the gun to the issues you wish to defend. Because if you are not defending democracy and freedom with your right to own a gun, why should anybody care about your right to own one?

You Are The Role Model

Agents of change must hold themselves to a higher standard if they wish to have their principles taken seriously. Imagine one of the great speeches by Martin Luther King Junior laced with obscenities. Or using the word “bigly”. Imagine if he decided to wear clothing that called attention to himself rather than his message. Would he have been taken as seriously as he had been? This is not to suggest that King as an individual did not have the right to talk and dress and carry on however he pleased, it is to say that he put aside any personal considerations in order to best represent the movement that was so important to him.

Even Malcom X, despite his often bold and angry words, took the time to annunciate them clearly. And while they did nothing to hide the earnestness of his resistance to the status quo, he always made sure to wear a jacket and tie. It wasn’t so much to show respect for the system that oppressed him and his people, it was to show respect for himself and his message.

That is sort of sacrifices one must make when trying to make the world a better place, and if you do not seek to make an example of yourself, people will find ways to become distracted from your message. If you want your message to be taken seriously, you need to take it seriously yourself, and to do that you must place it above personal desires and preferences. If the message means that much to you, you must show you are willing to sacrifice for it, otherwise don’t expect to convert those who are resistant.

But this goes way beyond dress. Clothes are merely a superficiality few get hung-up on, especially these days. I remember bumper stickers on SUVs saying I Support The Troops during the Iraq War. It always rung hollow to me, to think that you would send people to die in foreign lands rather than reduce your oil consumption. Supporting someone goes way beyond simply saying “atta boy, you go get ‘em”. Supporting someone means helping someone, and that goes beyond a bumper sticker.

Mahatma Gandhi knew how to make people take his message seriously. He went to extreme lengths to show that his cause was not self-serving, far more than almost any of us are willing to go. How are we supposed to take seriously the commitment of our leaders when they are elected to serve, and then retire from office eight or twelve years later as millionaires, with connections that will lead to the accumulation of many more millions in the years to come?

More importantly, how will we convince our enemies that we are sincere and dedicated? They will not see our cause, they will only see our hypocrisy. They will use the millionaires and the hypocrites as poster boys in their campaign to denounce us. And it will be an effective tool.

No, if we want to convert the hard-hearted, we must demonstrate a commitment that cannot be denied. If they find hypocrisy in us, it must be obvious to anyone they speak to that they have to use a fine-toothed comb to uncover it. They must to be made to look like hypocrites themselves in finding the mote in our eye when there is a beam in theirs.

I do not ask of you to be martyrs or hermits. The task we face is daunting, but it is too much to believe we can all be like Gandhi. But we must all find ways to show our commitment to the cause. When we walk down the street, people should see us and have no cause to doubt our commitment to peace and the environment. When we are at the grocery store, our neighbors must see us with our reusable bags, buying sustainable food. They must see non-violence in our behavior towards others if we want the world to value and respect the idea of peace. We must find ways to demonstrate to others that another way is possible!

We must find ways, individually, to set the bar higher. Individual actions alone will not save us, but they will demonstrate to others our convictions. It is what will rally people to our cause and bring about the necessary larger changes. If we cannot demonstrate our own willingness to live as we preach, it will merely appear that we are advocating for laws that humans are not designed to live by.

Our cause is twofold: to prevent nuclear war and reverse the environmental degradation that threatens to end life on Earth. Both must be taken equally serious. And both have at its core the same underlying answer: non-violence. Non-violence is the commitment to finding alternatives to war. It is not a meek and fragile thing but a force of great power, but it requires its adherents to be every bit as brave and sacrificing as those who advance their agenda by killing others. Non-violence is required in order to save our planet as well, because we need to apply the same principle of ahimsa (non-injury) to our planet and other living creatures as we do to ourselves and fellow human beings.

It is easy to get lost in the fear of what is required of us, easy to get lost in self-recriminations when we feel we are never doing enough or are somehow failing. We don’t have time for that. Recognize you will never be perfect, recognize that you too have a right to be happy. Indeed, you will never win converts to your cause if you cannot demonstrate your own capacity for joy, because nobody wants to live a life that will make them miserable. Find your own joy and you will realize how easy it is to get rid of those things in your life you relied on to get you through the day. Yes, you can be happy and revolutionary. I do not think there’s another way.

Our cause is larger than any that came before. King sought to bring non-violent change to the United States, Gandhi, to India. It is our task to teach non-violence to the world. It is our unenviable but necessary task to stand on the shoulders of such giants in order to save a world that is currently intent on destroying itself through violence and selfishness. We must teach it another path, and we must do so not only with our words and arguments but with our actions.

We can no longer call those who make no personal sacrifice for the cause “leaders”. They are poison to the movement. We must dismiss them from our presence and build a community that reflects the proper respect for the cause. We, each of us, must show the commitment, must be the example, to each other and to those we wish to convert. From that community will naturally arise those whom we will be proud to call leaders.

The America Of My Youth

I remember a time when my clothing was made by union labor in the United States. Those who made our clothes had well-paying jobs that could support a family with a single income. And yet the Levi’s I wore were always affordable, so that a young and irresponsible punter such as I was had more pairs of jeans in his closet than he really needed. I remember commercials for the Garment Worker’s Union on which it was sung “Look for the union label”.

 Hanes came with an inspector’s tag in each package, showing there was a real person at the other end. 

At some point our country was capable of paying fair wages to the people who made our clothes, whereas now we are told we need children working long hours in sweatshops to make them. And we’ve come to be okay with the fact that the clothes on our backs cost somebody their childhood.

I remember butchers being paid very well for the hard work they did. Hell, my grandfather was able to raise thirteen children as a butcher who later owned a small butcher/grocery store. 

There are no small, locally owned grocery stores any more, and they’ve streamlined the butchering process so that now migrant workers are paid a pittance to work at extremely repetitive tasks that wear out their bodies at far too young an age. But it’s just the way the economy works, I guess we’re not smart enough to realize how that makes things better for everyone in the big scheme of things. Thank God we have people like Thomas Friedman to make it all seem rational.

I remember being told I needed glasses when I was young. My mom took me to the local optometrist who had a little shop of his own. He wasn’t working for some larger corporation that syphoned off the profits and sent them to people who knew nothing about my eyes or cared about me. Same with my doctor and dentist, they didn’t have to work for someone else, didn’t have to share the fruits of their labor with people they didn’t know. Nowadays if you’re an optometrist or pharmacist or beautician, chances are you’re working for Walmart or some other corporation that sets wages for you and dictates how you will serve your clients. When anybody bothers to point such a change out, it is called progress. Unavoidable, don’t you know.

My sister was a cashier. Not the looked-down upon cashier of today, not one of those who should be replaced by a machine and should show more grit in order to advance herself. No, she was a cashier who worked hard at her job and was good at it, and was rewarded adequately for it. I remember her finally getting a full-time position and knew from the money she earned she would be able to provide for herself and her young son. It too was a union position.

The America of my youth was a forward-looking one: we were building agencies to ensure the environment was taken care of. We appreciated the arts and gladly funded them We offered professors permanent positions. We knew we had to start building more fuel-efficient vehicles. We were intent on joining the rest of the world and converting to the metric system, a system so very superior to our own.

The U.S. of my youth was one where we spoke to people in other nations rather than threatened them. The Vietnam War had just ended, and Richard Nixon had paid a visit to China, of all places, proving we could work diplomatically with just about anybody. We debated and we argued with nations we disagreed with, but we did so to a great extent within the confines of the United Nations, a democratic institution based upon the principle of peace. Today we act through the military alliance known as NATO, where we do not negotiate but threaten.

We had fewer news channels in the 70’s, but they managed to provide us with a much greater degree of perspectives. I don’t recall the angry talking heads that are all about us now. Perhaps that was because for every point there was a counterpoint, so that everyone had to be respectful lest they get back what they dished out. Audiences today can find their own niche, where they never have to listen to opposing positions.

Those televisions on which we watched fewer channels with greater diversity were most likely made in the United States and those workers were adequately compensated for their labor. Many of the components to today’s TVs are made in Malaysia, Thailand, or China. In my youth, I don’t recall any stories of workers committing suicide or companies installing netting to keep workers from jumping to their deaths, but perhaps time has dimmed my recollection of them. As if time could ever erase such memories.

We were able to pay for people to answer phones and provide us the answers we needed, rather than being forced to endure endless hours lost in answering systems that never resolve our issues until we are finally able to speak to a real live person. We paid people to pump our gasoline. A small thing, I know, but a nice touch. You left the gas station with a clean windshield and the knowledge you had the proper amount of oil. It wasn't yet unheard of for a doctor to make a house call or a milkman to deliver you eggs. And job security. God, we had job security, with a pension awaiting us at the end of our work-life.

What happened to us as a culture? How did we get from there to here? And how dare we continue to call such a movement “progress”? How long do we continue to accept what today’s society provides for us at the expense of those who toil and are not rewarded? Do not the very clothes you wear itch and chafe at the thought of the suffering and wasted lives of those who created them for you? Do you not long to see Walter Cronkite’s image when you turn on the television, or Noam Chomsky when you turn to PBS? When you go to your optometrist, wouldn’t you like to know he was looking out for you and not his employers? Don’t you wish the people who are handsomely, no, obscenely, rewarded for overseeing business and politics started making life better for the average man rather than worse? Damn, it’s time to make some changes in our nation. And we’re going to have to do it on our own, because the people who took us from where we were then to where we are now are not interested in you. It’s time we became active in those democratic institutions such as labor unions, politics at the grassroots level, and international outreach. Because those who have been ruling us from the top down have failed us, failed us miserably. And it’s just going to get worse.

Don't Give Sociopaths Your Trust

Imagine you were responsible for the death of an innocent or even not so innocent person. Imagine if you allowed a friend to drive home from your house drunk only to hear he wrapped his car around a tree. Such an incident would change you, so that you would likely do whatever you could to make sure you were never again complicit in such a situation.

If you hit someone with your car while texting and driving, would you not be altered by it, not feel immense personal guilt? If you did the wiring in a building and the house burned down because of it, wouldn’t you make sure you either damn well learned to install wiring correctly or else never attempt such a thing again?

The stories are many. A boxer kills another man in the ring in fair combat and can no longer pursue boxing as a career. A child dying of SIDS while in the care of a babysitter causes a young girl years of shame and guilt she must work through. A depressed family member who commits suicide can lead to unending amounts of self-recrimination for the survivors, who ask themselves what they might have done to prevent it.

We humans are often prone to taking the blame for situations beyond our control. But it is a a human response, a necessary part of coming to terms with ourselves as active agents and responsible human beings. We must grow through this sort of questioning and self-examination in order to provide meaning to our lives and insure we are the people we believe ourselves to be and want to be. We, most of us, want to be good human beings. We want to believe we have a positive effect on others and are willing to go to some lengths to insure we do no harm to others.

But not all of us. Some people are capable of the most despicable of behavior and walk right through it as though they had no hand in the matter. These people are called sociopaths. They are incapable of reflecting upon their actions, are utterly uninterested in assuming responsibility for anything they’ve done. They are built in such a way that they can only see the rewards and not the punishments. They are defective people and it is best that we weed them out from positions of power.

Unfortunately, positions of power are the exact thing sociopaths are likely to seek out. It is normal for the average person to be wary of wielding too much power, to be humble enough to doubt their abilities and viewpoints enough that they’re not eager to thrust them down other people’s throats. But sociopaths aren’t concerned with personal responsibility, all they see are the rewards available if they push themselves forward in their quest for power, wealth and fame.

Thus do we often end up with sociopaths ruling over us, especially when we neglect our responsibility in the process. Every time we get lazy, every time we achieve a degree of comfort and self-satisfaction, we open the door for sociopaths to assume positions of power they have no right to.

Which brings us to Adam Schiff. Adam Schiff pushed for and voted for the Iraq War. It cost him nothing to do so. And when the Iraq War’s popularity receded, when the reasons behind it proved false and the notion of a quick in and out operation revealed itself to be delusional, he afterwards stated, "Unfortunately, our intelligence was dead wrong on that, on Saddam at that time.”

And that’s it. No sense of responsibility for his actions. No sense that he need atone, apologize, reflect, confess. As I’ve already stated, the average person would struggle with the guilt and regret resulting in actions that may or may not have resulted in tragedy or death of a single person. Even if no one were to hold you responsible, it is hard to get rid of the notion you could have prevented death and disaster had you done things differently. At the bare minimum, it would change how you behaved going forward. Hell, even if you knew someone who had been permitted to drive drunk, even if you weren’t there at the time, you would be a little more conscious in trying to prevent a tragedy occurring again.

Not so a sociopath. A sociopath is intent in furthering his own interests, not helping others. Thus it is that Adam Schiff is capable of moving on with his life after voting for a war that killed a third of a million people and is still affecting millions of people’s lives for the foreseeable future. Rather than accept any blame, he blames our intelligence for being dead wrong.

What kind of response would I expect from someone who voted for a war on false information, information that many knew were false and refused to accept? What could such a person do to demonstrate he accepted the full moral weight of his decisions? Hara kiri would not be out of the question. Though I would not ask it of anyone, suicide would demonstrate they felt somewhat the depths of responsibility for the lives of others they could never sufficiently repair.

Leaving office in a cloud of shame would be mandatory. To forever have your name synonymous with disgrace and selfishness is a no-brainer. If you had any respect for the human race, you would need to place yourself at the very bottom of the species.

I can’t imagine how I would ever deal with that amount of blood on my hands. Perhaps if I gave up all worldly possessions, severed ties with all those I loved in order to spare them some of the reflected disgrace of being associated with me. Perhaps a lifetime spent in jail for my crimes, or in a more enlightened society, a lifetime of service to others in a leper colony or someplace where human suffering is greatest. To forever discard any garment that speaks of wealth or comfort or authority, to dress as the humblest of all humanity and eat of the simplest of foods. If I had so much blood on my hands, I could only hope that such complete abnegation of self might in some small way cleanse me.

I pray to God I never have to live with such a thing on my conscience, pray to God I never have to go before him with such crimes tied to me. Which is why I try to live a simple life, try never to assume more power than my conscience can deal with should I fail.

Meanwhile Schiff has learned nothing. He has apologized for nothing, and now lauds the very intelligence agencies he seemed to blame for his vote for the Iraq War. Again he pushes for antagonism with a foreign nation, convinced in his position in a way no rational person could be. Certain to the point of accusing Tucker Carlson of carrying water for the Kremlin. Tucker Carlson.

What else can you call a man like that but a sociopath?