The Armed Righteous

I am in awe
of the deadeye imperturbability
of the armed righteous,
who look upon the world’s suffering
and see targets. . . .
    This is a fragment of a poem (“Vigil”) I wrote 25 years ago, in response to the “vigil” some gun-rights advocates held in front of a school in Columbine, Colorado, while Bill and Hillary Clinton were in the gym meeting with students, in the wake of the terrible shooting at the local high school. The men held up bright yellow signs reading “Gun Control Kills Kids”  and “We Will Never Give Up Our Guns.”
   Yeah, my response was bitter. The vigil was really about . . . what? Even if the participants were truly concerned about their safety – and furious that bureaucratic theft of their sacred right to live with a sense of power was looming – I couldn’t tolerate their collective refusal to acknowledge what had just happened. Oh, every classroom in the country just needs a few armed good guys in them, ready to start firing when a lunatic announces his intent to lessen the student population? Can’t we open our souls and truly try to figure out how to create a sane future? I’ve been asking this question for decades.
   And then something happened this morning that expanded the scope of this question exponentially. I came across a piece of news: “Former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene says that the Trump Administration is considering possible nuclear actions during strategy meetings on the Iran conflict.”
   Oh my God. Only a good nation with a nuke can stop a bad nation with a nuke.
   Let me note that the Trump White House has totally denied Greene’s accusation, nor is she someone I’d particularly trust about anything, but still: Trump is losing the war he started for no reason and his approval rating is in the sewer. And he’s the guy who said, four months ago, that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Using a tactical nuke (or two or three) on Iran certainly sounds like something Trump could do if he wanted, perhaps impulsively.
   As Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said: “This war is already eviscerating any notion of America’s moral standing in the world and, like the Israeli genocide in Gaza, is systematically disintegrating the international norms over the use of state violence that we take for granted. Already, we have the US president constantly threatening to destroy Iranian civilization and boasting about conducting war crimes like attacking civilian bridges and water plants and civilian infrastructure. His Pentagon is stonewalling the American people regarding its use of AI to conduct strikes like the double-tap bombings of the Minab girls’ school.”
   Having a gun creates a sense of power. So does having control (or imagined control) over a nation’s military, including its nuclear weapons. This understanding of the nature of power always requires an enemy – or at least the possibility of an enemy that could show up out of the blue. And this could, so easily, turn into a mindset set in stone: the way the world works. That’s why “gun control kills kids.” The enemy could show up and kill your son or daughter if you aren’t prepared to defend them. And a weak, wimpy military could let the enemy conquer – and likely destroy – the country.
   I’m not saying terrible things aren’t possible. I’m saying, or trying to say, that we have to address such possibilities together – and that power is collective. When it’s not . . .
“Vigil” continues:
They stand in potent prayer
with hands clasped
and arms extended,
judgment on a hairtrigger,
God in the recoil.
I believe them.
I believe they believe
in their own innocence
and the innocence of guns,
to clean, to cradle,
to cherish and employ.
What you have to understand
is the good they do,
picking off home invaders,
the furtive dark-clad,
the malevolent, the incomprehensible,
the hungry.
More innocent still
is the worship of guns
and the worship of the gods
they allow us to become.