It’s NOT All About Me

Ruby red osiers (red-twig dogwood)

It’s hard to remember that only 10 weeks ago, the American economy was quite good, our foreign relations were on the whole positive, we were on the way to dealing with climate change with subsidies for wind and solar energy, and we still lived in a democracy.

So began Robert Reich’s April 7, 2025, Substack post. It’s true he doesn’t mention what was happening in Gaza ten weeks ago—that wasn’t good news—but it’s hard to argue with what he does say about our world ten weeks ago. 

And now? Barbarians running amok throughout the federal government at all levels, slashing and burning, wreaking retribution wherever possible on particular states, universities, law firms, judges, and anyone else who has dared to stand for the rule of law against the lawless, monolithic attack, and now punitive tariffs on everyone from China to penguins. What can one little bookseller in a small, quiet village possibly hope to say to draw attention away from the national scene and toward her own small interests? 

Does she look dubious?

But I don’t want to divert your attention from the national scene! I want you to pay attention to it. If I include photographs of my dog now and then or images of beauty found in my country neighborhood to give you a reason to smile, that’s not because dogs and scenery are more important than imminent threats to our democracy (as well as our livelihoods) but simply because we need to remember, in the midst of chaos and horror and destruction, that our world, the basic reality being so egregiously attacked, has an essential goodness. 

As for why I include snippets of big news here that you can easily find elsewhere in far greater detail, it’s because I hope that at least one or two people who depend on (dis)information silos to guide their thinking—I cannot stop hoping—will find something I say, some random link I include, if not their stock portfolios tanking, a serious challenge to their ”God’s got this” complacency, because I know that many of them have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as do I, and surely they don’t want our country destroyed before those younger generations have a chance to enjoy a good American life. 

How many people do you know who are downsizing households and reducing material belongings so “the kids won’t have to deal with a mess” when they’re gone? Well, how about a country without respect for the Constitution, without freedom of expression, a country loathed by the rest of the world for not keeping its word? What parents want to see their kids having to deal with a mess like that? 

The Secretary of the Treasury (another billionaire—surprise!) does not think (my sentence should really end there, shouldn't it?) that ordinary Americans facing retirement “look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening” in the stock market. He thinks they don't pay attention to the market, which is somewhat like (although not quite as bad as) the Secretary of Commerce saying that only fraudsters complain about not getting their social security checks on time. What planet do these idiots live on?

Mr. Bessent, sir, Americans preparing to retire are paying more attention to financial indicators than you realize. And Mr. Lutnick, sir, your mother-in-law may not worry if her social security check doesn’t arrive on time, but many Americans rely on those checks to pay their rent. How out of touch with your fellow Americans can you possibly be? 

I’m thinking that right about now, with Social Security threatened and world trade in crisis, Americans who didn’t worry about international students or undocumented aliens being kidnapped without grounds for arrest and without any semblance of a trial—those Americans might be getting a little nervous now that their pocketbooks are threatened. People who were perfectly comfortable with nonstop lies, fear-mongering, and violations of the United States Constitution might not be quite so comfortable with value erased overnight from their own stock portfolios and retirement funds.

Many of us have long wondered what it would take, and maybe this is what it takes. Cart our immigrant neighbors off to prison in El Salvador; cut off funding and trash years of research into serious health issues; make the United States a pariah among nations—but my stock portfolio? My money? You’re messing with my money?! 

Yeah, well, if that’s what it takes, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their pocketbooks. If that’s what it takes for people to start paying attention to the Constitution, now is the time to wake up!

As for what inspired the absurd tariff plan that has the stock market in freefall, the true story would not be believed if it were written in a novel. The actual fiction writer may be offstage for a while (we can only hope), but for now the damage has been done. We’re told it will be GREAT “in the long run.” In the long run, of course, all of us will be dead, and our poor grandchildren will be left to put together whatever pieces of freedom might be left.

This is what happens, friends, when experience, knowledge, and solid background are considered as disqualifications for the highest positions in government. Take a look at the Cabinet and the advisors to the president. Just take a look. The rest of the world is looking on with horror!

Meanwhile, in my little corner of the big world, more snow arrived on Monday and a dear friend died. Time is inexorable. Larry Coppard, we will miss you in Northport, and your absence will be felt far from our village, as well, because a good man is hard to find and heartbreaking to lose. But every life well lived is an inspiration to others, and so the good life Larry lived will continue to light our hearts and our way forward.

The Artist called his dear friend Larry "Lorenzo"!

These are the things that matter: dear friends and family, principled human beings, the reassuring cycles of Nature, art and literature and music and memory and all the ways our souls live on past the body’s return to earth. 

The dogs bark, the caravan moves on. In other words, tyrants come and go, but love remains.

A David Grath sky --

Postscript 4/10. Nope. I’m not done. Do you know what the president’s golf outings cost taxpayers? Do you know that the new 100% unqualified assistant director of the FBI, a big “strongman” podcaster, apparently needs a 24-hour, 20-man security team, no matter where he is or what he is doing? (Those guys don’t work for free.) Do you know that the Secretary of the Interior, at the same time that park rangers are being fired across the United States, has paid aides baking cookies for him on demand, because he has to have them warm? 

Oh, right! It’s all about cutting costs, trimming waste, making government more efficient. You believe that?  This, friends, is how autocrats rule: Living like pashas, they take from the people and give to themselves.

Let’s Think Carefully, Then Talk to Each Other

Out in the countryside

Friends and strangers stopping in the bookstore the last couple of days have been shocked to see me underlining phrases in a book. With a pen, no less! I explain that it’s an old paperback, spine cracked and pages ready to start falling out, and that some previous studious reader already went through the whole thing with yellow highlighter. One young man asked, “Are you doing a word search? My mother does that.” Seems the whole concept of underlining key ideas in a text had passed him by. But I am of another generation, of course....

The book I’ve been reading is a little anthology of historical writings on the American Revolution with an arresting title: The Ambiguity of the American Revolution. The book’s editor, Jack P. Greene, in his excellent introduction, traces the history of our history, as it were – the different interpretations given over time to the Revolution, starting with contemporary accounts -- because even in the 1770s, there was no unanimity of view. Loyalists saw the conflict one way, patriots another, and their perspectives colored the way they wrote their accounts. John Adams himself said there were as many American Revolutions as there were colonies and perhaps as many as individuals in those colonies. Everyone had a slightly different take on it at the time, and through successive periods of our country’s life new interpretations have emerged in waves, to be supplanted in their turn by others. This diversity of perspective is something we often lose sight of, now that we’ve had two hundred and forty-one years to come -- more or less, in textbooks if nowhere else -- to agreement on a national narrative.

[See continuation of discussion of this book here.]

David Ramsay, a Maryland physician who graduated from the College of New Jersey in the year of the Stamp Act crisis (1765), eventually wrote of the Patriot cause and the newly formed United States of America:

The world has not hitherto exhibited so fair an opportunity for promoting social happiness. It is hoped for the honour of human nature, that the result will prove the fallacy of those theories, which suppose that mankind are incapable of self-government. 

– from his History of the American Revolution, first published in Philadelphia in1789, an excerpt of which appears in The Ambiguity of the American Revolution

President Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, addressing the crowd at Gettysburg, noted that the crowd that day “met on a great battlefield of that war,” a war “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Far short of three hundred years old, our country remains an experiment, its success into the future far from guaranteed.

Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press: If the “national security” entails restricting those freedoms, what “security” do Americans have? I picked up another book at home this morning, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Time, and, opening at random, fell by chance – true story – on a chapter entitled “Journalism and Democracy.” On the first page of that chapter, Bill Moyers (one of my heroes) says that after less than two years as White House press secretary,

It took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what’s important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality. ... 

 I also had to relearn one of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

The lighter side

Today is the 4^th of July, and Americans are gathering again, all over the country, in crowds large and small. We take time out from our ordinary pursuits to re-read the Declaration of Independence. (In Leelanau County, such readings usually take place in front of a village post office. See below for Northport event.) The mood of Independence Day is celebratory. There are parades and marching bands and flags waving in the breeze and displays of fireworks against the summer night sky.

Patriotic village gathering

While most of us do not see ourselves “met on a battlefield” this July 4, 2017, we are painfully aware that our country is deeply divided. We are divided not only on issues, but on our most basic core value, freedom. What does ‘freedom’ mean, and how is it best protected? Beneath all the posturing and tweets and insults, that is the crucial question.

Coming fast upon the heels of the first question, however, is another: How can the question about freedom be answered in a civilized manner?

If we cannot agree on an answer to the second question, the first becomes moot, because when civil discourse gives way to hate, attacks on freedoms proliferate, and repression ensues, and when hate gives way to violence, life and liberty both fall victim.

Can the current trend of incivility and increasing repression be reversed? Can our freedoms endure? It’s worth taking a few minutes to ponder these questions on this day of air shows and hot dogs and sparklers.

Eternal vigilance!

Second Amendment Arguments

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. 

- Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

Like most of you, I suppose, I think a lot these days about guns and the arguments advanced by both sides of what passes for a national debate. An article in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis (March 2013, Volume 42, no. 3) adapted from a lecture given at Hillsdale’s Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., is unsurprisingly adamant in support of gun owners’ rights. (Anyone living in Michigan and knowing anything about Hillsdale College, that is, would not be surprised.) Edward J. Erler makes a strong case for the right to bear arms as an individual, not a collective right, though he may overstate it (or perhaps this was an editorial decision at Hillsdale) with a section heading that reads “The Whole People Are the Militia.” Are the whole people "well regulated"? In what way, and how? If the answer is simply that our society is governed by the rule of law, I hardly think that was what the framers had in mind, but there are other aspects of Erler’s overall argument, including but not limited to the defense of semi-automatic weapons, that I find far more troubling – and, I must say, at times confused and even contradictory, and it is those aspects I want to address.

Stolen Guns

Erler states that “most gun crimes are committed with stolen or illegally obtained weapons...” (clear statistics on percentages are difficult to obtain; most crimes are not committed with guns at all) and notes (statistics bear this out) that most of the guns stolen and used in crimes are handguns. (See Bureau of Justice statistics on firearms and crime.)

Stolen guns are a problem. Who would disagree? Erler’s solution is twofold: (1) more responsible, law-abiding citizens should own guns; (2) prosecution and penalties for crimes involving guns should be swift and harsh. He also argues that semi-automatic weapons, “so-called assault rifles,” as he puts it, are seldom used by criminals but are “extremely well-adapted for home defense,” so presumably (3) more law-abiding citizens should, in his view, arm themselves with semi-automatic weapons. That is, he believes there should be more, not fewer, semi-automatic weapons in American homes. He seems to have no quarrel with a ban on fully automatic weapons, which might be ever so slightly reassuring if the line he draws did not seem completely arbitrary: the government may legitimately ban automatic weapons, he seems to think, but a ban on semi-automatic assault rifles he finds a violation of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. It would be interesting to hear how he thinks the framers would have drawn this line or what specific wording in the Second Amendment supports the distinction.

One question about having more guns in American homes seems logical: If there are more guns are in the homes of law-abiding citizens, won’t more guns be stolen? Stolen guns are and must be stolen from their rightful owners. That, after all, is what stealing is. Locking up guns is one proposed solution to not having your guns stolen, but I cannot find that it is Erler’s answer – perhaps because he does not ask the question. (He may have addressed it elsewhere. Anyone wanting to find out is welcome to search his published work more thoroughly than I have done.) His reasoning for semi-automatic weapons in the home is that since “assault rifles are rarely used by criminals, because they are neither easily portable nor easily concealed,” homeowners defending their private citadels with assault weapons (excuse me, “so-called assault weapons; Erler himself objects to and then makes use of the phrase himself without scare quotes) will be better equipped to avoid becoming crime victims. But is this not a dangerous escalation of what we might call the domestic arms race? In light of the fact that most crime is not committed with guns, protecting against it with assault rifles seems extreme.

Guns and Crime

Another logical question is much more difficult to answer: Does gun ownership reduce crime? These seemingly straightforward statistical question is deceptively simple, in that it looks for correlation between two and only two variables. Not surprisingly, the evidence for clear results and a clear direction of causation is murky, and each side picks and chooses among statistics to find numbers supporting its position. For instance, when homicide numbers go down, but homicides by guns goes up, is it fair to credit gun ownership with a drop in violent crime? Here’s a chilling statistic from the same article: "The presence of guns in a home during domestic violence increases the homicide chance for women by 500 percent, according to a 2003 study of domestic violence incidences in 11 cities." But “more guns” is only part of Erler’s solution to the problem of crimes involving guns. The other half, having to do with punishment and prevention. is that we should lock more people up. We should also, he thinks, hand down the death penalty more often and lock some people up before they can commit crimes.

The United States of America, which we like to think of as the freest country in the world, already has a greater percentage of its population behind bars than any other country in the world. Is this a solution or a problem? A retired cop who was a guest speaker once in my ethics class told my students, “If you need to draw your gun, you’ve already lost control of the situation.” If we need to lock up so many Americans, if we need the death penalty, it looks to me as if we’ve definitely lost control of the social situation.

Involuntary Incarceration

Erler’s advocacy of involuntary incarceration is totally baffling. Given his staunch support for the Second Amendment, one might expect he would bring the same vigilance guarding the Fourth Amendment, which gives “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure.” It is a strange inversion of priorities that would put the rights of ownership above the rights of personal freedom, freedom in one’s own person being the very basis of all natural rights. The argument from natural law, which Erler at other times is eager to invoke, is passed over silently when he – and others, who defend guns and point to mental illness as the problem – call for involuntary incarceration where no crime has – “yet,” as they say – been committed.

Gun advocates' promotion of involuntary incarceration as a solution to violence is strange not only from a philosophical point of view but also in light of centuries of abuse of those declared mentally ill by governments for political reasons. Totalitarian governments across the political spectrum, from Communist to Fascist, governments elected and those ruling by blood, have never been shy about calling “mad” those who would oppose or even question their power. If the concern of gun advocates is truly that a free citizenry be able to defend itself against excesses by government – Erler points to the “right of revolution, an essential ingredient of the social compact” – their simultaneous advocacy of involuntary incarceration would seem to close the very door they are fighting, with their guns, to keep open. Who is in a better position to provide for himself and his family and defend himself, his family, and his property – the free man without an assault weapon or the man behind bars?

Erler gives a passing nod to the “horrible exceptions – the mass shootings in recent years....” Those shooters, he argues, were mentally ill and should have been incarcerated before they could kill. (We might note that most of them could not be punished afterward since they turned their weapons on themselves before they could be captured and brought to trial.) Here is Erler on his opposition:

But the same progressives who advocate gun control also oppose the involuntary incarceration of mentally ill people who, in the case of these mass shootings, posed obvious dangers to society before they committed their horrendous acts of violence. From the point of view of the progressives who oppose involuntary incarceration of the mentally ill – you can thank the ACLU and like-minded organizations – it is better to disarm the entire population, and deprive them of their constitutional freedoms, than to incarcerate a few mentally ill persons who are prone to engage in violent crimes.

Has a citizen with a legally obtained handgun been “disarmed” if he has no assault rifle? When, in the absence of violence, is the danger of it to society “obvious”? That is, how is someone “prone” to violence identified before he engages in a violent act? Again, I would point to the strange inversion of rights in Erler’s position. He sees gun control advocates seeking to "deprive" a population of (one) constitutional freedom (I see the goal as setting limits, not depriving), whereas his position opens the door to the taking-away of a much more fundamental constitutional right, the freedom of the person.

Americans who break the law are subject to the law and have the right to trial. Those declared mentally ill by government-appointed experts have no such recourse, no way to defend themselves against charges that are not "charges" but "diagnoses." Neither is their incarceration given any time limit. Those locked away for being mentally ill, even if they have committed no crime, can be stripped of all their rights, sometimes for the rest of their lives, and in the current climate of government cost-cutting it is difficult to see that greater numbers of incarcerated mentally ill could receive appropriate treatment in humane living conditions.

Even professionals who would not want to see involuntary incarceration completely abolished warn about its potential for abuse.

In any troubled relationship between the powerful and the less powerful, like the relationship between a repressive totalitarian government and a dissident citizen, or between parents and a gay teenager, or between husband and wife in a patriarchal society, the language and ideas of psychiatry and mental health practice are open to abuse as a form of social control. In these instances, the mechanism of involuntary commitment is also open to abuse as a way to confine those who are threatening to the social or political order. 

- Alicia Curtis, “Involuntary Commitment,” in Bad Subjects, Issue #58, December 2001. (Click here for full article.)

Curtis cites recent abuses in China, as well as common cases within living memory in our own country where parents could commit a gay teenager for being gay or a husband have his wife locked away for not keeping the house clean. It doesn’t require a wild imagination to come up with dystopian possibilities on the current political horizon.

In Summary

How dangerous is our world today? Where are the greatest potential threats? How might these threats be mitigated? How do we want to balance freedom and safety? These are the questions behind the debate, the questions both sides presume to answer with the positions they take.

When gun advocates see danger in stolen guns, it is difficult to see how more guns available to be stolen will solve the problem.

When they point to potential abuses of government as the danger, their advocacy of involuntary incarceration looks paradoxical, contradictory, and extremely problematic.

Their clarion call for the death penalty clearly speaks to emotions of anger and frustration, but as there has never been evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent, this so-called solution would only lock the barn door after the horse had run away or been stolen – or after the barn had been burned down.

*   *   *

Again, I will remind you that I do not have an editor, so besides comments of a substantive nature, any needed corrections are always welcome.