"Is it possible ...?" - Rilke as Malte Laurids Brigge

It is ridiculous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, twenty-eight years old now and known to no one. Here I sit, and I am nothing. And yet, this nothing begins to think, and five flights up, on a grey Paris afternoon, thinks this:

Is it possible, it thinks, that we have neither seen nor perceived nor said anything real or of any importance yet? Is it possible that we have had thousands of years to look, ponder and record, and that we have let those thousands of years pass like a break at school, when one eats a sandwich and an apple?

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with an unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that the entire history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that we have the past all wrong, because we have always spoken of its masses, exactly as if we were describing a great throng of people, rather than speaking of the one man they were all gathered around – because he was a stranger and was dying?

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that we imagined we had to retrieve what had happened before we were born? Is it possible that every single one of us had to be reminded that he came from all those who had gone before, and that, knowing this, he would refuse to listen to others possessed of other knowledge?

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that all these people have an exact knowledge of a past that never happened? Is it possible that all realities are nothing to them; that their life is winding down, connected to nothing at all, like a clock in an empty room –?

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that one knows nothing of girls, who are nonetheless living? Is it possible that one says ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘boys’ without any suspicion (none whatsoever, despite all one's education) that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?

Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that there are people who say ‘God’ and suppose they mean something shared by all? – Only consider two schoolboys: one of them buys a knife, and the other buys an identical one on the same day. And a week later, they show each other the two knives, and they turn out to be only remotely similar, so differently have they been shaped by different hands. (Well, comments the mother of one, if you will go wearing everything out right away.) – Ah, yes: is it possible to believe we could have a god without making use of him?

Yes, it is possible.

RFK on the "Mindless Menace of Violence" 4/5/68

(Text beneath, under video window)

Remarks April 5, 1968 at the Cleveland City Club, following the murder of MLK -

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity to speak briefly to you about this mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by his assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some looks for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies - to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear - only a common desire to retreat from each other - only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is now what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember - even if only for a time - that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek - as we do - nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

The time to start talking about dealing with gun violence is ...?

Now.


People say "Let's not exploit this tragedy. Let's mourn and, in due time, then we can address issues. Just not right now."

No,

No.

No.

Hell no.

It's wrong.

It's cowardly.

It dishonors the memory of every person murdered.  When these atrocities happen every few weeks, what do we wait for?  When does "in due time" come about when the killing time comes around again, even before the healing time is done? When is this mythical tragedy-free time when the next attack comes in a few days or at most a few weeks?

What you're effectively saying is "Let's wait until all of these frequent, senseless, brutal, un-Christian/un-Jewish/un-Muslim/un-Buddhist/un-etc./inhuman killings stop of their own accord before we sit down and talk about how it is we can bring them to end.  Let's pretend they're out of our control because we lack the courage to do or say something about them. Let's offer our 'thoughts & prayers' while we sit on our asses."  If they were being bombed to death by foreigners, would people be saying "Now, now, we need to focus strictly on the victims. Let's not do anything just yet." Obviously not.

Thoughts and prayers are nice & pretty, but they don't accomplish anything besides brief, mild, warm internal fuzzies.  In other words, they accomplish not a thing. More graphically, they accomplish fuck all. 

Offering thoughts and prayers when the butchery happens over and over and over again is the moral equivalent of handing a drowning victim a Hallmark card and hearty good wishes.

I have a couple of guns.  I kind of like them.  I take care of them and I use them responsibly.  I keep them safely managed.  The moment I think they pose an active threat to others, whether through exposure, mis-management, instability, etc., they will go away.  I don't fetish-ize them.  I don't pretend they actively protect me against the .01% likelihood of personal violence or home invasion. 

I definitely don't pretend that two handguns will protect me from some rogue government that might spring up and attack me with tanks, mortars, drones, bunkerbusters, and the like.  I also don't think they're any kind of stopgap against dealing with personal feelings of xenophobia, paranoia and insecurity.

I don't think 0 guns in the country is a solution, but I also think that 300,000,000 guns in the country is a tragedy and travesty on a magnitude of many powers of ten.


We are awash in blood, worshiping at an altar of fear, praying to a God of paranoia.  That doesn't make us Abraham or Isaac. It makes us fools. It also makes us all complicit in 30,000 US gun deaths each and every year.