Back where I come from
(yes, this is titled after the song of the same name)
My grandfather was the mayor and police chief (at the same time) of a one stoplight town in eastern Ohio. Grandma was a school teacher.
Dad grew up near Baltimore, Maryland and moved to that same small town later where he met my mom.
It was a simple time in that small town. Grandpa created a park where kids could play (and he and grandma kept the basketballs at their house, which was at the entrance of the park). He didn't play favorites (neither did grandma) - he once gave my mom, his daughter, a ticket for running a stop sign. Grandma held mom back in the second grade.
I remember spending part of my childhood there - it was like Mayberry and Andy Griffith. Everyone knew everyone else.
You didn't live in fear of your neighbor. Kids went to school and no one ever feared that something bad would happen to them. There was one theatre there (a fact which I often chided my cousins over as I lived here in Columbus and we had more movie places in walking distance than they would ever hope to have - now most of them are gone), there was one main grocery store that my uncle worked at. Churches and bars outnumbered everything other business.
I didn't grow up being afraid of others for the most part. I would walk from big nanny's house to little nanny's house (big nanny was big, and little nanny was short and scrawny -maybe not politically correct but we were little kids and that is what called them). The folks in that town are what we today would call 'good old boys'.
Dad and others owned guns and there were shooting clubs in schools there. Folks went hunting, fishing, and us kids would often make things called 'tennis ball cannons' - we used lighter fluid and would pour it into the bottom of tennis ball tubes (the tubes tennis balls came in) and then light them up - we could shoot tennis balls a long distance.
It never occurred (generally) to folks that some would go out and kill others using what we saw was a simple tool. We weren't ignorant or stupid- there was the Kennedy assassination, Martin Luther King, etc and so on - it was obvious even to me, a young boy (born in 1965) that there were some scary folks out there.
I didn't grow up fearing guns or people in general. I had a fear of the KKK and still remember when I was just a young lad being afraid to come home to Columbus after a weekend in Byesville because the klan was here protesting. My mom told me not to worry about it, that they were just stupid.
Everyone, including my dad, owned a gun. Some used them for hunting, others just had them because they had grown up around them (i.e., they were in the home from the time they were born but never used because they didn't hunt for their food). I remember shooting guns on new years' eve as a celebration. Uncles, friend's, neighbors, all owned them growing up - some went hunting and would bring back enough deer meat to last a winter. Others hunted squirrel and pheasant.
Many had fought in wars and had a rich hunting tradition in their family on top of that. Weapons were something we saw as tools and respected. It was the same with our fishing gear - be careful around the hooks (and I have had more than a few hooks while fishing stab into my hands). People trusted and respected each other, we were not raised to think of each other as the enemy. Yes - we had the whole idea of 'stranger danger' but for the most part we did not view fellow citizens as an enemy (we had the russians for that).
Today in the US there is not a common enemy like there once was - the new common enemy is you and me. I can't trust you to bring a bottle of water onto a plane. If you own a gun - I am supposed to be afraid of you. If you buy cold medicine when you are ill, then I am told to think that maybe you are a meth producer.
Fear and the enemy used to be some other far away country, today we have replaced that with fearing one another. Used to be if you owned a gun we didn't worry about you we were glad that you had the ability to defend yourself, you were a hunter, etc (hell, to be honest, growing up we never really though much about it - people just owned guns like they owned TV's or cars and no one cared).
Today it seems like we are programmed to fear one another and to trust only those we elected (well, not who we elected but those with enough money elected). Our only trust is in others we don't know at all, who lie to us, that use weapons to kill innocent people all across the globe....in short, we are being herded into a place where the only people some want us to trust in are folks who have been bought off and we don't know at all.
Some guy used a gun and killed some people in a theatre. Terrible, yes. But someone used a gun to kill Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and others. Back then we blamed the person, shunned them, wanted them to be brought to justice and recognized that the person doing the act was responsible for it - not what they used. We didn't want to punish the many for the few.
Now we are being told that me, you, everyone else is a potential enemy and we need to let those in power (the wealthy) control us for our own sake. We can't be safe and sound unless we give up things, like guns, and let only those in power have access to them. I don't fear my neighbor - and no one is going to convince me to do so. I fear those in power who own so much of our resources, those who want to control me and others, those who whisper into my ear that you and my fellow Americans are the enemy.
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