AMERICA — WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS

Candlelight Vigil — Uvalde — In Remembrance

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AMERICA — WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS

By Ron Starbuck
Opinion — Editorial

​​Author of — There Is Something About Being An Episcopalian
Publisher/Executive Editor/CEO
Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Houston, Texas

Angel of Time — Chartres Cathedral

A poet's work is to help expand humanity's literary and cultural dialogue and to magnify and transform our human perceptions. We do so by engaging fresh forms and symbols, and vocabulary. We create new languages describing the experience of life. We offer words and, in our imaginations, try our best to capture the ineffable and intangible - tongues of angels and heaven.

​Poets and writers who create literature have a different relationship with words than the legal and justice communities where lawyers, lawmakers, courts, and justices live and work.  One thing seems inevitable, the best poets and writers rarely suffer a failure of their imaginations. Imagination is their livelihood; imagination is their bread and butter; it is what inspires them to rise in the middle of the night or early morning to create and write.
 
In 2012, the following poem – “Tonglen For Newtown (Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep),” was first published in a new collection of poems titled When Angels Are Born.  At the end of this essay is another poem – “A Season of Sorrow” from a more recent collection, A Pilgrimage of Churches, nearly ten years after the Newtown, Sandy Hook Elementary shooting and only a few months before the Uvalde, Texas shooting at Robb Elementary.

  
 
 
TONGLEN FOR NEWTOWN 
(Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep) 
 

You have known this one
prayer by memory since
you were a child,
it's a good place to start.
 
"Now I lay me down to
sleep if I should die
before I wake, I pray
the lord my soul to take."
 
There are times
like this,
when you just have
to stop doing
 
whatever you are doing
and simply pray.
Practice some tonglen,
like the Buddhist do
 
or light a candle
as a Christian does
in church, kneeling
before some sacred altar.
 
Tonglen is the taking of another's
pain and the giving of love.
We begin by taking on
the suffering
 
of a person we 
know to be hurting, of
the world even as Christ did, 
and whom we wish to help.
 
This takes the greatest 
compassion; it is breathing in
all the darkness.
And then letting the love
 
of your heart turn it
instantly into the light
of a billion stars and suns,
and then breathing out
 
again all that love
into the world,
the light brightening
the world, turning 
 
it again and again.
It's true you know,
love makes
the world go round,
 
even when, perhaps
especially when it
has stopped making
all sense. This is when
 
we need such
prayers
and praying
the most.
 
  
Ron Starbuck — When Angels Are Born
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0988944701
 
On gun safety and new ways to address gun violence and mental healthcare in America. American children deserve the same protection as Supreme Court Justices and members of Congress. Why would we offer anything less to a child?
 
We must protect the future well-being of our children and the schools where they learn. The GOP's resistance to any change, to doing nothing, is unsustainable and unconscionable. Always saying no, does nothing to make anyone, especially our children, safer.  This is a sacred trust we must not dismiss. Lord, forgive us for what we DO NOT DO; inaction is a sin.
 
The Bill of Rights, with it, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, was written by James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” and the fourth president of the United States. As one of the founders, he was a brilliant student of the law, an esteemed scholar, and a philosopher of his time. His early studies at Princeton included Latin, Greek, theology, and the works of the Enlightenment. He later read and studied the law in even greater detail.
 
The Enlightenment encompassed a range of philosophies centered on the value of human life and happiness, the pursuit of knowledge through reason and empirical knowledge, and the principles of liberty, social progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and the separation of church and state. The views of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of autocracy known in its time under the Western institutions and rule of monarchies and the Church. The Age of the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, arose from the European religious wars of the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries, which resulted in the death of millions.
 
The first wave of immigrants to America came to seek a new life and opportunities, peace and safety, and social and religious freedom without conflict, violence, and war. They came to America as refugees with new ideas and the intention of creating a better society formed on these values. And in the process, they made the world’s oldest democracy. A democracy that is now threatened by an insidious erosion of those shared values of enlightenment and reason.
 
It is not beyond reason to imagine that the founders could never have foreseen the future Americans live in now. It is a failure of the imagination for Constitutional originalists to consider a more thoughtful scholarship and approach in the 21st Century, with the military weapons and arms manufactured in massive amounts today. This cannot be what the founders intended in the Constitution and the pre-industrial age.
 
We must look at the tragic and complex social dynamics and the death of American children. No one, not one of our nation’s founders in the late Eighteenth-Century, could have foretold this future and these tragic deaths. We may easily imagine that they would be horrified at this chaos and death. And the loss of law and order, grounded in the rule of law and God’s two greatest commandments.
 
The Second Amendment to the Constitution is a straightforward sentence: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” We can look at what the Framers meant in their time's historical and social context and the heritage of militias first established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 and other American colonies for their common defense.
 
The organization of these state militias was preserved and maintained after the founding of the United States, and the ratification of the Constitution under Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 and 16 giving the President, Congress, and the state government the authority to call “forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” A clear and distinct line of military command is present, where the Militia reports and answers to the United States Government.
 
Article I, Section 8, Clause 15:
 
[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections, and repel Invasions.
 
Article I, Section 8, Clause 16:
 
[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.
 
We may also look at what is written first and the sequence of words used in the Second Amendment. “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
 
The first clause declares the presence and existence of a well-regulated Militia, with the word Militia capitalized as a proper noun, indicating a formal name or organization. This implies that any Militia is a part of the organized armed forces of this country and the government, which may be called upon in an emergency. We see what the Second Amendment guarantees at work in America today through the presence of citizen soldiers serving in the National Guard as an essential part of the United States Military.
 
The second clause tells us that an organized Militia with a capital “M” is defined as — “being necessary for the security of a free state.” The following two clauses are dependent upon these first two. “The right of the people to bear arms” is dependent upon the formal association within an organized and sanctioned Militia associated with the nation's Armed Forces. And when that condition exists and is the case, as it was during early American colonial and frontier times, to “keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
 
In the United States v. Miller, decided on May 15, 1939, the Supreme Court “reasoned that because possessing a sawed-off double barrel shotgun does not have a reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia, the Second Amendment does not protect the possession of such an instrument.” How much more could this apply to weapons designed for war and used exclusively by the military?
 
The Second Amendment does NOT protect any citizen's unregulated and unfettered ownership of dangerous and unusual military weapons. In the District of Columbia ET AL. v. HELLER case, decided on June 26, 2008, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. Although the ruling did affirm that Heller may possess a handgun for self-defense within the home, there were requirements associated with that ownership, and the District did permit Heller a license.
 
The Court also provided other clarification in its ruling. The SCOTUS brief explicitly states, “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” It reaffirms the following.
 
“The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.”
 
Dangerous and Unusual Weapons — covers a lot of semi-automatic weapons, and new laws could be written and implemented to provide a greater level of Public Safety. And those laws would be Constitutional without negating the right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting, and sport, or components unconnected to military service.
 
Such laws on dangerous and unusual weapons would not change how the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a functional firearm unconnected with service in a militia and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. However, they could help to control and regulate the possession of more dangerous and unusual military-grade weapons designed to inflict maximum damage upon the human body.  At the very least, we should move towards a compromise that embraces middle-of-the-road gun reforms, which include raising the minimum age for purchasing most semiautomatic rifles to 21 and banning high-capacity ammunition magazines, along with more extensive background checks and red flag capabilities. None of these common-sense actions would be unconstitutional.
 
We are doing something wrong in America, and our local, state, and federal leaders are paralyzed. They are incapable of movement, and far too many are beholden to the NRA and special interests.  In the day's politics, they have lost something we should all hold dear, a sense of honor associated with the practice of true servant leadership that protects and embraces human life. America, we are better than this; let compassion guide your consciousness and conscience to protect the children and families of this nation.
 
 
 
A SEASON OF SORROW
PSALM 31 In te, Domine, speravi
1 In you, O Lord, have I taken refuge;
let me never be put to shame;
     deliver me in your righteousness.
2 Incline your ear to me;
     make haste to deliver me.
 
 

In our deepest grief
Earth’s fairness fades
And removes itself
From all suffering
Within the world
Becoming a season of sorrow
Where impassive signs
And forebodings
Begin to reign as
We fail to remember
Whom we are
Our brightness gone
Our gardens longing
For heaven’s light reflected
Once in a decency lived
In this darkness
We witness our death
Through a single loss
Amid the hardness of life
We do not know how to live
Among the dead
In the anguish
Of our complacency
Remorse haunts us
An illusion steals
Our breath away
In our inability to breathe
In such rigidity
And fear we lose
The point of living
As if it too has moved
Elsewhere and is lost
While heaven bears witness
Watch now — we are being
Transformed through
A deeper memory at work
Within the world
At a point which comes
Much later — when a season
Of hope restores the light

 
 
Ron Starbuck — A Pilgrimage of Churches
ISBN: 978-1-7330233-9-9

To learn more about gun violence in America visit these two great organizations.

Everytown for Gun Safety

Giffords Law Center
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