Ubiquitous Weapon Dystopia

Good readers:

Madame is indisposed, so you get me for a special bonus post. 

What are we filling our lives with?  Do we have space?  When do we just BE?

I was thinking of this when I had dinner with a buddy of mine who has a lot of stress in his life: traveling often, doing two jobs and one occasional job on the side.  We went to Cracker Barrel tonight as a storm was scheduled to come in.  My friend said he was content just to sit by the fire there and drink hot tea and talk.  He said it calmed him.  We have both been deployed in the last few years, and know the longings for home.  My longing when I was deployed was to imagine sitting in Panera and drinking hot chocolate from a ceramic mug and revel in the fact that neither I nor anyone around me in Panera was armed.  When I came home, that reality calmed me.

Those who seem to revel in the prospect of many or most people being armed, that it will make people “safe,” should try living it for an extended period.  You will likely find it far less appealing than you think.  Far from feeling safe and secure, the tension will ripple through everything.  The maddening variables take their relentless, stressful toll on you: Who has the more lethal or dangerous weapon or weapons?  Who gets to use it or them first?  What about IEDs, rockets, mortars, explosives, truck bombs, or even gas or biological?  How do you know who the enemy is until the very last second when it is often too late? 

And you have to sleep sometime.  What weapon that you have can guard you when you are asleep?  If you sleep fitfully, half alert, you can feel what that does to you, mentally and physically.  You can feel the years coming off your life and the mental and emotional rearranging you might never be able to put back to what it was before.

And let’s not even mention when weapons are used.

Good people under that kind of stress can snap.   It is so easy to get tired, to draw the strings too tight for too long.  We are not meant to live under that stress.  See how you feel when comrades, people on the same side, have a misunderstanding, when tempers flare from exhausted people whose adrenals have nearly burned out from the stress.  It’s a special kind of tension to be in the midst of armed people of the same side when they point their weapons at each other and no one wants to back down.

And that was with large numbers of people forced to work together, with minimal distractions or outside responsibilities, against a common “enemy.”  What would be the case in this hyper-individualistic society, where people are alone or in very small groups? 

A society should be careful not to let its desire to preserve life and security come at the cost of the character of that life.