Category Archives: Distant Replay

Upon Further Review: Gun Control

Ding Dong

The recent shooting in Nova Scotia will likely get the gun nuts all excited, saying it can happen anywhere. Yeah, it can. We know that. What’s the point of your point, though? I shouldn’t happen anywhere, with here topping the list.

Below is a column written in March, 2013. It still hold trust…

By GORDON GLANTZ

GORDONVILLE — Left of center. That means a lot of things to a lot of people, and not all of them good, but it is also the title of a semi-popular Suzanne Vega song.

It actually came on the CD player while driving Sofia to school Thursday morning, and it caught her increasingly discerning ear, as evidenced by her bobbing her little head and singing along in the backseat.

I was able to enjoy that she and I were on the same musical wavelength because, in a true rarity, we were running ahead of schedule.

Through the rear-view mirrors, I could check her out at stop signs and red lights. While we were waiting behind school buses with their lights flashing and stop signs popping out to temporarily halt traffic, it struck me how these road safety features are, more or less, anti-people devices.

It is human nature, regrettably, that many read a stop sign and interpret it as ‘yield’ while a ‘yield’ sign means ‘keep going.’

That’s why Sofia was in a child safety seat as we rocked and rolled down the road. That’s why I had my seat belt on. That’s why, if the worst happened, the vehicle is equipped with an airbag.

None of these safeguards existed back when the ‘motor vehicle’ first hit the road. They evolved over time, meeting the needs of the society.

These measures can’t be enforced all the time, and they don’t prevent every death or serious injury, but most of us would agree that they help.

It’s why we get our cars inspected once a year. It’s why we change our brakes and our bald tires.

It’s why there is a speed limit. It’s why laws are now in place, or in motion, to crack down on distracted drivers more interested in texting and yammering on their cell phones than being safe drivers.

It’s why they make cars with all-wheel drive and turn signals and high beams.

Realistically, people are still going to speed. They are still going to fall prey to temporary ADD while behind the wheel.

They are going to drink and drive. As long as there are bars and cars, you can bet your recession-depleted bottom dollar than some fool is going to tempt fate and think they have immunity.

To combat it, there are stricter rules for DUI. And there are DUI checkpoints.

As a system of checks and balances, we don’t give up on trying, even though people are still going to act like, well, people.

Yet, when it comes to gun control, the pro-gun types out there are sticking to their guns more than ever in the wake of renewed efforts to deploy the same common sense we have on the road.

Since Newtown, driving Sofia to and from school has been an almost religious experience, as I can’t shake the vision of the parents who said goodbye to their first graders that fateful day and never saw them again.

I have spoken out about gun control, and I’m still doing it because I refuse to consider it old news, and have gotten back a lot of venom.

Personally, I see no real need for guns and don’t get the fascination. In the few hundred years since the Second Amendment, cars have become a little more essential to day-to-day living than a gun.

But these instruments that should be in the hands of the military and law enforcement are ingrained in our culture.

I can respect that law-abiding citizens do the right thing, although I am compelled to point out the ‘tragic accidents’ that occur in homes and on hunting trips each year.

I am, like the Suzanne Vega song, left of center on the issue.

The operative word is “control.”

I never said ‘take away.’ Neither has President Barack Obama.

But people – being people – hear what they want to hear and read what they want to read.

At left of center, there is more fresh air; more realism.

Just like you can’t go around rounding up illegal immigrants and transporting them home, like many pro-gun types would like to do, you can’t go door to door and collect weapons.

But you can start to stop the madness.

If not now, when? The arguments against doing so simply don’t hold up.

‘Guns don’t kill, people do.’ ‘People die in cars each year, and you don’t ban them, do ya?’

The common denominator is ‘people.’

For the car argument, we have the rules of the road, enforced by your local and state police – a necessary arm of the g-g-g-g-overnment – to protect and save as many lives in the face of people being people.

And since people are people, and they are prone to temper tantrums and temporary insanity, we need better gun control as much as we need salt on the roads when it snows.

And if you want to take the defeatist stance, saying that it won’t matter anyway, let’s do away with all those traffic laws.

Let people be people, and drive 100 mph through a school zone. Let them blow through a red light at a busy intersection because they feel like it.

Just exercising their freedom, their liberty, right?

Wrong. I know it is human nature to want it all.

If the statement ‘you can’t have it both ways’ was made the 11th commandment, I’d be OK with hanging it up with the other 10 in public.

Cease resisting the president so much on his left-of-center effort to make the highway of life, circa 2013, a little safer.

Close the gun-show loopholes. Same as applying for a driver’s license.

Ban semi-automatic weapons. Same as not driving while intoxicated.

Immediate results? No. It may take a generation – when my daughter is driving my grandchild to school, in even safer vehicles than today – for tangible change, but it is worth the effort.

People are people, true No matter where we stand – or fall – on this thorny issue, whether we are left of center or far right, we share one commonality.

We only live once. If that’s not worth one step toward the middle, then what is?

Contradictory

Upon Further Review: Obamacare

Obamacare

The following is how a column I wrote in 2012 about how I felt about Obamacare …

By GORDON GLANTZ

GORDONVILLE — Back when hockey was hockey, they had these things called ties.

For we hockey purists, there was nothing inherently wrong with ties.

The key is that there were good ties and bad ties.

If three 20-minute periods – and later a mini-me frame of five minutes that usually saw both teams play it so conservatively that you would have thought Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan were coaching – left the score knotted (except in the playoffs), so be it.

It wasn’t until non-hockey people – cut from the same cloth as those who were appalled by outbreaks of fisticuffs – came along and said they couldn’t take the sport seriously because they went to a game once and it ended in a tie.

I presume that left them feeling unfulfilled.

What hockey haters didn’t know was that there were good ties and bad ties. Example: If a team was playing its sixth road game in eight nights and battled back from a 4-1 deficit to earn a 4-4 tie, that was a good tie.

For the other team, well, not so much.

Being a hockey guy (pronounce that ‘gee,’ giving it a French Canadian flare), I don’t always view life’s twists and turns as wins and losses.

Just like arguments are not always being black and white, the outcome was not always a win or a loss.

But we live in a society where the vocal minority gets appeased.

Now, in place of a righteous deadlock, hard-fought games are settled in the most stupid fashion known to professional sports – shootouts (like playing H-O-R-S-E if a basketball game is tied, or having a home run derby – in lieu of extra innings – in baseball).

Sometimes, in the game of life, there are ties.

Upon further review of the Supreme Court’s recent health care ruling, the narrow victory for President Barack Obama is a tie for the American public.

True, a loss would have been devastating for the proletariat, not to mention the death knell for Obama’s re-election bid against Mitt Romney.

In that sense, we the people are looking at a good tie.

But time, more than any Supreme Court justice acting on transparent political motivation, will be the ultimate judge.

The health care system is still in critical condition, and all you have to do to confirm that ongoing status is talk off-the-record with the doctors and nurses on the front lines.

Dreaded Obamacare – a right-wing code word for letting ‘them’ have something for nothing, even though it is a virtual identical twin to Romney’s health care plan when he was governor of Massachusetts – will, among other things, do the following, now that the high court upheld the Affordable Care Act by a 5-4 vote:

•Young adults, you know the ones who are lucky to get part-time jobs in retail after taking out obnoxious amounts of dough from legal lone sharks to catch a whiff of whatever stench the lure of the American dream is giving off these days, are allowed to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26.

•Not denying children – yes, children (not inmates on death row) – insurance via some non-medical person behind a desk who may or may not know what it’s like to have a sick child.

•Not allowing people with pre-existing medical conditions to be denied coverage – if they can avoid the grim reaper until 2014 (nice, huh?).

•Thirty million Americans (excluding illegal immigrants) who don’t have health insurance can get it (the White House estimates only 4 million people will reject that benefit).

Go ahead, read them there bullet points again.

I’ll wait. Now let it sink in.

Making sure children get health care, whether or not their parents knew the rules of the game (and make no mistake, this ain’t nothing but a cruel game)?

Letting young adults, thrust into an economical nightmare not of their making, have a safety net should they get into a car accident or tear a knee playing hoops?

That’s s-s-socialism? That’s giving the country away?

That’s what you think is making the founding fathers spin in their graves?

Sounds more like an attempt – and more like a bunt than a home-run swing – at solving human problems with semi-humane solutions.

The high court equated the mandate to have health insurance to a tax, a hot-button word (tax) which makes many on the right go apoplectic before they even stop tea-partying enough to learn the facts.

Your tax money is going to go somewhere, folks.

That’s a fact. I don’t get how it is better for the money to go toward a nuclear warhead that can help us blow up the world 1,001 times over instead of 1,000, than to heal a sick child who may find the cure to cancer one day.

I don’t get how it’s acceptable to let the health industry and drug companies – the same unholy alliance that would probably conspire to keep that cure to cancer under wraps so they can keep making money – hold us hostage.

I don’t get how you don’t want the government, the one theoretically in place to protect us from such evil pursuits, to serve as negotiator and free us from these chains.

Doesn’t sound very American to me.

Doesn’t sound very Judeo-Christian.

Doesn’t sound like we are taking care of our own.

Doesn’t sound like waving the flag – and chanting ‘U.S.A., U.S.A.’ – is going to make it go away.

I’m as a patriotic as the next guy, but give me a reason to be proud.

We are ranked 37th in the world in health care, while leading the world in health care spending.

If you accept that – and to the illogical point that you don’t want to even try out what eight presidents (including ones with skin as white as Ivory soap) have wanted – the only conclusion to draw is that you are not playing to win.

That’s why we are losing. That’s why ties – like the the Supreme Court gave us – are the best we can hope for right now during these days of being torn in the U.S.A.

Distant Replay: Sandy Hook

sandy-hook

By GORDON GLANTZ

GORDONVILLE — The best part of my day is picking Sofia up from school.

I relish the moment, knowing the day when she will opt for the long way home – i.e. the bus – looms in the future.

But I never relished it more than last Friday – Dec. 14, 2012.

The full details of the heart-wrenching tragedy in Newtown, Conn. were still not completely clear, but we knew enough.

When Sofia got in the car, she gave a big smile, completely unaware of what happened to other little kids whose parents sent them off to school, not knowing they would never see them alive again.

When I stopped to secure her in her car seat, which is part of the daily routine, there was none of the usual playful banter between us.

Losing the battle to fight back tears, and trying to imagine what those parents in Connecticut must be feeling, I just pulled her close and held on like I never wanted to let go.

It was a small snippet – one played out everywhere in America – in this country’s longest day since Sept. 11, 2001.

For me, that day ended when I got home from work.

Sofia was asleep. Sweet, innocent, unaffected – clutching her Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal – while our two cats, Hank and Licorice, curled up around her.

Unlike 20 precious first-graders, and the school staff members killed with them, she was going to wake up the next day.

I pulled her close again, and had the next of several hard cries – only pierced by therapeutic fierce battles with thick-as-a-brick conservatives on Facebook – that continued through last weekend.

When I took her to school Monday morning, there was a police vehicle on the premises. When I picked her up, it was there again.

Its presence was a sad commentary on the post-Dec. 14 world in which we suddenly live. Even sadder was the fact that I was relieved to see it there.

Welcome to the new normal. We never discussed the events with Sofia last weekend, instead changing the channel from the news to cartoons when she entered the room, but they addressed it at school Monday.

Later that night, she was seen hiding all the figurines in our Christmas village so ‘they would be safe from the bullets.’

She was assured that she had nothing to be worried about.

Where do we go from here in the quest to make that assurance a reality?

Here’s a start: We need to stop asking how these mass shootings can keep on happening in a civilized society.

The truth is that we don’t live in a civilized society.

During the whole ordeal, I was put in mind of those futuristic movies and novels that projected how our culture might be in the 21st century if we don’t have a serious gut-check moment.

And here we are, living it out like some self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s time for some serious soul-searching, and it begins in my own chosen profession of journalism.

The quest for Pulitzers and Peabodys – not to mention ratings and driving traffic to websites – were blatant.

Children who survived, despite being recently scared and permanently scarred, were interviewed. Reporters and anchors talked about the death toll like statistics at a basketball game, waiting to see where it would rank with other recent massacres.

Then we have Hollywood. The gratuitous violence has become so common, seen as so necessary to fill the gaps in mediocre story lines, that our children are undaunted.

They become so numb to it that it is no wonder they don’t act out more often when things don’t go their way.

And then there is the elephant in the room: Gun Control.

Gun advocates began playing defense almost immediately – pointing the finger at mental health, school bullying and armed teachers in every school.

They won’t even concede the obvious, that all of the above – along with social issues like the erosion of the Middle Class – are connected in an unholy alliance.

You can’t resolve one without the others.

You can’t break out your surgeon’s scalpel and carve gun control out of the mix.

This is no time to cling to your guns, or your religion.

If we need God in school, like some say, then we need God at the gun shows, too. We need God in places like our own state, where it is easier to get a gun than a driver’s license.

President Barack Obama, clearly moved by the tragedy, was feared and smeared as someone who was going to ‘take your guns away’ in his first term, as part of a greater left-wing conspiracy to ‘take your country’ from you.

Now, in his second term, with the specter of Newtown, Conn. happening just easily in Norristown, Pa. or Your Town, it appears the same sane president bold enough to give us semi-humane health care is ready to go where no president has gone before with gun control.

By forming a task force charged with getting answers sooner than later, he would be giving your country back.

Not only to us, but to our children.

So, this season, let us drop the inane debate over whether to say ‘happy holidays’ or ‘Merry Christmas.’ Unless you are abnormal – and I concede a lot of you are not (one whacky ‘Christian’ zealot already muttered that it was God’s wrath for gay marriage) – there is nothing to be merry or happy about.

For all the gifts under the tree on Christmas morning Tuesday, or those already given out during the eight nights of Hanukkah, there is only one gift to give this year.

It is the promise to work together for a better world – that civilized society where these tragedies are not supposed to happen – and where we hold our kids out of love and joy, not fear and sorrow.

This column originally ran in The Times Herald on Dec. 22, 2012 (the first Sunday after the Dec. 14 Sandy Hook massacre)