Escanaba in da Moonlight

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My daughter was ill at school recently and I went to pick her up. It has been a few years since this has happened, so I guess I’m a little out of practice. In the school office there is a Star-Trekish device poking up through the counter where visitors check in. I was instructed to put my driver’s license on the device and an eerie glow emerged from it as they scanned my card. You are not allowed to leave with your own child, even if the school calls you, without being scanned. A New Jersey license is a real hassle to acquire with multiple forms of ID required – this isn’t the Midwest where you just turn in your expired license and they hand you a new one. Every four years you have to prove you are who you say you are. As we climbed into the car, I was glad for the school security, but I couldn’t help remembering.

I grew up in western Pennsylvania where deer worship was the dominant religion. The first day of buck season was a school holiday; I can’t recall if doe opening day was just a half-day or not. We could not graduate without passing a course called “hunter’s safety” which involved detailed instructions on how to shoot rifles and shotguns. My high school – God’s truth – had a rifle range in the basement and you were allowed to bring your rifle to school as long as you checked it in the principal’s office. When I tell others about this they don’t believe me, but when I ask my high school friends they all remember it that way too. Now that my stupidly smiling driver’s license image is floating around the school mainframe as a potential kidnapper for picking up my own daughter, I think about the difference in times.

Kids had guns in my high school in the late 1970s, but they knew that it was wrong to shoot other students. It was a small town, but we were all taught the rules of engagement and we knew that other human targets were outside the scope. Every year there were accidental hunting fatalities (Dick Cheney would have felt right at home), but the schools were used to address that issue. Today I see wind-bag politicians trying to cut back on education as much as possible and I see kids who don’t know any better killing their fellow students indiscriminately. No, I’m not nostalgic. I do not own a gun. It is my belief that children learn from adults, and when politicians say through their words and actions that looking out for number one is all that matters and that bullying (yes, Mr. Governor) is appropriate for getting what you want, I think it is no wonder we find ourselves with children who can’t tell right from wrong. I’m ready to watch Escanaba in da Moonlight and pray to the god of the deer.

Deer God...

2 thoughts on “Escanaba in da Moonlight”

  1. Chaz

    Hi Steve…

    I went to a high school in the 80’s that had served as a training facility for the armed forces in WW2. We too had a target range in the basement, but it had not been in use since the 60’s and became only a creepy legend students talked about in my day.

    Years after graduating, I met a man who graduated some 30 years prior to me, who confirmed that he was part of the rifle club in the 1960’s at the same school. He would walk down the city street with books in one hand, 22 rifle in the other, and just for safety, ammo in back pocket.

    At school, rifle kept in locker til lunch. Nobody tried to steal it, nobody went on killing rampage. And this is an urban school in a city of now 1.5 million (back then probably not even 500,000).

    I can’t help but wonder if as distance increases between the current generation of youth and rural, subsitence living, and the real effects of a major war, if the reality of the danger of fire arms does not also increase.

    I am a very late child. My father was in his 40’s when I was born in the 60’s, which made me one of very few in my class whose father fought in WW2. Combat and prison camp. Plus, my mothers family were from farms a generation before.

    The trickle-down effect was, I believe, that there was an inherent awareness of the reality of guns and their use, power, and danger. They were used by my father to fight a war. They were used by my mothers family to hunt and protect the farm from predators and rodents. There was very little glamour and much practicality in these uses of guns.

    Today, what? Starting with the TV generation (mine) who grew up watching gun play on TV nightly, to the current generation with their graphic video games where people are blown away on their iPhone screens.

    Dare I say we have drifted from reality and meaning around guns? And the current war has only produces a fraction of the causualties of the two world wars, where virtually everyone knew someone who never came home. We aren’t as affected by the casualties of war, and thereby, guns, to the degree past generations were. Or certainly in a different way.

    And the de-sensitizing through “entertainment” has only carried the state of un-reality further.

    My take anyway.

    Ciao.

    Chaz

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    • Steve Wiggins

      This is insightful, Chaz.

      I think we may also be suffering from a general effacement of empathy as well. In a generation isolated from other people it is easy to do. The example I always come back to is driving. In a car, the other drivers become objects, not people. Anger at objects is much easier to live with than anger at a frustrated mom with a crying baby in the back seat who is late for an appointment. We live in a shell. The Internet and video game worlds are also shells. What you are shooting at is somebody else’s shell, not another person. We’ve bent the rules of reality itself, perhaps.

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