Various production photos.

Headline from Huff Post, “Red Sox Ceremony: Boston Honors Victims, Police; David Ortiz Says ‘This Is Our F–king City'”
I know a lot of people will forget this next sentence after they read the rest: America, Boston, the Red Sox and David Ortiz deserve a rousing feel-good ceremony after the horrific events of last week.
However, I don’t know who Ortiz was including in “our.” America? Boston? The Red Sox? I assume he meant Boston, since he was naturalized as an American citizen and plays baseball there. What bothers me is that his aggressive rhetoric, the “F” word in this context, is exactly part of the reason two young immigrants, American citizens, could think of bombing and killing innocent people. It is paart of the very reason that a troubled young man can think of using guns against six-year olds. Sports are great, and focused aggression help you win, but America has a pathological assumption that aggression solves problems. That violence is a solution to all our troubles.
And I’m glad the Red Sox won last night, even though I’m a Royals fan.

A week and one day before Christmas.

Sadness and frustration fill me. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, and the fruitless job search.

I want people here in the U.S. to think about the long term implications of any support they have for unregulated guns. If the reason is to protect ourselves from tyranny, how will we know, and agree that we know, that tyranny is here? Once we know, and commit to action, what will that mean for our way of life? The U.S. military is too powerful for a band of rebels to overcome unless there is massive influx of state-of-the-art arms, and personnel trained to use them. And if that happened, and civil war broke out, our life as we know it would collapse. The economic advantages and international prestige Americans now have, will be gone. Gone. Gone. Then what?

Will the resulting “freedom” be what we really wanted? It will be only if it is the “freedom” a minority of people wanted. I fear that minority is the conservative people who would have us living back in the 19th century where women and people of color had no rights. The “freedom” called for by evangelical Christians is a “freedom” I fear and abhor.

Perhaps we need violent overthrow in this nation, but to what end? And along the way, do so many people have to die? Murdered in incidents completely unrelated to any struggle for freedom?

I think not.