Voices
Lately I’ve the privilege to witness the email exchange between two friends on the topic of The Second Amendment and gun ownership. The exchange has been passionate, and to my sense, contentious at times. Yet, the topic represents a nexus of the present state of our society since firearms are a prominent aspect of the American myth. How we think this country, as we understand it, came to be what it is today, has a lot to do with guns. Perhaps nothing is exactly as we think that it is; reality manages to escape our thought forms of it. This seems particularly the case when it comes to what we believe about our country, what the country “stands for,” and events that happen with increasing violent regularity. You know that I am referring to the incidence of school shootings. These are no longer random, exceptional, once-in-a-generation disasters for the community that suffers the outbreak, and for families deprived of a loved one for the rest of members lives.
With those comments I’ll say no more. Here are some wise words written by Gary Snyder.
There are tens of millions of people in North America who were physically born here but who are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally. Native Americans to be sure have a prior claim to the term native. But as they love this land they will welcome the conversion of the millions of immigrant psyches into fellow “Native Americans.” For the non-Native American to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island.
–Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (1990)
