Dear ABC

Dear ABC:

During the early '70s my wife and I moved to Fairhope, Alabama in order to attend college at the University of South Alabama. At some point, I took a break from my studies and got a job at the local weekly, a small town newspaper in a small Southern town that was  right out of Norman Rockwell.  

The Courier was run by a wonderful couple, Ford and Edith Cook and what I learned from them went well beyond learning the mechanics of newspapers and printing.

I was part of a group that published The Rearguard, an underground newspaper in Mobile. If you own a giant web press and publish a newspaper once a week, It makes no sense financially - or even mechanically - to leave it idle. The Courier job-printed other newspapers, ours included.

One day an FBI agent came to the paper investigating us. He wanted to know who published the paper as well as a bunch of other specifics. Mr. Cook, although very conservative himself, was incensed. He told him to get the hell out of his office that he was acting un-American and gave him  a lecture about the First Amendment.

You could learn a lesson or two from this great American.

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Cut to the bone

 As is evident in the constant shifts in the conversation about Kirk's killer, we parse out issues through the prism of beliefs and prejudices. It seems we are now going to return to talking about the shooter's personal life and that somehow his presumed justification for carrying out this terrible act is what we should be talking about. 

Cut to the bone - past the gristle and fat of the shooter's motivation - and face the fact of a senseless killing and our seeming acquiescence to this constant mayhem. I have little confidence that it will bring us out of our coma of indolence. Any meaningful action will be lost in the push and pull and the fact of another senseless killing will be just more dust in the wind. 

"Well, shit, what can we do?" Not much could have been done to stop him from going to a campus with which he was apparently very familiar and using what's probably gramp's hunting weapon. But things can be done to make these events less likely. Kirk's killing has now shared the grief with those who oppose doing anything to curb gun violence in the name of the sanctity of the Second Amendment. It's not a defeat to recognize that something has to change, to give up a bit of your absolutism, to belly up to the bar.

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