Arm yourselves!

 A lot of people are talking about arming themselves against the unrest they fear will engulf our relatively safe country. I mean people who weren't already arming themselves and preparing to live in their little fantasy forts when everything collapses. That's fine as far as it goes, but if the apocalypticists get their wish, the period of violence and shortages will outlast the supplies of nearly everyone. The best-prepared of the extremely wealthy will be warlords. Everyone else will live tenuous lives, trying to find a place in their service or a fugitive life avoiding them.

Conflict resolution is difficult at the best of times, and we're definitely not entering the best of times. A slim majority of American voters decided that they're completely finished accommodating anyone they don't like. Some of the voters choosing the dictator cared so little for any of the other branches of government that they didn't bother to fill in any selection below the top spot. They can't wait for that big hammer to fall on everyone that they view as a nail.

Eradication of opposing viewpoints is tempting. Who hasn't had a momentary -- or longer -- flash of rage and imagined carpet bombing an imaginary gathering of opponents in a glorious fireball? There! That'll teach 'em! It might, for a while. But the treatment must be applied frequently. It can get out of control. So we use economic pressure instead. Deny employment and housing to "undesirables" and to people who have failed to thrive in the existing system. As a country, we do use military force and the threat of it. As individuals, armed citizens use the threat of death to stifle disagreement. This is the world they think they want to live in. How soon before shootouts become everyday occurrences? I know they already are, but they're not everywhere yet. How long before we bring back dueling? So many things wrong with that, but it's a natural outgrowth of a society structured on cruelty and force.

Violence can be inserted into society in a number of ways. I'm sure that the people eager to initiate it imagine specific scenes in which they prevail over their clearly inferior foes. When it comes to deadly force, you want to dish it out, not take it. Look at the evolution of warfare: armaments were developed to inflict damage on opponents while receiving as little as possible in return. The ideal battle ends in extermination or rapid surrender by one side. It's not a game. It's pest control.

You might get away with a threat display, but if that fails then what? Your threat is less effective if you yell it from behind a protective object. And that assumes that the object you might hide behind will actually stop a bullet.

Your best defense is often to run like hell. In an unstructured confrontation, it's all variables. Can you run? Where can you run? What can you hide behind? How are you armed? Do you have enough ammunition? Is your adrenaline making you shaky? Are you not as ready as you thought you would be? How can you really be ready for someone trying to kill you?

Whether our country survives this crisis and returns to therapy in search of sanity, or just degenerates the rest of the way, we might consider setting up recreational death facilities where consenting adults can try out deadly confrontation on willing foes in a sealed environment. Forget wussy paintball. The blood is real. Flesh is torn, bone is shattered. Losers die. Even winners might die, depending on how ferocious the exchange was. Whoever draws the last breath is the victor. Just leave everyone else out of your personal drama. But who are we kidding? Dragging in helpless bystanders is part of the fun, isn't it?

Initiators of violence love the power trip. They take control of the lives of everyone around them. Maybe they don't have perfect control of the outcome, but for as long as they present a threat, everyone has to react to them. If they aren't as good at it as they thought, their moment is brief. Just because you start something doesn't mean you will be able to finish it.

Even if you plan to act only defensively, you need to practice, practice, practice, with live rounds, so that your muscle memory is as ingrained as possible with the actual weight and recoil. You need to shoot in different positions and situations, at least some of the time without hearing protection, so you're ready for the actual volume of sound. Or maybe you will get lucky, whip off just the shot you need when you need it, and scamper away to run another day.

Civilization is nice. It's comfortable. Only a fucking idiot looks forward to its collapse and the hell that follows. Tough guys of all genders like to growl that anyone who gives up liberty for safety will have neither. That's one of those logic trails that leads to a scorched landscape of constant killing, as we do nothing to restrain murderous impulses because doing so would mean giving up the freedom to indulge our wrath. Freedom in that case belongs only to anyone ruthless, powerful, well-armed, and skillful for exactly as long as it takes for their luck to run out anyway.

The military forces that defend our very own Land of the Free begin their careers by giving up their freedom. It's a very rule-bound life. Freedom of religion means that believers get to give up their personal freedom for the sake of satisfying the rules of their faith. We give up freedom all the time, for very sensible and grownup reasons. You might say it's fine if it's voluntary, but once you're in it it's coercive. The military has disciplinary options including imprisonment and , in extreme cases, death. Religions dangle the threat of eternal damnation over you if you stray. You can resign from the service or be dishonorably discharged. You can serve your hitch and take a regular discharge. You can quit your religion and take your chances with the eternal damnation, or sidestep over to another religion which will curtail your freedom. Point is, if you participate in a society of any kind, you will face restraints.

Even if you're in the militia of your favorite post-apocalyptic warlord you can only engage your enemies in specific ways. Go rogue and you might make your boss nervous. You get no job security when you work for a warlord who doubts your loyalty.

I owe my life to two world wars

 On this Armistice Day, I think about the military service of my grandfather, whom I barely met, and of his only son, my father.

Although both of them were American, my father's parents met in France. I know even less of his mother than I do of his father, because of the way that circumstances broke up their family years later, so I don't know why she was in France, but Grandpère, as we knew him, went there with the American military forces. I don't even know how they met, because the endgame of their family was so difficult for my father that we let him tell us what he wanted, when he wanted. Whether he was dealing well with the trauma or not, he had plastered over it heavily to hide the cracks. He could not let it bother him, because his profession depended on strength and invulnerability.

After the Great War, my father's parents lived in Paris, where Grandpère attempted to continue his operatic singing career. He'd been emerging as a new talent in the Chicago area before the US entry into the conflict in Europe pulled him away. I have no idea whether he was further hampered by any carnage he might have seen or perpetrated, but the operatic career did not take off. Still, the couple were living a comfortable life as my father recalls it, until the 1929 stock market crash sent its economic waves through the wider world. At least that's what the young child was told was the cause of the family's rapid decline in fortunes and living spaces. But they were starting to rebuild by the late 1930s, only to be displaced again by a troublesome German. They left France in 1939 as World War II broke out across Europe. They landed in New York.

The family situation deteriorated, with his mother hospitalized and his father going off in search of work and -- I'm guessing -- a measure of solace, based on what little I know of the events. My father was left to live at a friend's house while he finished his last year at a pretty fancy prep school, where he was a scholarship student, not a rich kid riding daddy's money to educational credentials appropriate to the business he would inherit. One of his classmates inherited the New York Times. Meanwhile, Dad ended up fending for himself, working for a boat yard on City Island, for a bike shop, and in the offices of the Boy Scouts of America. He'd been a scout since his childhood in France, and was an Eagle Scout in every respect.

By this time, America was in the war. My father had gone to college, entering MIT, but all of the stresses on him hurt him academically. His only achievement was on the water, kicking ass in sailboat races for the school team. The coach at the Coast Guard Academy suggested that he enlist, and then apply to take the academy entrance exam. The Coast Guard Academy took applicants solely on merit, without congressional appointments. This my father did. He expected to get sent off to drive landing craft onto beaches, but instead ended up in a construction detail in Florida, and other odd bits, before entering the academy in 1945.

Meanwhile, my mother was growing up in central New Jersey, and chose Connecticut College as her next step after high school. Adjacent to the academy, the all-women's school provided a convenient dating pool for the all-male inmates across the road. Thus the streams of life eventually converged.

During the years of the Korean Conflict, my father had been on ice breaker duty in the Arctic, and on Baffin Island, building and manning a LORAN station. The fight against global communism had many fronts. His later trips to Europe to discuss search and rescue agreements with friendly governments also included navigational enhancements that would aid in the guidance of doomsday weapons against the USSR, back when those had to be more personally delivered.

Over the course of his career, the Coast Guard evolved from a very military organization shaped by its wartime and Cold War activities, to an "agency," under the Department of Transportation. The ships still had guns, but fewer, and smaller. At that, they'd never bristled with the armament sported by naval vessels. Even so, the world I was born into had short hair and attempts at household discipline commensurate with a family in service to its country. But the 1960s were coming.

My father attended the US Naval War College in Newport, RI, in the school year 1964-'65. Thus, my older brother and I attended a local school our parents chose. It was my first experience as a "new kid," but in a navy town with not only the War College but a regular base, transient students were common. I was only in third grade, but I understood that my father believed that our adventure in Vietnam was a bad idea. His conviction was built on practical considerations, risk-benefit analysis, and the difficulties of counterinsurgency for the conventional military forces, it wasn't bleeding-heart hippie bullshit. Nevertheless, his position didn't help him in the more gung-ho climate that developed around the domestic politics of the war.

Through various ups and downs, triumphs and setbacks, he stuck it out, achieving, among other things, the first two seasons of all-year navigation through the Great Lakes in the mid 1970s. Wherever he served, he solved many more problems than he left for others to solve.

My father remained in the Coast Guard until 1979, retiring as a captain. He had been passed over on his first flag board, where existing admirals review aspiring admirals, and everything they know about each other gets weighed in the decision. It's not uncommon to need a couple of shots to make it, if at all, but after about 35 years he was ready to try life on the outside.

A few years ago, well after his retirement, our family was sitting around considering alternate courses our lives could have taken. My father said that he had wished that his family had stayed in France during the Nazi occupation. They could have done it, others did. I felt myself disappear. If he had stayed there, none of his children would be here, though he might have had other children. The specific entities created by his union with my mother would not have happened. If the war had not displaced him, he would have stayed, they would have stayed. My parents would not have met.

This doesn't make me grateful to Hitler or happy that things worked out the way they did. If I never existed I would never know it. But it was startling to consider how tremendous world upheavals led to families like mine, completely unrelated to the historical issues of the conflicts, but entirely the product of the movements of the little people caught up therein. There must be millions of us who are war children without ever being near a war.

Veterans Day again

Military service is the ultimate endorsement of the concept that your government knows what's best. Otherwise why would it be worth the potential sacrifice of your life?

Those who serve are frequently brave and noble. That does not mean the causes in which they are expended are always equally so.

Honor those who served, for the reasons they thought they were serving. Cherish the times it was true. But never deny that not every call to arms really manages to serve a higher purpose and a better future. In a better future we wouldn't spend so much time trying to kill each other.