BROKEN BODIES – BROKEN HEARTS
I’ve had it with this gun nightmare – enough is too much! No more Mr. Nice Guy for me – as a journalist and broadcaster, I make this solemn oath. I will do all in my power to send to Coventry any politician, Australia wide, who supports the ‘fine tuning’, ‘modifying’, ‘honing’ – whatever the euphemism – of Australia’s current gun laws.
Oh, and I will never vote for them again either!
This issue is above and beyond all others: it is truly about life rod death. Freedom to bear arms is a retreat to barbarism. I can take a reasoned view on the economy – I can be temperate in my assessment of the dock dispute – even coolly assay Wik – but in no way can I find vindication for permitting deadly weapons in the hands of the citizenry.
For unarmed people like myself, it is simply a case of personal safety – of fear. And do know fear of guns: I once had a well-armed neighbor who harbored an abiding hostility towards me. In a sweat of paranoia l would string tin cans across the gate at night. This was a budget security system; the jangling designed to alert me to nocturnal incursions. I wasn’t frightened of the man personally, having traded chest-to-chest insults on many occasions; but I was afraid of his firepower.
So, the multi-murderers are getting younger say the statistics. As above (America), so below (Australia). Normally social trends take about eight years to percolate down-under. Martin Bryant was in his twenties; a similar age to America’s carnage-makers in the late eighties. How to impress upon our more astigmatic leaders that it will be our own impressionable kids who, in a few years. will be spilling the blood of classmates. Family and bystanders?
A current interpretation of an ever- wise Buddhist aphorism asserts that when a child shoots an animal (not to mention a person!), they shoot a hole in their own heart. Over time this results in an autism of pity to another’s pain and torment.
The 11-year-old accused in the Arkansas shooting was proudly given the character credentials, by curiously unmoved family members, of using small birds round the house as target practice; and having recently shot his first duck. Enough compassion loss to self-promote to human targets it seems.
How gratifying during the gun buy-back to witness piles of these ‘weapons of mass destruction’, which automatic firearms surely are, being broken up and burnt. How much pain and torment, for both human and animal did this sanity prevent? How fewer suicides? How many terrorized women and children can now sleep more soundly knowing their menacing menfolk have been disarmed? How many neighbors?!
A personal message to John Howard: For whatever reason, you are standing firm on your gun legislation, I salute you. From your evident passion on the issue, I give you the benefit of the doubt that you do not have ulterior political motives. Your moral commitment to a safer Australia shows the human face of a government so often the target, as it were, of obloquy censure and satire.
The shooters of this world have brought me to tears on more than one occasion; evincing a bewildered grief for people I didn’t even know. Thanks to our prime minister, and his gun-banning supporters across the political divide, there has at least been some pain-sharing in the last two years. How edifying to see the shooters’ faces at their rowdy rallies distorted with frustration at their emasculation. Good!
So what of the vexed question of what, to do with the two young victims? Yes, the killers are victims too, of both their ‘right to bear arms’ society and gun-loving upbringing. For the comfort of the grieving, they should be put away for a very long time, probably life. However due to Arkansas law, juveniles can only remain incarcerated till they are eighteen.
What a travesty of justice if, in a few short years, the mother of one of the limp and bloodied girls bumps into her daughter’s murderer in the supermarket. The agony of the victims’ loved ones will be a life sentence; so why shouldn’t that of the two boys’ families guilty by commission or omission? There are only victims in these shoot-ups, and that’s how it’s going to stay until all guns are removed from the unsteady, and in this case child-sized, hands of the civilian populace.
“What about our need to cull feral animals?” I hear the rural community protest. A nice little earner for the army or the police perhaps? What better target practice? As for shooting as a sport, its main outcome is a perpetuation of the gun culture – ban it.
In Australia power thankfully does not ‘come out of the barrel of a gun’, but from a pencil stub on polling day. I implore all gun-hating Australians to exercise this precious power, every chance they get.
Important Earthschooling Notes
Copyright Alan Whitehead & Earthschooling: No Part of this book, post, URL, or book excerpt may be shared with anyone who has not paid for these materials.
Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss.
END NOTE
Alan has presented dialogue in his writings in an expressive form, where he tries to capture the accent of the person he was with to give his writing more authenticity and to allow the reader to “be with him” in his experience. In no place in his writings is he using expressive language to make fun of or demean the speaker. So, as a person with a linguistics and anthropology degree I find this enriching and informative to me as the reader. Thus, we have made the decision to leave all expressive writing in its original form.
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