Erin says:

 

"BC, NO ONE CAN READ THE FUCKING YELLOW!!!!  Will you stop with the damn yellow print and use a color people can read? Oi!"

 

But BC never prints anything in yellow because he knows it is unreadable. (give me a little more credit, Erin!!)  And so I am wondering if maybe when I print things in other colors they are getting interpreted as yellow by my computer's cousins.  This is fuchsia.  This is red.  This is blue.  This is green.

 

And this is yellow.  Quite bright and useless, as you can see.

 

If anyone could take a minute and tell me what colors they see and/or if they can relate to the complaint, it would be kindly appreciated.  Maybe it's just Erin's two-bit machine!

 

---

 

And the last word on those pesky guns goes to... Tucker Lieberman!!

 

 

I'm a pacifist.  I don't think I have to go into details -- everyone can guess what my personal opinion of guns is.  To show you where my opinion complicates itself, I'll say something in support of gun rights.  "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns," although sloganish, is one of the best points that can be made in favor of retaining gun rights.  The other is the simple question of individual liberty.

I'm not vocal about my position on this issue, because -- especially when it's reduced to liberal vs. conservative, Million Moms vs. NRA -- my position is hard to articulate.  I always have to find the third alternative.  I have to admit that my avoidance of the two major camps is facilitated by the fact that I am not aware that I have ever, in my whole life, met anyone who owns a handgun (although my grandfather had a rifle on the wall that he used in the War).  Because I am not exposed to guns, they are not a reality for me, and the issue is at the bottom of my intellectual things-to-consider list.  If, however, I lived in a neighborhood where gun ownership was the norm, if godforbid my ex-boyfriends all owned guns, I would put a priority on figuring out which legislation I support.
   

I can't abandon my spirituality which is based on nonviolence.  For me, that is Life itself.  But I'm afraid to sweepingly impose my personal spiritual ethic over a nation of hundreds of millions of people, many of whom live in gun cultures that I have no knowledge of.

 

First of all, to impose anything on anyone else is a violation of the nonviolent ethic in its purest form.  Nonviolent conflict resolution involves openness, trust, and love that is freely chosen.  You agree not to bring your guns to the table; you don't send police into other people's houses to confiscate the weapons.  To do so is to resort to violent, oppressive force to solve the problem.  Nonviolence as a way of life must be freely chosen, otherwise it is just another oppressive regime, contradicting its own philosophy.  Secondly, legally prohibiting the sources and symptoms of problems is not the best way to solve those problems, which is why I advocate the shift to spiritual nonviolence.  The law may coerce us into abandoning guns, but the deepest social change can only come out of our own hearts when each of us personally renounces violence.  Policy is not the solution to all issues.  Who we are as people matters a thousand times more.

 

Ever since Grog hit Zor over the head with a rock 60,000 years ago, human violence has been a problem.  It's in our entertainment, it's in our classic literature, it's in the nuances of our vocabulary.  Violence is written into our flesh.  Yes, we can write it out.  But if it could be done as easily as signing a bill to ban weapons, it would have been done eons ago.  The real peace movement has to come from inside each one of us, from where we are, whether we've never seen a gun or own ten of them.  We must be radically changed by peace.  If we outlaw guns, but are not personally changed, we are still operating on the basic caveman system and some document in Washington isn't going to matter.

 

If I have to pick sides, I side with the Million Moms.  I'd show up at their march if I were in town, if only to support the general "peace movement."  But I'm not so naive to think that gun control laws are a quick fix for all gun violence.  Gun control laws are a misdirection (perhaps not so slight) of peace activists' energy.

 

Tucker FormalTuck@aol.com