Peace, Please. Or I Just Might Wet My Pants...

I inherited much kindness from my Mum, I am sure of that. I really am the guy who steps in when the meek are being picked on and I’ve been known to have picked up a few unwanted meek friends that way. One minute, you are trying to do a kind thing, the next minute, you are trying to figure out how to get this person to step back a few steps out of your life. It’s not easy knowing just how much intercession is a good thing, and it’s not easy possessing the size and physicality that calls you into these affairs to begin with.

I mean, wholly crap. I am a lover not a fighter. Just ask me!

There really is no easy remedy for human affairs.

(That has got to be the understatement of the pages.)

There is no easy way to get humans to agree on things, as long as we don’t.

(That has got to be the most ignore-gnomic thing I’ve written all morning.)

You know that that is all true when we, as humans, can’t even all agree that settling differences of differing viewpoints and conflicting desires by toys, bullets, and bombs is plainly not cool.

So why do we continue to do it? I don’t know, but I say blame it on the other guy. I mean, why not? They are blaming it on us!

From my father I inherited a mean streak. Not a real mean one, just a sort of mean one. Mean as in mischievous. You know, that twinkle in my eye kind of mean, where you look at me and know you’ve just been had, but you have to wait for the hadness to happen to know how it was gonna happen?

Some grandmas would say - “You’ve got the devil in you, dear, sweet, boy…” and they would be spot on.

That kind of mean streak.

I know Pops had it because in almost every picture I have of me as a child I have just wet my pants. Big giant water oval on my crotch. Big smile on my small face as I am usually holding a fish or trying to stand proud like a little man in a big world.

I wet my pants quite often, apparently, according to the pictorial records we have floating around our family.

Turns out, Pops only thought to get the camera out when there was some mischief to be had. “Scotty wet his pants, quick, get the camera!” Normal days and happy days went by completely unrecorded, which I guess is OK in the grander scheme of things.

This is a picture of me holding a catfish caught in a Mississippi farm pond, with my cousin Patrick in the middle and my older brother Steve, holding all of the sun fish we caught. This was one of those rare pictures where I was allowed to change my pants before the picture was taken. Yes, I peed my pants bringing in this monster on my bamboo pole with my little red and white bobber and my little jar of crickets I caught in the yard.

My brother is really angry with me in this picture. I had something he didn’t have. I had caught the big one and everybody was interested in hearing my tale. My cousin can’t quite figure out what all the fuss is about. He’s seen catfish this big before. Lots of ‘em. Heck, he’d caught catfish like that in rain puddles on his way home from school!

I look at this picture and I wonder… Is this where it all starts? All these big toys and bullets and bombs and all the blood? Do we learn to hate by learning to compete? Is it in our predisposition?

Pops wanted me to follow in his footsteps and join the military when I was young. He had spent 14 years in the Air Force, and it had given him a flying career.

I spent one evening watching youths at a Civil Air Patrol meeting trying to learn to live within a hierarchy of organizational ordering, everyone sporting the same silly haircut, trying to become a cohesive unit and I knew I didn’t belong.

“No sir! Not for me!”

My brother Steve felt the same way, much to my father’s disappointment. We just had different drums to beat, that’s all.

My cousin Patrick joined the Navy and is now a Commander and a psychiatrist. He was in the initial invasion of Iraq. He then did a stint in Okinawa, and is now back in Iraq, doing another tour.

Maybe I’ll ask him, if I ever see him again, about where the impulse comes from to shoot bullets and drop bombs? Does it come from the early years, where we learn to compete with one another?

He’s a shrink. Perhaps he’ll know?

As the world gets smaller and smaller and people get more mixed up with one another, I hope we get it all sorted out.

Peace.


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