"Our Children Kill Each Other"

tears well in our eyes   

indignation puffs us full   

of righteousness   

at children carrying weapons   

we cry in dismay   

at cold-hearted killers   

living desperate lives in disparate lands   

far from our safe homes   

children as soldiers with an arsenal of death   

not ours   

not our responsibility   

tears well in our eyes   

as we cling to the Second Amendment   

our right to arm our children   

with hatred   

camouflaged in mistrust      

we cultivate our subtext of fear   

creating cold-hearted killers   

within our own homes   

children as soldiers with an arsenal of death   

yet not ours   

nor our responsibility   

tears well in our eyes   

disbelief sucker punches us again   

as our children kill each other   

questions, finger pointing,  and the blame game resumes   

but nothing changes   

while the new order of horror   

nurtures cold-hearted killers   

within our own homes   

children as soldiers with an arsenal of death   

ours   

our responsibility  

   

Copyright 2012 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

“Old Friends and New Disappointments”

            The responses of various friends to national and world events have left me disillusioned. Did I ever know the true spirit of woman who sits in mass daily and yet defends the attack on the Capitol? Did I misjudge the friend who insists her right to refuse to mask and vaccinate during this pandemic outweighs my rights to stay healthy? Did I naively trust the man who now insists he must own and display an AR-15 when I visit?

            Have these people always been so different from my vision of them, and have they donned masks throughout our years of friendship? Or have they changed without my noticing? Can these relationships recover, or will these disappointments color our interactions from now on?

            Already, there’s less contact initiated by these friends towards me because I know the insurrection at the Capitol endangers our democracy even as those supporters of our former president defend The Big Lie more than a year later. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated for COVID-19, wear masks, and social distance because it’s the moral choice for not just our country, but for the world. I cannot “un-see” the photographs of my friends and family arming for a war that they aspire to begin.

 

Copyright 2022 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

"Wants VS Needs"

         I’ve read some pretty mean comments on social media recently. Insulting words lashing out, sometimes with no obvious reason for the inflammatory temper tantrums. Suddenly, a conversational steam turns ugly. I sit dumbfounded as I read through cruel, malicious responses from people I thought to be reasonable—and nice.

         Most of the time, I try to understand both sides of the issue. If I weigh in (many times I bite my tongue and keep away from my keyboard), I attempt to find factual support for the issue at hand. Sometimes I balance myself onto a middle ground. Occasionally, I respond with well thought out deliberation. Fortunately, I have a blog wherein I can pull together longer reflections.

         In my dream-state last night, I mulled through this-n-that in an effort to distill recent events into some kind of cohesive theory that applies to a bigger picture, and I tossed-n-turned myself into a dichotomy of wants versus needs.

         Many people state belief systems as though they are needs. They need to follow their religious doctrines.  They need to spank their children—and everyone else’s, too. They need to defund programs like education and welfare. They need to take care of their own—even if that means making decisions that harm others. They need to own guns. They need to stop abortion. They need to segregate themselves way from minorities. They need to prepare for Armageddon.

          Whenever these people speak out, they truly feel that these things are essential requirements for their safety and happiness—for their duty to family, or church, or country. Their insistence that things are needs lends a level of urgency and unreasonable panic to their daily lives. When they feel that these needs are threatened, they respond with illogical anger and boiling hostility. They view their world as always threatened by someone else encroaching upon or diminishing their basic needs and rights. It must be rough living with so much distress and disharmony.

         I wish I could wave a magic wand over these people and shift their mindset to the fact that all of these things are wants, and not needs, because the urgency and fear shifts dramatically with this worldview.

Copyright 2018 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

“People Kill People—With Guns”

Whenever the phone rang in the middle of the night, I’d sit straight up in bed, “Dad’s been shot!” the first thought hitting my sleepy brain.

Fortunately, that call never came. My father, a deputy sheriff for Galveston County, never fired his weapon once (while on duty) in all of his years in law enforcement.

         Dad loved his work. Although he’d come home looking like an arsenal—riffle, shotgun, hand guns, bag loaded with ammunition, he prided himself on his ability to rely upon his communication skills in dealing with “problems” at work. He often spoke of the dangers of the lenient gun laws in Texas. He complained that the danger in his work came more from domestic disputes than hardened criminals. A drunken and angry husband with a gun in the dresser drawer posed more threat to my father’s safety than any other situation.

         He stressed that it didn’t matter what kind of class people took for learning about guns and weapons because angry, or drunk, or drugged people do stupid things. He had many examples of “regular Joes” and their mishaps with weapons.  

Dad described one call he answered late one night. A man, distraught and depressed, stood in the middle of his front yard, weeping. He aimed his shotgun at his wife, threatened to kill her and then himself. This man held a good job, lived in a good neighborhood, and practiced his religious beliefs every Sunday. He didn’t buy a gun to kill his wife, or himself, or my father. Yet one terrible night, he found himself in a standoff with policemen. Captured in spotlights, his power amplified by his weapon, he stood ready to kill.

         I know some of you chant, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

         I don’t think you listen to just how plain ignorant that sounds.

         Maybe you’d have a different view if it was your father who stood within range of that weapon and had the job of diffusing the situation without loss of life. Maybe you’d understand that every gun within reach of the public, even “good, honest, hard-working citizens” meant possible threat to my father and other law enforcement agents.

         Whenever we hit an election year, I think of my father answering a call at some Joe the Plumber’s house where this upright citizen, who’s never broken a law, descends into desperation and despair. I want the laws to change to where the weapons this man has within his home don’t turn him into a tragedy because he’s capable of firing hundreds of rounds into his neighborhood.

   

                 Karl F. Abrams

Copyright 2012 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman