Goodbye, farewell and amen

This column is the author's final piece in The Hays Daily News, where he worked as a reporter for two years.

Some of my friends have those stupid "Make Art, Not War" bumper stickers. Each time I see one I bristle. Art has never ever ever freed a slave. War has.

Years ago, I stopped — whenever possible — doing business with companies that paste idiotic "no guns" signs on their doors, as if a homicidal maniac on a rampage would see the sign and walk away, dejected. Those signs came into style after the Legislature legalized concealed weapons for those who can pass a background check, and they make about as much sense as it would to replace the walls at every prison in the country with banners that read "no escaping." Rules have never ever ever prevented a murder. A good guy with a gun has.

But this, my parting shot, is not a column about how evil (and that is not too strong a word) gun control is, or about how dumb (also, not too strong a word) anti-war-ism is.

This, my parting shot, is about the pervasive nonsense we see these days, the nonsense that teaches John Q. American to cooperate with muggers so as to avoid further harm, to give them what they want and let the authorities sort it out, to keep his seat on a hijacked airline in hopes of avoiding violence, to not fight.

Last week I read a story about Mark Beverly, an overnight gas-station employee in Roseville, Minn. Beverly was fired after a March 26 incident in which a masked robber entered the store where he worked and attacked a co-worker. Beverly jumped the robber, slammed the bad guy against the counter, and chased him off the premises.

He, evidently, violated company policy because he did not "cooperate" with some guy who was beating up a friend. Resistance to a thief, even to protect an innocent victim, is a firing offense.

At risk of offending the delicate sensibilities of certain Democratic presidential candidates, that is the kind of thinking that led to Hitler invading Poland. Let the Nazis have the Sudetenland. They'll be content with that, and nobody will get hurt. Peace in our time.

Simply put, passivity is going to get us all killed.

On 9-11, when Americans were passive toward their hijackers — doing what they were told to do — their plane crashed into the World Trade Center, killing some 3,000 innocent people. When they fought back the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field; all aboard died but no others were harmed.

This is why I joined the National Rifle Association about a year ago. Each month, the NRA publishes three magazines — one related to hunting, one about sport shooting, one describing legal and legislative action regarding gun rights — to serve three major factions of its membership. But each magazine shares an identical page, called The Armed Citizen. It's a set of news briefs from the last month, from across the country, detailing examples of Jane Q. American defending herself from a burglar, a rapist or a murderer. Sometimes Jane merely brandishes her gun. Sometimes she shoots and kills. But each time, the perpetrator flees or is gunned down, and Jane — the real victim in a real crime — ends up the better for it.

If good people lose the ability or the will to defend themselves from bad people, the world is lost. The stakes are no lower than that.

I've regularly written columns for six years now. And in this one, my parting shot, I say if I've convinced just one person in all that time of just one thing, I hope it's that we must never ever ever be content to let the authorities sort it out. We must never ever ever refuse to fight back, no matter what company policy is. We can never ever ever afford to sit in our airline seat and hope the hijackers won't use the plane to blow up the World Trade Center. We must always be prepared to fight back and crash the plane into an uninhabited field instead.

Yes, a few people could get hurt. But if we let the bad guys have free reign, the consequences will be far worse.

Indiana Jones and the legacy of the passive voice

In all of my career, I've not been chased from a cave by a humongous boulder. I haven't attacked a tank from horseback. I've never witnessed human sacrifice. And I have not flown around the world, hunted the Holy Grail, crash-landed in the Himalayas, or escaped a Nazi dirigible.

Yet.

But I was Indiana Jones for Halloween last year.

I still wear the hat sometimes, even when it gets me made fun of. (I also have a gimmick bullwhip — I couldn't find a real one — and a safari-style shirt.)

Anyway, the tale I tell today began a few weeks ago. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" opened today in theaters, and I wanted a local tie to this national event of the most import. So I called the history department at Fort Hays State University, from whence I graduated some 12-1/2 months ago.

I was hoping to find a professor or student there who first embarked on the grand adventure of history because of some inspiration they found in the first three Indiana Jones movies. So I put out a few feelers, asking former fellow students if they — or anyone they knew — fit that description. No such luck.

I asked a former professor the same question, and I got a slight chuckle for an answer.

"No," the professor told me. "But what would be an interesting story is if you found someone who said they were inspired to study history by Indiana Jones, and they found out it was exactly what they expected."

My professor was alluding to the true, real-life stories experienced by many historians. They are not stories of archaeological adventure, of seizing artifacts from long-buried hiding places, of racing the forces of evil for some relic with awesome, untold powers. Much of the study of history is done from inside a library. Lots of it is reading and writing. And writing. And reading.

This professor frequently provides his students with a "list of forbidden practices." They do not mention desecration of burial grounds or improper artifact collection techniques. They described how not to write a history paper, with a host of common errors young writers make; violation of the forbidden practices list could result in the lowering of a grade.

They include items such as "don't use contractions" (oops), and "no one-sentence paragraphs" (again, guilty).

The point is, historians usually are much more concerned about the passive voice than they are about spiders and snakes and Nazis on our tail.

But I don't have aspirations of academics and I don't intend to write historical dissertations. (Mostly, because it would require me to work.) So effective historiography (yes, that's a real word, and no, I don't really know what it means) is not my chief concern. I like to think I'm an effective writer, but when I was still in college I constantly struggled between the competing styles of concise news stories and deep history papers.

For what it's worth, I'm incredibly grateful I decided to study history when I did. All of our high school teachers told us "their" subject was the most important for anyone to learn. But I tend to side with the history teachers in that discussion. Because history gives us a few things that are utterly priceless: It shows us the mistakes (and some of them are tremendous) that have been made before, so we can learn from them. It shows us some measure of our quality of life -- when we look at pictures from the Dust Bowl, it's tough to worry about any current woes we face. And it shows us that we should have some respect for what we have -- no society ever to grace the earth has been as prosperous, open, equal and free as ours.

So I am deeply grateful to Indiana Jones. And to the makers of the "National Treasure" movies. And even to those who brought us "Fool's Gold." Because pop culture can — and does — play a huge part in glamorizing historical study, and that is no small thing.

That last point is one I know well. Because I was drawn to history by the likes of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and David Farragut. And, probably just as much, by Indiana Jones.

Dear Barack Obama

Dear Barack Obama:

I grew to like you over the last year.

I've always thought of you as dangerously naive at best. Eloquent, gifted, genuine, yes. But dangerously naive at best.

I couldn't vote for you -- but not because of your funny name or your lunatic pastor. I couldn't vote for you because you say we should raise taxes (even on the rich, who I'm convinced already pay too much), and because you say we should abandon Iraq (which I'm convinced would be surrendering a war we must win), and because you don't respect the Second Amendment (which I'm convinced should disqualify any politician from any office).

Still, I've liked your message of unity and your ability to inspire. And, since your rise I've hunted, quite frantically, for young conservative leaders with your talent. (To my relief, I found Bobby Jindal.)

And I've long said if you beat Hillary Clinton, you will have done your country a tremendous service. But anymore I'm having a harder and harder time rooting for you.

First came your wife's comment about being proud of America for the first time — conveniently, right after you started winning primaries. Then came your own words about your grandmother, who is just a "typical white person" — a racist, or at least someone with racist tendencies. (I'm a "typical white person," I suppose, and I'm no racist. In fact, little makes me angrier than when it's insinuated I am.)

Sometimes people say things they don't really mean. But this is a pattern.


Last week, we heard your comments about small-town America. Someone at a San Francisco fundraiser asked you why it's so hard for Democrats to win in rural areas. You said:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them ... So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them ..."

Is that a minority? HEY CLETUS, GET THE GUN! (If only we had a job to go to, some time in the last 25 years ...)

Here's a thought: Maybe gun rights voters know gun control laws kill people and steal freedom.

Here's a thought: Maybe some of us have moral objections to an immigration system that forces rule-followers to wait decades for legal status, and rewards border-violators with amnesty.

Here's a thought: Maybe some Americans cling to their church because their pastor is a nice person, because they find love there, because there they have something they can believe in.

Here's a thought: Maybe, just maybe, us simpletons in small towns find it harder to be bigoted than all o' y'all cityfolk. Maybe, in small towns, where everybody knows your name — and how hard you work, if you pay your taxes, how well you treat your neighbors, how often you volunteer in the community, and whether or not you're a good parent — people see the content of your character, so they don't give a hoot about the color of your skin. (But I grew up in a small town where about a third of the population is of a different race than me. What do I know?)

And here's my favorite thought of all: Maybe small-town folks are — really — capable of thinking. All on our own.

You're wrong about why small-town Americans don't vote for Democrats.

We don't vote for Democrats because we're self-reliant so we don't like the government trying to "solve" everything for us. And because you tell your rich friends in San Francisco that we're dumb. And because, each election, whichever one of you is running for president traipses all over the country telling us you have all the answers, that you're the one on our side, that you understand and respect our way of life.

But each time, a little bit here and there slips out — and by the end of the campaign, we can tell what you think about us. And we manage to learn who you really are.

And we see you're just a horse's ass.