Change

Change can be hard. If what you are changing from is comfortable or familiar or well worn. The most successful changing comes from a desire to change. It's harder if it's just a need – or unimportant to you – or requires effort or even pain, even if we know it's the right thing to do.

Combined with our scripting – every utterance from your parents, jokes your friends told, good and bad and awkward experiences that form our notion of right and wrong, true or false, evil and good.

I had a friend point out that there is a lack of morality and "God" that she holds responsible for school shootings. I might not agree that this is a problem with him not worshiping a particular deity, but I can look at him (in this case secularly) and say that she's right – the shooter obviously doesn't value human life (a lack of acceptable morality) and his experiences didn't allow him to consider other alternatives.

But we cannot change all of the experiences our children go through (we can affect some), but we can teach kindness, compassion and love secularly as well as religiously. Competition can be healthy, but can also be damaging. We cannot turn out looking at every other being as someone to better.

There are those who feel that teaching our kids that winning is everything and this is where I think we need to change. Children need to be taught to compete with themselves. They need to be taught to think of themselves critically (and objectively – not" I'm failing" – but "what can I do to be better").

There are those that criticize awards for reaching a base goal – attendance awards, for instance, but these serve a purpose. They are not lowering expectations – they are making achievement incremental. And so it needs to be with changing acceptance of others. Tolerance – not ideal, but a base point to start from. Acceptance and eventually collaboration/integration are more positive steps on the path. This relates to race, it relates to age, to sex, to sexuality, to gender preference, to innderstanding and come – to social differences of any kind. We need to move ourselves, as a nation, incrementally towards uloving each other.

The problem is when change is presented, agendas start to engage. There are many that profit off our disenfranchisement from each other – from people that market to "select" groups to politicians who want the divide to be their mechanism to influence voters.

Thoreau is credited with saying "He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and extract a motive power out of the greatest obstacles. Most begin to veer and tack as soon as the wind changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which they can never reach."*

And we need to take other preventative steps in the meantime. This means taking away easy access to things some people love.

We have to teach mutual love knowing some of our folks won't get there in their lifetimes, but their children or grandchildren can. We need a long term focus on this.

I can relate. One of my great pleasures in life is writing and making music – and I do this with guitars. The experience is tactil – just as it is with other physical joys – a part of the joy is in the feel. I own 25 guitars right now (but that fluctuates up and down) and the reason is, each is different – feels different, sounds different, evokes different music from me. It would be hard for me to change my love of this – I've done it for 48 years – since I was 6.

But, if giving this up would save lives, I would have to consider it. I would need to be sure that it would work. There could be people telling me it wouldn't, for their own gain (those who sell me guitars for instance) or others who don't value the life of others as much as their own joy. There would be those that would try to hijack my love of life for other issues – like abortion or religious agendas. I would need to see past that and would need to be sure that my sacrifice would achieve the desired result.

It would be easier if I didn't give up all of my vocation, just the part that primarily made it easier to hurt others. I would view this suspiciously – as a slippery slope – where would it end? And this is where we are at with guns.

Short term, we need to remove access to the deadliest weapons that are commonly available. I recognize there's a reasonably sane part of the population that can use these tools responsibily. But just as we take unsafe toys away (you can't buy lawn darts anymore. Trampolines have been modified to prevent many injuries and nobody sells fireworks as toys anymore - althought they too need more regulation for safety).

This change is hard to accept. It would be like giving up some of my guitars – it's very hard. If I knew it would work – if I could save the lives of children – I would be morally compelled to make that change.

Well, we know that removing AR15s and variants from the street will help. We know it. Gun bans have worked in many other parts of the world. Removing easy access works. It's not to say nobody can have access – it's to say it needs to be substantially different than it is today. No private sales. Registered and owned for a reason, continued proof that we're sane and capable if we do use them.

I'm fortunate. The most pain I inflict with my vocation is that I subject you, my friends, to my music – which you can ignore, turn off or occasionally suffer through. So I get to keep my guitars and hopefully someone somewhere gets joy out of what I do.

With guns, we need to get to that well-regulated place, where they can be used responsibly by those who are capable and are not available to those who are not or don't care to be exposed (this is the right to turn them off – just like you don't need to listen to my music, I shouldn't have to worry about your gun).

You may believe this is a violation of rights – but our rights end where they start to negatively impact others (this is true of anything). We need to provide mechanisms to allow us to coexist understanding that neither of our preferences negatively impact each other – and when they do, we have the ability to, without taking our lives into our hands, let each other know and work it out.

This goes against that scripting, that comfort, our intuition – to sacrifice things we hold dear for the safety of others. But this exists in religion and in the wide world. Many of the people we hold as examples sacrificed significantly, if not everything;

Mother Teresa. Gandhi. Our WWII Veterans who saved humanity. Our philanthropists, the people who work at food banks and animal shelters, those who work tirelessly to cure disease (in the face of inadequate and unsure funding). It's those that protest the inequities in society to affect change.

It's not just guns. It's all of the things that we need to invest in to keep our kids educated and alive. But alive is where we need to start and guns are significant in that area.

I hope we find the strength to change, to compete with ourselves to be better, for everyone's good, rather than against each other to the detriment of some.

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*Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, p. 362, Houghton Mifflin (1906). http://www.captainfletch.com/literature/poetry/thoreauocean.asp