Call It What You Will. It Ain't Freedom.

France is moving to enact sweeping powers that would allow State of Emergency measures against the potential of terror that looms throughout Europe, but is primarily being forced upon France. Disregard, if you can, that porous borders in Europe make such measures somewhat futile.

Back here in America, 31 Governors of this great nation have decided to publicly announce a block of any Syrian refugee's into their states in the wake of a potential Syrian connection to the ISIS claimed massacre in Paris.

Disregard, if you can, that temporary Visa's are somewhat easy for any European to get when seeking to set foot on American soil.  Forget as well that any state in this union offers instant and unfettered access to every free human being that lives in any other state.  Blocking Syrians from 31 states would only work to keep those 31 states from the potential economic benefit as America vets and scrapes the cream off of the top, taking the best of Syria's migrants. Between this blocking of Syrian's and the decision to block Medicare expansion, GOP governors will soon be notorious for two of the worst economic decisions in the history of state politics.

Let's advance our American imagination right into the realm that France is now,  taking a State of Emergency vote that could soon allow them random search and seizure rights as well as other emergency infringements upon the rights of its citizens.  If what we fear is really worthy of the concern that some have expressed, WE the People should be arming ourselves against this fear just as some American's say WE should.

What will Freedom look like in the future?

Such ideas rose as suggestions again when last our theater's were under arrest and our schools were under attack.  Some American's even think we should place more guns inside of our schools so that kids can make it home safe each day.



Home Of The Free.........Land of The Brave?

We know ourselves to be the brave people of America, the most free land on earth.  Freedom is our namesake.  Our flag stands for Freedom and our way of life is supposed to reflect it.

If our best hope for safety is the hope that WE never have to use the gun that is hiding on our hip, then why carry it?  If you really anticipate having to thwart terror before you finish a lifetime in America, aren't you leaving home with the real acceptance of being the dead victim of terror or worse, a mentally or physically wounded survivor of it?

When the day comes that we choose to arm ourselves just to go to the grocery store- or we plant some pistols in our schools so children can learn without worry of gun play- we can choose to call our way of life anything that sounds reasonable.

Just don't call it freedom. 

Movie Going Just Ain't What It Used To Be

Long hours with little kids at the discount movie theater was a mainstay when my kids were younger. Now, with only one high school senior left at home, free times don't automatically fill themselves like they did when we had a full house to raise, educate and entertain. Golf has been great with helping me to establish my post-parenting identity, but I'm still waiting for the Misses to catch the bug. In the meantime, movies have doubled as a time taker and a date maker for two people who have let our children dictate our lives, dates and movie choices for longer than either of us care to admit.

Unsure about his sanity, a Colorado jury was unable to decide unanimously to
execute James Holmes who will now serve life in prison without parole.

In the past year and a half- now that our kids only hang out with us when they crave the comforts of parents- we've seen several movies despite living in Colorado and despite living close to Aurora, and despite the copy cat theater shootings that my wife and I have done our best to ignore given the fact that we pre-planned the movie going commitment a few months before James Holmes tried to place movies beneath golf on our "Don't Do" date list.

I'm not sure when the damn broke or if we ever felt as comfortable as we pretended to feel when carrying on after Aurora's massacre, but lately I have noticed that my wife has to hold the popcorn and eat at it nervously like I used to do when I was the keeper of the corn and concerned that she would eat up my share. As for me, I now take a side posture that offers me a loving view of my best friend for more than a quarter century and I rub her back while I scan the theater and wait for my turn at the popcorn. I gladly take upon my role in our movie preparation process in an effort to lovingly convey that I'm clear on the popcorn pecking order and clear on every suspicious character in the room as well.  In doing so, she gets the comfort of sitting through the entire movie capturing details that I often miss because of that squeamish guy who needs to stand up occasionally for circulation or bladder reasons, so he sits near the exit and moves a lot.

The truth is, a movie had better be really damn good these days to take away the anxiety of enduring the process, especially as copy cat killers keep losing their minds at movies.  My wife silently noticed my uneasiness some time ago yet comforted herself in the fact that I was on high alert so that she didn't necessarily need to be.  Maybe its just coincidence or the fact that people often behave oddly in a really really dark room and we never really noticed before, but it seems to us that we get at least one oddball every time we go to a movie these days.  I don't even think to tell my wife that our own squeamish reaction to other squeamish movie go'ers could categorize us as the oddballs that somebody else is blogging about right now because I don't really think she wants to be seen in that frame of reference.

Oddball become us, especially in light of the fear of film that grows with each theater attack.  If you don't already have a portion of Netflix stock, these theater shootings are a ready made reason for a growth in direct to Netflix productions versus the traditional Hollywood film release that  doesn't feel as safe as it used to feel. Come to think of it, Netflix stock split in July (7 to 1) and I would imagine that board room members from the company have credited the James Holmes effect for increased sales that lead to the historic stock split.

 After 9-11 we fought back hard for our American sense of normalcy, whatever that is for each of us individually.  Despite the horror of seeing our beloved towers fall, we knew that this was an anomaly. A failure in imagination as its become.  This was a lightning strike that kills violently but happens rarely.  If you live and work in a big city with big buildings, you might still be coming to grips with your own failed imagination, and you dream the worst dreams now that  Oklahoma City, Columbine, 9-11, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook or whichever act of terror gave you cause to dream the worst.

Yet nothing seems quite as universal as movie going, and movie going just ain't what it used to be.

Touching Our Guns Drives Many American's Crazy

Guns don't kill people. especially since crazy people will kill with or without guns. I felt the need to clear up the image of guns since gun sales double every time we even hint about weapon laws

James Holmes is crazy.

Not like you and I who all suffer from some level of mental instability at times.  James Holmes is at war with voices in his own head, and the voices took over on one Dark Night.  In his own words- spoken to his own psychologist prior to the Dark Knight movie release that inspired Holmes to color his hair and boobie-trap his apartment with bombs since he would likely die in a hail of bullets- Holmes was losing the war within himself.

Is killing James Holmes the right way
to stop the rise of more crazed killer's?

What could we have learned from
the mind's of Klebold and Harris?

Sentencing that Boston Marathon murderer to death seems agreeable to the blood lust region of the black side of my heart.  Killing Holmes doesn't feel the same for me.  In fact, keeping him locked up in a jail and not a sophisticated psyche ward for crazed killers waiting on justice seems off tilt as well.  Is a police detective or the FBI actually the best first interview for criminals of this sort?

Typically, the kind of gunfire that takes more of our societal purity ends with the death of the gunmen, so exploring the minds of our crazed killers is mostly uncharted seas.  Rarely, to almost never, do we get to explore the mind of a societal rapist' who we think capital punishment will justify.  Is their death and our ignorance truly bliss or can we seek to learn from the minds of terror?

Imagine a chance to talk to Klebold and Harris.  What directions could they give us towards dealing with people like them?  Maybe we could try to convince Holmes to help solve a plot similar to his own by someone with problems similar to his own.  Could an animal find a propensity to protect as even a killer grizzly does at times?  If we saw past the animal that Holmes appears to be, could we learn to help avoid the kind of animal Holmes and others have become?

If we are never able to explore the minds of another domestic terrorist, is it reasonable to at least keep crazy people away from certain tools of death- or monitor them if they purchase one or more of these tools as Holmes did in preparation for that fateful day?  Might many off these same people- especially those already seeking help like Holmes was- actually consent to being monitored during their mental warfare before they're losing too bad to ask anymore?

If that sounds too much like gun control, I apologize to anyone that I've offended.  Your weapons are safe, so please don't double and triple your personal armory whenever you hear the words crazy people and guns in the same conversation.

We're talking about James Holmes kind of crazy.  Not you.

Capital Punishment Is Necessary But Complicated

A quarter century ago I met the woman who would provide me the love of 5 beautiful daughters and the benefit of 25 years of wedded bliss.

I knew that she was the one for me when our first phone conversation became a 12 hour marathon that ended with the sun rise and ran the gamut from marriage to capital punishment.  The former we both seemed agreeable to, the latter I have recently agreed that she was right and I was wrong (the secret to 25 years marriage).

9-11 might have been an act of terrorism against America, but the response was the equivalent of capital punishment, and even a pacifist like me could relate to the emotion.  I never believed Sadaam Hussein was the right person to hold accountable for the crime, nor were the already war tattered mountains of Afghanistan a worthy place to chase after Bin Laden, the presumed mastermind of it all. What I did believe is that seeing bombs on television would help vulnerable Americans feel like they'd responded to the highest level of evil- enacting a version of retaliatory capital punishment, and it felt good to me too.

Years after we married, a dear friend came to me for support of her golf tournament designed to honor the memory of her murdered son and his girlfriend who were killed because he was scheduled to testify against a  killing that he witnessed at a party.  When Sir Mario Owens was finally convicted for the murder of Javad Marshall-Fields and his girlfriend Vivien Wolfe,
I didn't change my view of capital punishment, but I found myself suddenly eager to shoot her son's killer dead just to ease the pain of her loss.

In the wake of the recent Dzhokhar Tsarnaev conviction in the Boston marathon killings, we return to the mirrored reflection we always confront every time we decide that killing a man is the best way to deal with killing a man.  Places like Boston become more challenged in their moral convictions since they are a state firmly opposed to capital punishment. Yet, even Boston found a way to try Tsarnaev in a jurisdiction (federal) that would allow a jury to kill him if they saw fit.  Once again, even this pacifist would happily put the bullet into the brain of Tsarnaev to ease the pain of those most harmed by his brutality.

Personally, I have never seen death as a worse option to being beaten or molested for years in a prison, but Tsarnaev would likely miss out on that form of prison life even if he avoids death.  If sentenced to life, he likely gets sent to ADX near Florence, Colorado, a VERY expensive maximum security prison that is built to avoid escape, or the kind of prisoner interaction that might encourage escape attempts.  Extra heinous criminals that find their way to ADX are secured and separated in a manner that isn't quite as interactive or vicious as traditional prison.  With six levels of security, ADX inmates have to earn their way into general population interaction. Critics of this location have called the prison the Alcatraz of the Rockies or a cleaner version of hell.

Will Colorado sentence James Holmes to death?

Our uneasiness with disposing of dead weight made us give Tsarnaev the best lawyering we could imagine for the pursuit of saving his life. For the man who was partially responsible for the worst act of terrorism on American soil since 9-11, we give the best representation our system can imagine. In addition to super lawyer Judy Clarke, Tsarnaev received 3 additional public defenders including one who speaks Russian, Tsarnaev's native language.   If sentenced to life in prison, Tsarnaev will join another of defense attorney Clarke's popular clients, Ted Kaczynski (the unabomber), who was saved from death himself thanks to Clarke, and is currently residing in Florence, Colorado as well.

Killing Tsarnaev will not come without years of delay and appeal, both on our dime and at our expense.  Once the appeals run out, finding the drugs to kill Tsarnaev will be a challenge too.  Currently, the states that love to kill people are down to their last few doses of capital punishment cocktails since drug companies that make these meds don't want to be associated with the botched killings that are becoming more prevalent from our lack of skill at capital punishment.  By the time Tsarnaev gets his just deserts, medicated capital punishment's might go by the wayside unless some medicine company gets into the death business soon.


Although any medication can be fatal when used in dangerous doses or combinations, medications of all sorts are originally designed for the opposite purpose of capital punishment.  Even when they help capital punishment achieve its purpose, no medication  or combination of  meds will ever react the same given to different people.  Just as alcohol effects each of us differently, so do murderous cocktails, and these repeated botched killings are an embarrassment to any forward thinking society.

My bullet to the head idea is rather risky too, in that killing the brain doesn't insure that the body will immediately follow, yet we find this method to be the most humane way of killing cattle.  The guillotine is another oldie but goodie, though I doubt our stomachs will endure rolling heads or spurting blood since we can't handle the convulsive agony with the medicinal route we currently administer.

Way back when I first started courting my wife and challenging her on the question of capital punishment, I asked the question of "who wants the blood on their hands anymore".  Way back when, my would be wife said she would kill them herself, so that angle of argument proved hollow against my boo- but it worked with most.  The killing panels were popular a quarter century ago in which several people took part in the process so that no one knew exactly who administered the lethal injection, thus minimizing the potential for personal guilt.  When the first person sentenced to a medicated death began to slobber and convulse for a few minutes longer than expected, we instantly lost this freedom from guilt as well.

Way back when, my wife didn't argue about marrying me, so I put my energy into trying to convince her  that we should stop spending so much money on capital punishment.  I've dreamed forever of an island of ill repute where those sentenced to death could option to live and survive in an environment where we only provide access to  fresh water.  Every other aspect of survival would be the responsibility of the  islands criminal inhabitants. A new age Alcatraz of sorts, but much further from civilization and built, organized and maintained by the convicts themselves.  If a man can not be reformed to live within the order of society, this idea would force him to conform to societal order in a graphic first hand experience.  The most unruly would likely be killed and disposed of a lot faster than they are within our current system of law and justice, leaving the murderous side of capital punishment to be done by those most comfortable with doing it already.

I know what you're thinking.  WE are way too humane for that sort of idea.  Which is the same thing that I used to say about capital punishment.