Things I Learned from R. B. (May 10th, 2020)

Jonathots Daily Blog

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Episode 14

We stayed in Sacramento as long as Sacramento stayed with us.

Although I’m uncomfortable with the comparison, I must candidly admit that our family was a little bit like musical locusts. We moved into an area, found out who might be interested in having us share our talents, and after about six months, we established some lovely relationships—but had eaten through all the crop of possibilities.

Since we had decided to keep working at our mission instead of becoming merely “gainfully employed,” we had to make a decision.  Truthfully, our landlord was requesting that we give deep thought to the matter. It was tough.

The guys were a little older and it was time for them to be settling in somewhere to begin their own lives. One of my sons met a delightful lady whom he loved dearly—and has ended up being his wife for twenty-five years. He hardly wanted to leave her to go back to being a traveling man.

We talked it over as a family, voted as a family and we left our home in Sacramento as a family.

We weren’t sure where to go.

To the west was the Bay area of California—from where we had just come. Not many prospects there.

To the south was Los Angeles, where dreams go to die.

To the east was a lot of Rocky Mountains before arriving at a lot of rocky land.

Above us was the Pacific Northwest, where we had not spent much time.

Also, R. B. was there.

Communication with him after the Thanksgiving holiday had been spotty, but the vibrations from his spirit were tenuous, and sometimes even a bit frightening.

I made a decision on a whim and then convinced my family it was a great idea. I didn’t do that very often, but I thought Washington and Oregon would be good for us and our music—and we might be helpful and nurturing to R. B.

When I shared with R. B. that we would be coming up, he was less than enthusiastic. I understood why—he’d dug a hole for himself where he was partially comfortable but wouldn’t be happy for others to see him inside the tomb.

I went anyway.

However, R. B. did provide one immediate blessing.

A fellow he knew had a five-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac in Tacoma which he wanted to rent—and he would give it to us for only five hundred dollars a month.

It was beautiful—at least, to us.

For the first time in their whole growing-up period, my sons would have their own rooms. (Usually in motels, it was a corner with about two feet of space.)

We settled in, scheduled a few things and the money started rolling in our direction. We had decided to pay rent weekly, so every Monday morning, after our weekend’s adventure, we drove to our landlord’s house and gave him one hundred and twenty-five dollars.

He thought it was cute—but I knew it was wise. I was aware how quickly money disappears in a family of five.

Although my sons were disappointed to leave Sacramento, the prospect of this new home with a huge garage did ease the pain.

We wanted to stay for a while. We wanted to see if we could help R. B. escape his depression and loneliness.

For it had been a year-and-a-half since he had held a job. He was living off credit cards and finding that they, too, were much like the locusts.

We tried to love him, but R. B. was unwilling to see us very often. He was horrified at the prospect of us beholding his living situation.

We had come a long way to a foreign land—to have shelter but feel very foreign.

I did not know what was going to come of our quest, or if there was some doorway into the heart and life of R. B.

 

Overreaction … January 18, 2013

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Slight traces of mercury are found in apple juice in containers from Upper State New York. As a precaution, a nationwide recall is made of all apple juice, not only from that particular company, but also from all distributors for a season, to ensure the public safety.

An overreaction.

A report is made that a razor blade is found in apples given out at Halloween to children near Cleveland, Ohio. A warning is broadcast across the nation via the media, informing parents of this danger. So many of these loving individuals take their children’s candy to the local hospital, where free inspections and X-rays of the treats are made available. Other parents (including yours truly) make sure they comb through every piece of sweet so that their children will not be damaged. It ends up being an isolated incident, in one case in one community.

So all the concern was certainly an overreaction.

Arsenic is discovered in several capsules of Tylenol near Chicago, Illinois. Within hours, all Tylenol products are pulled off the shelves, quarantined and put to the test, to make sure the public is protected from this poisonous outbreak. Once again, it was limited to that single store.

One might consider this an overreaction.

In the Pacific Northwest, ecoli turns up in some fresh spinach, making several people ill and causing the death of one. Within twenty-four hours, all fresh spinach is removed from the produce aisles, to shield us all from what turns out to be a very narrow spectrum of danger.

Likewise, toys that came from China had tiny particles of lead in the paint, forcing concerned parties to cease accepting shipments and to physically take all such products off the shelves.

An overreaction?

And now, twelve years later, we are still removing our shoes, having all of our possessions radiated and even being frisked at airports because of what happened on September 11th, 2001. Simultaneously, due to that tragedy, a Patriot Act was quickly voted into place, which limited freedoms and allowed for personal intrusions into our lives when it was deemed necessary to guard the common good.

An overreaction?

The truth of the matter is, if tomorrow’s news cycle generated a story in which a young man in Atlanta, Georgia, threw a coconut cream pie at one of his fellow-students in the cafeteria at Oglethorpe High School, in a matter of just a few hours, coconut cream pies would be removed from all cafeterias in our schools, deemed a recent danger. An investigation would be set into motion to determine when and how the treat could be returned to the menu.

Certainly an overreaction.

Yet when the Newtown Twenty-six were lying in their own blood in an elementary school, the American public, rather than producing a righteous overreaction by ceasing further commerce in the matter of weapons, ammunition and insisting on a full investigation of the kind of mental illness that produces such a macabre fiasco–yes, instead of this NORMAL overreaction that Americans would grant to a bunch of suspected spinach, the public instead went out and bought more guns than they ever have before–especially interested in the assault rifle used by the assailant who murdered our children.

No overreaction. Really no debate.

We are settling for a contentious conversation about how we can continue to be mediocrely prepared for such mayhem, while continuing to put an amendment in first place, which should be secondary to human lives.

Do I have this right? Spinach and Tylenol can be blamed in entirety for delivering ecoli and arsenic, which is not in the original makeup. But guns get a free pass simply because normally they sit on a shelf, waiting to be used. If spinach and Tylenol are blamed for producing a few deaths when they are completely innocent, guns must take their turn.

The only way for us to prove that we are serious about stopping violence in this country is to generate an overreaction, demanding a thirty-day moratorium on the sale of any weapons. It would speed up the process of our debate–because certainly the gun sellers would want to expedite a conclusion–and it would show that we have as much concern for our children’s safety from bullets as we do from ecoli.

The absence of this is the presence of a nationwide insanity, riddled with hypocrisy, which renders us at the mercy of an instrument that has a trigger on it, which can be pulled by anyone at anytime.

I am not against guns. I am against guns until we find out how we can keep them in the possession of the common citizen without putting the general citizenry in jeopardy.

And please do not quote the Second Amendment to me unless you’ve taken a moment to read it. The Second Amendment allows for a militia, which, if you move ahead to current time, would be the police force. I have no problem with policemen having automatic weapons. And by the way, the Second Amendment has already been infringed upon–because it allows citizens to BEAR arms. Most states have laws against walking around toting a pistol. You have to have a carrying permit, which after all, is the government infringing on your rights.

This is not a states’ rights issue. This is not about personal freedom. It is about the necessity we have as intelligent people to overreact when we realize … that a bit of hell is threatening our heaven.

It is time for an overreaction to violence. It is our responsibility to give the Newtown Twenty-six a decent burial and memory by taking more than five minutes to commemorate the loss, but instead, honoring these casualties by making sure that they … are the last ones.

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