May I Please, Please Protest Today?

For many Saturdays this year, a group of us have sat on a plaza and read names. People drift by, look puzzled, clutch their small children’s hands more tightly. Some gaze, some avert their eyes. Anyone who establishes eye contact gets a little flyer explaining what we are doing. The point is to engage in debate.

Among the people strolling through the plaza are a policeman or two, who stand by and look on. What don’t they do?

Put me in handcuffs and fine me 701 bucks.

That, unbelievably, is what happened yesterday in the capitol rotunda of Madison, Wisconsin.

Full disclosure—I got the figure of $701 from a friend; I’ve looked but been unable to verify it. However, I did come across the video of Will Williams, below. And Williams is a 70-year old veteran who got handcuffed and escorted down the stairs. Whereupon he tripped—or was he tripped?—on the first steps, and fell onto his handcuffed hands. Ouch. 

Nor was Williams the oldest person to be thrown into cuffs and led off. Check out Wednesday’s post—there’s a clip of an 80-year old woman being handcuffed. She’s singing away, the cops cuff her, and she trots off with them. At no point is she resisting—she’s just singing.

Let’s be clear. This is assault. And under what circumstances can a cop stick cuffs on a person? When I worked on inpatient psychiatry wards, the use of restraints was very clear. A patient had to have shown behavior that was a danger to himself or to others. And that behavior had to be documented. OK—so are cops operating on a different set of criteria? Here’s what one guy said:

Actually, there are several reasons a law enforcement officer can detain you without notifying you of the reason. They need not produce an arrest warrant if they have probable cause that you have committed a felony. Placing handcuffs on a person is not always the result of being arrested; an officer need not arrest you to detain you. If the officer feels you are a flight risk and that flight would compromise an ongoing investigation, or if he feels you are threat to him or another, he may take you into temporary custody. If there are other pressing matters to which he must attend to maintain public or personal safety, he need not speak to you at all.

Nor am I the only one to think so. Check this out….

Dane County Sheriff David Mahoney Thursday refused to retract remarks made Monday during a radio interview on his apparent condoning of the protest singing in great numbers, despite a federal judge's ruling only assemblies of twenty people or less could be staged without a permit.
"I'm here to join alongside the Solidarity Singers. This is an example of freedom of speech," Mahoney told Workers Independent News (WIN) Monday.


This is a monstrous attack on human dignity and on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. And despite the temporary order upholding the government’s “right” to require permits for demonstrations with over 20 people—no. If people want to get together and sing songs in the capitol, dammit, they have every right to do it.

Oh, and the legislator who had a meeting with the chief of capitol police and the secretary of administration? Here’s what she wrote after the aborted event.

"I was very shocked and disappointed today when you and Department of Administrative Assistant Gwendolyn Coomer walked out of a meeting scheduled in my office," she wrote in a sharply worded letter (PDF) that was hand-delivered to Erwin's office in the state Capitol. Taylor also took the police chief to task for being unable to identify the "specific conduct you believe to be unlawful."

Yes, it’s very clear that there are some people breaking the laws at noon in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol.

Very, very clear…..

For those who can help with the legal costs incurred by protesters, please donate via PayPal to the following fund: 
http://solidaritysingalong.org/

Treason, Anyone?

Readers will know—a group of people and I have been reading 30,000 randomly generated names for weeks now. Why 30,000? That’s the number of people killed by gunshot every year; using information from the CDC, I compiled a list of 720 pages.

I had been nervous about doing the reading, since I don’t do confrontation well. And I had thought that I would run into a lot of NRA supporters. So in all these weeks of talking to people, how many card-carrying NRA members have I spoken with?

Two.

And I have spoken to many, many people. So what’s the story? Yes, I am in Puerto Rico, but there are many tourists here. There are days, in fact, when two or three cruise ships come into the harbor—the city becomes Des Moines, linguistically and culturally.

The two cases of pro-NRA folk were identical; they were white, middle-aged men. They didn’t want to talk, one saying frankly, “I’m not interested in your views,” after I had asked him why he was in favor of the NRA. The other engaged briefly in debate, but declined to sit in front of the camera and give his point of view.

Generally, I would prefer to be wrong rather than right—you learn something. And if someone can tell me, for example, why gun shops require background checks but gun shows do not, I’m willing to listen.

And I started out this project wanting to know—what is it that fuels this debate about guns and gun control? What is it that stirs such strong feelings on both sides?

I’m hard-pressed to think of a more potent symbol than a gun. Yes, I considered briefly the image of Christ on the cross, or the swastika (please note—I’m not likening the two) or the sickle and hammer. Strong, yes—but as strong as a gun?

And I’ve come to believe—the NRA advocates, based on my brief encounters personally and my longer encounters electronically, are deeply fearful people.

And whom do they fear?

The government.

They see their guns as the only thing stopping the government from tyranny. And I’ll go further.

They see their world disappearing. There’s a black guy in the White House. Gay people are getting married, and Spanish is spoken everywhere. Hillary may well be president in 2017, and that will drive them nuts.

They see their guns as protection, and each day brings with it added urgency; more need for bigger, more destructive weapons.

But there’s a problem. And a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky brought it out, as reported by the Daily Caller:

In a bizarre op-ed in The Charleston Gazette last week, journalism professor Christopher Swindell argued that the National Rifle Association “advocates armed rebellion against the duly elected government of the United States of America.”

Bizarre? How so? The most extreme gun advocates quite openly state—their guns are their defense against the government. And how far is it that defense become offense?

A Libertarian wants to get 10,000 people carrying loaded weapons to march through Washington DC on the Fourth of July. He says it will be peaceful, but who knows? To me, it’s a pretty provocative act.

It’s also provocative to argue, as the new president of the NRA has, that Obama is a “fake president.” In olden days, it would be called unpatriotic; I still think it is.

People are reacting to a series of threats to our liberties. The media calls it fear. That’s not it, that not it. It’s a sense of rational outrage that’s been building for a very long time. It’s not going to diminish. It’s not going to go away….

I hear some Americans say with the last election the country is lost. No. No. An election was lost. There’s another election more important to the Second Amendment right around the corner. With the U.S. Senate and the House up for grabs, we as individual N.R.A. members can direct the massive energy of spontaneous combustion to regain the political high ground. We do that, and Obama can be stopped.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/05/jim-porter-and-the-nras-challenge-to-america.html

That was Porter speaking recently at the NRA national convention, and it’s clear—the NRA is playing out the demagogue’s favorite trick: create a false crisis and stir up the masses.

God save us all.

Panic on the Plaza

“You’re shaking, Marc” said Mendoza, the nice kid who makes me tuna sandwiches (for which I pay him, of course), and then I realized, ‘yes, I am.’

Well, I covered by telling him, “too much coffee,” but I suspect he knew: that wasn’t it.

And that’s when it hit me: that’s why I flubbed all those auditions—those many, many auditions which involved hours of glorious playing at home, a wrenching ten minutes of sheer musical hell, a taxi-ride-with-tears-suppressed home.

I am a racehorse, not a plow horse. At any loud noise I startle, panic, bolt. And today, merely by going off to read names with two loved ones—something I have done for months now—I was nervous.

Yes—we’re a third of the way through the 30,000 LivesProject; today we finished Hawaii and began Illinois. And Raf’s mom, Ilia, strolled as always into the plaza, dispensing greetings, muzzling kids heads, assuring all the little girls they were “tan linda, nena.”

“Besos,” she tells me; we kiss.

I have been sitting in Plaza de Armas on a green resin chair, next to which is another green resin chair, on which artfully is draped a shirt and blue jeans. And I have been pondering my body, specifically my brain, which is firing neurons down to my adrenal glands, which is making me want to run, not fight.

Do I know that I am not in danger?

Yes.

Do I know that I am scared, shaking, dreading the moment when I will have to start reading names, approaching people, trying to engage them and—more often than not—getting no response?

No.

Does my body know?

Yes.

That’s the thing—I may rationally have known that I was under no threat, as I waited those hours for my moment to fail the audition to come. My body, however, was screaming a different story. And it’s curious—both the body and the mind play the cello. Yes, those are my fingers on the fingerboard, holding the bow—but those body parts are under the control of the mind.

And for all those years when I was failing auditions, I never really knew that.

Or did I?

Yes, I had been a psychiatric nurse; yes, I knew something about physiology. But at the core, there was something wrong with me, something bad about me, something shameful.

“You have to believe in yourself,” friends would tell me.

“You have to see it, really envision it, make it real,” they would say.

“Did you want to fail?”

Why was I sabotaging myself? What dark corner of my psyche hid the roaring beast that would spring to attack me, those auditions behind the curtain? What was wrong with me?

It was savage—enduring and cleaning up from those auditions. It would take a couple of months, before the pain would start to ebb. I could talk to no one, I who was so flawed that I had caused myself once again to fail.

“It’s OK,” I told him, that guy in his thirties and forties, that guy who lives in me, that wonderful guy. “I’m here, remember? I walked you to El Morro and showed you my door and pounded on it and taught you and protected you. And remember, I read you and laughed at you and thought, ‘shit, how did he do that?’ Remember? And I still do.”

“I know,” he told me. “Thanks for that. Thanks for being here.”

“You’re wonderful,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter about those auditions.”

“Right, so can I get the cello out?”

“We gotta call Rodrigo, the repair guy.”

“Can you do that for me?”

“Yes.”

An old lady is pushing her walker towards me; the wind blowing her chestnut hair, the smile leaping up in her face.

“Besos,” she says.

We kiss.

All three of us.  

The Trigger that Pulls the Finger

If you watch the video clip below—and there may be reasons not to—you may have the opposite effect than the title suggests. The video is called “The Liberator,” but might better be called ‘The Enslaver.”

The worlds of technology and computing have merged into something truly frightening: the world’s first printable, plastic gun. Yes, you can now download the file for printing a gun from the website…nah, you won’t get it here.

You may be wondering how a “printer” can print a gun. Well, it seems that there are printers that lay down threads of melted polymers—basically liquid plastic—in precise patterns. It’s just like a regular printer, except this one is 3D, with the layers being placed on top of each other; instead of ink, the printer uses plastic.

So a 25-year old law student at the University of Texas got it into his head to create the thing, and joined up with a young engineer to do so. And as you can see in the video below, it worked. So now, anybody with 8,000 bucks to buy a 3D printer from eBay, can download the file for creating the device, which has one metal part, completely inessential but placed there for the purpose of triggering metal detectors.

This is hogwash, of course: anybody who wishes to avoid detection would be able to do so in seconds.

You could also point out that $8000 will buy you a lot of guns more powerful than a plastic gun, but that isn’t the point. Sure, it’s 8000 bucks now, but in five years time? We’ll probably be making our kids’ dolls at home from files downloaded from Mattel, not running out to buy Barbie at Toys ’R Us.

So that means that anyone, any man / woman / and-especially-worrisome-child will be able to get a cheap, lethal, anonymous gun. And that means forget gun control, because there won’t be a chance of that happening. In fact, here is the (un-named) website’s comment on the impact of this gun:

This project might change the way we think about gun control and consumption. How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet? Let’s find out.

“Hey, dude, let’s make a cheap, lethal weapon available to absolutely everybody, and see what happens!”

“Cool, dude!”

I would call this attitude irresponsible, but to Cody Wilson, the 25-year old mastermind of this affair, it’s not. It is, in fact, all very cozy with his radical libertarian / anarchist beliefs. Everyone, you see, should have a gun because the government can come at any moment and infringe on our God-given rights.

Oh—just one problem. Having all the guns in the world is useless, because the government has far more, and far more resources. Remember the Branch Davidian Siege in Waco in 1993? Guess who won?

Several thoughts come to mind. Readers will thrill to hear—the “30,000 Lives Project,” debuted in New York City’s Central Park last Sunday, with five volunteers and me reading names and distributing flyers. It was a beautiful spring day, and I felt a little bad about intruding my agenda into it: isn’t it enough to have survived a grueling, cold, dark winter? Can’t a person enjoy the sun and flowering trees without some guy putting gun control into my face?

But we did, and one of the volunteers got a hostile reaction—a gun nut who was completely against the project. But she’s a tough and persuasive woman, that volunteer, and she prodded the guy gently, and told the story of her husband’s nephew, who had used his father’s gun to shoot himself. The family, as you can imagine, was not distraught but destroyed. And in the end, the guy came around—he began thinking.

Unlike John and I, who stopped thinking after we saw a piece on the plastic gun—as well as the video below—on the McNeil Lehrer News Hour.

“You know what,” said John angrily, “Let’s all just fucking arm ourselves! Let’s completely fucking forget about gun control, because these bastards have completely changed the game, and if we don’t arm ourselves we’re just poor sacks of shit waiting to get snuffed out!”

Or words to that effect…..

At least John could speak, I was stunned into wordlessness (not a common state for me….).

Well, I looked it up today, and I’m happy / sad to report that research done at my very own alma mater—the University of Wisconsin—that just by seeing a gun, test subjects react more aggressively than others who have seen a neutral object. And in another experiment, drivers honked more at a van with a visibly loaded rifle rack stalled at a green light than a van without the rifle. Which is crazy—logically, drivers should honk LESS at a load vehicle than a (presumably) unloaded one. Oh, and a further thought—it seems that the human eye can detect snakes and spiders—potentially venomous agents—faster than we detect other stimuli.

But guess what?

We also detect guns at the same speed as the snakes and spiders. So it may not be the case that we evolved to detect the snakes / spiders. Or it may be that we have evolved to include guns as well.

I think I have my answer, now, to my question—why am I spending two hours a week reciting names in public places? I wanted to know what was behind this weird American obsession with guns.

A Dutchman explained it to me in Central Park last Sunday.

“We’re sill getting used to the American obsession with the three G’s.”

And that would be?

“Guns, God, and Government,” he replied.

And it was true, I thought. Some of us are pretty crazy on all three—they believe that the government is going to tyrannically enforce their Godless agenda on them, and the only chance of keeping that from happening is…

…a gun.

Actually, a lotta guns.

Because I’ve come to believe, guns are a positive feedback cycle. Like pornography, they’re addictive. The number of gun-owners may be down, but the number of guns those owners possess is way up.

I guess I should be used to living in my nutty country, afflicted with its obsession with the 3 G’s.

Cancel, I am used to it.

The question is how much longer can anyone live with it. 

El Nuevo Día Reviews the 30,000 Lives Project

Following is an excerpt, in English, of a review of my 30,000 Lives Project, by journalist Antonio Quiñones Calderón, published on Thursday, March 21 (yesterday) by the Puerto Rican daily newspaper El Nuevo Día. 

(For the full, original article in Spanish, please go here.)

(...) It is in such citizen-participatory spirit that the “30,000 Lives Project” is centered. The project was conceived and is being sponsored and performed personally by Marc Newhouse, a cellist, teacher of the English language and writer who has resided in Puerto Rico for many years; Newhouse, originally a Wisconsin native, has become another good Puerto Rican.

Marc was highly disturbed by a fact he had recently encountered: 30,000 people, on average, are killed every year in the US and its territories—including Puerto Rico—as a direct consequence of gun shots. He was specifically disturbed by the fact that approximately one in every 30 murders by gun shot—within the whole US jurisdiction—occurs in Puerto Rico alone, even when our island's population amounts to a mere 1.19 percent of the total national population. When his brain fully grasped this troubling fact, Marc was instantly convinced that nothing will be instrumental in halting such tragedies until, as he explained, “all of us who favor a strong gun control policy are vigorous and passionate enough as gun advocates are.”

A quote by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin came to his mind then; Stalin said—cynically and cruelly: “One death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic.” This encouraged Marc to produce his project, hoping that those 30,000 deaths by gun shots in 2011 in the US would not end up becoming just one more statistic.

So he decided to compile a randomly-generated list of 30,000 names symbolizing those lost lives. For this, he used an 8 1/2” x 11” sheet format for a single-spaced list, one name per line, written with normal font at 12 points. He ended up with 474 pages [sic.]. “Everyone who sees the printed document—tells us Marc Newhouse—has the same reaction: ‘Wow! Those are a lot of lives....”

The list will be read out loud on Saturday afternoons in public squares in the metro area of San Juan until next December. Marc, his friends, and citizens who find out about the project and recognize its merit meet each Saturday to read 100 names out loud and publicly. They then engage in a dialog to tackle the importance of finding ways to confront the violence that has taken large control of our society. This initiative, akin to that on Agenda Ciudadana, is, without a doubt, a valuable example of individual contribution to society. (For more information, please visit: http://lifedeathandiguanas.blogspot.com/) 

UPDATE: Please note this weekend's reading has been postponed for Sunday, March 24 at 1:00 PM (instead of the usual Saturdays) at Plaza de Armas, Old San Juan. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Ordinary People, Heroic Acts

For the last two Saturdays in a row, I have taken two chairs, a pair of jeans and a shirt, a video camera, and a satchel with information cards and consent forms as well as two books, each containing about 350 pages, to a public square.

It’s the 30,000 Lives Project, in which I cheerfully consent to look completely ridiculous. My object is to read the randomly generated names of 30,000 people: the number of people who die every year of gunshot wounds.

Why do I do this?

I had to ask myself the question that first day—when I was visibly nervous. I had support, thank God. Raf was there, holding the sign that announced the project. Pablo was there, reading names and talking to people. Nydia strolled into the scene, kissed me and got right to work. Then doña Ilia strolled in and stole—blessedly though not surprisingly—the show.

The point is that nobody would have been on the plaza doing what I was doing if I hadn’t gotten pissed. The NRA was making me crazy—how many more massacres would it take before we had gun control? And yes, Facebook and the social media are fine—but all my friends think like me, for the most part. That’s why we’re friends.

So the real work wasn’t the ten hours of copying and pasting in the one hundred name batches that it took to generate the 724-page document. And the real expense wasn’t the hundred bucks spent on printing the books, fliers, consent forms or sign. The real effort was to put myself out there—to make a fool out of myself and to expose myself to the possible scorn of NRA members or gun “rights” advocates.

I don’t do well with conflict. Or so I thought, because when I encountered that first day a gun rights advocate, the conversation was surprisingly cordial. I heard him out, disagreed, and parted company. No big deal.

Well, it’s been two Saturdays—we’ve read six thousand of thirty thousand names, or 5% of the total. And we’ve spent 4 hours doing it. So it should take 80 hours to read the names of all the people who die of gunshot wounds in the United States. Yup—two full work weeks.

So now we know. But is it worth it? Do we get anything from having Marc and friends stand / sitting around in public reading names?

I think Philip Zimbardo would say yes. And he should know—having written my Psychology 101 textbook those many years ago. So I clicked on his TED talk, and was immediately hooked. It’s that old question—if you were a German in Nazi Germany, what would you do?

Sadly, we know what you would do. You would follow the crowd, go off to war, press the button that sends the poison gas into the nostrils of the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in the chamber next door.

Or you wouldn’t. There was a German resistance, there were people hiding prisoners of war or Jews or anybody who needed hiding. So maybe you wouldn’t have colluded, maybe you would have been a hero, which is, according to Zimbardo…

…an ordinary person. A seamstress with tired feet, as Rosa Parks was that day she sat at the front of the bus. She didn’t wake up and say, “hey, I really oughta be a hero today,” she later said; she just had tired feet.

Years ago, at Wal-Mart, a motivational speaker concluded a talk by pulling out a dollar bill. He talked about how a person had given him a dollar bill with the message: go ahead, dream, follow your passion, you’re a leader and you can make change happen. So at every talk he gives, he pulls out a dollar bill and gives it to the person he sees having leadership potential.

There were about thirty people in an one-of-you-will-betray-me-moment—‘is it me?’

Well, I took the dollar in complete confusion, and did the only thing I could think of—put it under the laughing Buddha that then sat on my desk and now sits on my desk. And no—I haven’t spent it.

But if I was the person with the most leadership potential—and that guy really should cut out the morning bottle—it’s probably due to one thing.

I’m gay and I came out.

After you do that, you learn two things. First, that you can do it—that you can have the courage to face social disapproval, professional suicide, parental rejection. After that, standing in a plaza reading names is no big deal.

Second, going along with the crowd is not so important. Being liked is not so important. You realize—I’ll make my crowd, I’ll make my family, and no, I don’t have to have people like me.

Zimbardo talks briefly at the end of his talk about the bullying issue. And I agree with what I suspect would be his analysis—it’s stupid to tell a thirteen-year old kid “it gets better.” Sure, it’s true, and yeah, if feels good to say it. But do you remember how long time was when you were a kid? Christmas or a birthday took centuries to come around—now they pop up every other day.

I would tell these kids—“hey, you know what? There’s a reason you’re getting bullied, and it’s a good reason. You’re different, and that’s wonderful. There’s something special in you. I don’t know what it is, but I can sense it, and so can the kids around you, and they’re jealous ‘cause you’ve got something special, something to give, something unique. Do you know what it is?”

Kid looks up.

“Nah….”

“Well, that’s what we’re gonna find out….”

Doña Ilia Charms the Plaza

We’re forty lives short of California.

It took us an hour and 45 minutes to read through Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, and Arkansas.

It felt like a performance—mouth was dry, hands were shaky, my focus had narrowed. Pablo picked up on it, and asked if I was OK.

“Nerves,” I said.

So what was there to be nervous about?

Raf carried the camcorder, I carried the materials: the two books of the 33,050 names; the information flyers; two chairs, one for reading, the other for the 33,050 people who are not there.

“You’re such a drama queen,” said Pablo, as I was clothes-pinning the shirt to the back of the chair, and the blue jeans to the seat. “I love it….”

“Let’s go around the plaza and tell people about the project,” I said. So we did for fifteen minutes or so.

“You know, it’s really important to engage with people—that’s what I’ve been learning,” said Pablo.

He’s a social anthropologist, but that’s incidental. He’s also my Puerto Rican brother, who went away for a while and now is back.

So he started the reading the names—Robert Schneider, Marc Perry, Frederick Hogan…. He read for fifteen minutes, and then went off to his next project or commitment. Just before doing so, I ran into my first, and only, gun rights advocate.

“I wonder if you’d read the list of people whose lives have been saved by guns,” he started out.

“No, but if you want to compile the list, you’re more than welcome to sit on the other side of the plaza and read it….”

I’d been dreading meeting this guy or one of his ilk—a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the NRA who recited the Second Amendment word for word, though transposing the militia clause from front to back.

Which he may have done on purpose, since he immediately asked me why we need guns.

“Protection.”

“Yes, and protection from what?”

“I think you’re gonna tell me…”

“The government,” he exploded. “From a tyrannical government. We need to have guns so that in the event of a tyranny, we can rise up and protect our rights!”

I had forgotten one of the great American crazinesses—this wild belief that the damn Federal government is plotting away back there in Washington to take away my rights and my land and my children but by God they step one foot on my land I’ll blow the brains out of them fuckers!

It’s completely irrational, although maybe not. Thanks to George W. Bush and the war on terror (decided not to cap that term….) we’re probably less free than we’ve ever been as a nation and as citizens. But somehow, I don’t think that was what he meant.

“Hitler killed 30 million people and never fired a gun,” he said.

I didn’t get it.

And still don’t. He said that words kill more people than guns.

So guns don’t kill, words kill!

OK—the talk was cordial, respectful. Did he want to go before the camera and give his point of view? This is all about fostering debate.

“No,” he said quickly. And I wondered—what was he afraid of? Because there were many “noes” yesterday—the “no, I’m shy,” the “no, I’ve got to meet someone,” the “no, this isn’t my thing.”

Into the scene improbably walked Nydia, Raf’s sister, who had completely panned the whole idea two days previously. But there’s a thing about Nydia, she’s totally loyal. So if I’m out making a fool out of myself under the hot Caribbean sun, well, she’ll be there.

“I’m here to read names,” she said, kissing me, and then, having heard a bit of the conversation, dropped the news “but guns kill,” onto the man.

“Go give Raf a break,” I said. Somehow, the combination of a strongly emotional, passionate Nydia and a fearful gun owner didn’t seem like a good idea. So she went off to read.

And then, into the plaza and into the picture stepped doña Ilia, Raf’s indomitable 83-year-old mother. Who is here to read as well, and does so, sitting in her walker.

She’s full of charm, this rheumatoid-arthritis-wracked lady who went, almost seven years ago, into cardiac, pulmonary, and kidney arrest, met God and told him to go to hell—she wasn’t ready yet. And so she was moving about the square, telling little girls “Ay, ¡qué linda, m’hija!” and patting them and beaming at the parents. Or she was standing behind Nydia, and proudly holding the sign that announces the project—“30,000 Lives.” Or she was telling the two visitors from Wisconsin about how many of her children went to the University of Wisconsin—three, plus a grandchild.

Nydia more or less trapped a girl into reading—she did so for five minutes and then joined her friends who would do a flash mob and dance. Then the Wisconsin kids took over, the girl reading, the guy holding the sign. Lastly, there was a guy, don Miguel, walking through the plaza and carrying two signs—one in English, the other in Spanish. So he read some names, and then talked about his project—the proposed plan to sell the airport.

It was hot, we were tired, we were done for the day. People had drifted by, taken pictures of us on their cell phones, stopped to chat. The only person who doesn’t have a picture?

Me—completely forgot to bring the stills camera.

No matter—stay tuned for the YouTube clip that will instantly go viral.

How do I know?

Who can resist an 83-year-old lady who told God to take a hike reading names in the middle of a square in San Juan, Puerto Rico?

If anyone can get a message out, doña Ilia can….

The Edge

“It’s badly organized,” my friend told me bluntly.

Well, I had sought her out for her opinion—what right did I have to be offended?

And she may well be right—organization is not my strongest point. You want ideas? Hey, sit down, grab a pencil and start writing. And probably you won’t be able to keep up.

But there was more. An ardent supporter of independence, she took umbrage at being included in a project involving the fifty states.

“We’re a separate nation,” she said, “and we’re recognized by the international community as a separate nation….”

I learned long ago—this is the thinnest of ice. I heard her out, and agreed on several points.

Virtually all the guns here in Puerto Rico are illegal, and come from the United States, where they are cheap and plentiful. And since we are a colony of the United States, we rely on the federal government to police our borders—if we were independent, we could do the job ourselves.

In addition, it’s our status as a colony that has made us a major entry point for cocaine and other drugs, which we ship up north. What comes back? Guns.

She made another point—we are about to privatize our airport, and to whom? Well, critics on the left say to a company which has ties to the drug traffickers. If true, the situation will be a mess—the drug lords will have assured their logistics, better than even Sam Walton could. And there will be guns littering our streets like cigarette butts.

Well, her suggestion was to focus on the Puerto Rican angle, organize better, get the media involved, and especially get well-known people involved. That’s how it’s done. One person sitting in a square reading names? Just another lunatic.

Or maybe a writer. I spent seven years inside a cold grey building. Then I spent another year alone in an apartment, creating a new life for my mother. Now it’s time to get out, get stirring, take the plunge, talk to people.

I’m scared, of course. Scared that some nut will pull out his gun and kill me, or worse, incapacitate me. I can’t look at Gabby Giffords without wondering—could I do what she’s done? Would I have that strength, that courage to come back after that kind of trauma?

Scared of looking ridiculous, though that’s lesser. I pretty much AM ridiculous most of the time—unlike organization, it’s really one of my fortes.

Scared of the passion that some gun owners have: the blind fury and paranoia that, mixed with fear and hate, makes them seethe with rage.

Which may be why I had a waking dream—a dream in which, inadvertently, I had stepped from a tall building, and was falling, falling to the pavement below.

“Courage is a muscle,” said Ruth Gordon, “and like a muscle, it gets stronger with use.”

Or words to that effect.

I say that it’s time to move out of the comfort zone. If you’re not out there poking around, hearing stories, getting people to talk or rant or weep, you’re not where you should be.

On the edge. 

Out There

She’s a nice kid, and she’s very good to me, as they all are. I give her two dollars and she gives me change and excellent coffee, which is a fair deal. Or I give her more money and she brings me food, and I sit and munch and feel that there are people around me. I need that—an empty house can be menacing when the husband leaves for work, and you remember a life that got shredded on a Friday morning two years ago.

So I like Nicole, and Nicole, it turns out, likes guns. I know this because I had printed a copy of the list of 33,050 randomly generated names and was showing it to her and Sebastián, her coworker. Sebastián is in my camp, Nicole is not.

Her father is an armed guard, and there are guns all over the house. Well, no—she says that her father keeps his guns in a safe at all times, except for the gun he keeps in his bedside table. And he taught her gun safety from an early age, even before she got a gun license at age thirteen. Keep your safety on at all times, he told her. Point your gun at the ground always, he advised.

The problem, said Nicole, is irresponsible people, not guns. She and her father are responsible people. And her father tells her repeatedly, “I hope you never have to use a gun, but I want you to know how in case you do.”

I told her—your dad’s a responsible guy. And at some point I began to see the difference between the gun people and the gun control people. I think I see it now, why there’s this gulf between us. Simply put, the gun people are living in and with fear, with the possibility of danger and violence. The rest of us are not.

Even on an island where crime is rampant and violent crime no less, it never occurs to me to be afraid. I did the trot this morning, greeting my neighbors, walking briskly towards a stranger. Did I think for a moment that he was anyone else but a guy getting exercise like me? Did it cross my mind—it’s just him and me. What if he’s packing?

Nah, I was too busy listening to Bach. 

But for some people, the possibility of danger and violence is real—so real that these people literally and figuratively arm themselves. And they regard the rest of us with a mix of incredulity and derision—can we really be so stupid about the world around us? Hey, it’s not always pretty, the stuff that goes down….

No, it’s not. But I have lived over half a century—more than half my life—and never been in a situation where I needed a gun.

I have been, however, in many situations or more precisely states where it would have hugely inadvisable to have a gun. There’s a reason for the term “murderous rage,” and I might not have seen dawn, those days when I was deeply depressed, if there had been a pistol in the nightstand as I rolled sleeplessly around in bed.

Taí writes an E-mail with some advice her friend gave to her. Get a bulletproof vest and wear it visibly, she says. And goes on to say—she’s a little uneasy too. There are a lot of nuts out there, as well as a lot of guns. And if a murder can happen at a public square at midnight—as it did a month ago, and no one has yet been arrested—it can just as easily happen in broad daylight.

The logic of this goes by me, since anyone who wanted to kill me could simply shoot me between the eyes. Or better, from behind me, at the base of my cerebral cavity. But that’s not my real fear.

My fear is of having to deal with the anger and scorn of people who feel threatened, who see me as an enemy, and who are in the mood and mindset to fight, not take flight. By good luck, I’m a tall guy, which has served me well. Nobody pushes me around.

Be honest—I hate fights. I hate raised voices and widened eyes and the chin thrust belligerently out. Even now, my stomach churns a bit, thinking about it. There are people who thrive on conflict—I do not.

So why do it? Why not sit home and write the letters and make the calls and post on Facebook? Why put myself out there, when I am so much not an “out there” kind of guy?

Maybe the answer is somewhere in the document below.

The bound copy of the list of 33,050 names