A Moral Choice

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Those who oppose it [gun control] have made a moral choice: that they would rather have gun massacres of children continue rather than surrender whatever idea of freedom or pleasure they find wrapped up in owning guns or seeing guns owned—just as faith healers would rather watch children die than accept the reality of scientific medicine. This is a moral choice; many faith healers make it to this day, and not just in thought experiments. But it is absurd to shake our heads sapiently and say we can’t possibly know what would have saved those lives …”—Adam Gopnik, “The Simple Truth About Gun Control” The New Yorker, December 19, 2012

“All politics is local” is a beloved truism in American public life. The sheriff of the New York county in which I used to live is in international headlines today because he took advantage of yesterday’s two gun sprees to urge gun-owning citizens of his county to start carrying their weapons with them just in case.

Ulster County Sheriff Paul J. Van Blarcum published a release on Facebook this morning that was shared several thousand times within an hour of its posting and received international attention because Ulster County is nowhere near either of the two incidents so he decided to jump on board a train of his own invention before it left the station and also because it is bluntly pro-gun:
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Wandering

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

If the photo above is not of the actual car that my family owned in 1979, it is the same model Chevy Malibu station wagon that my memory has chosen to remember as the actual car that my parents drove to cart my sister and ten-year-old me around that summer and every other summer, before 1979 and after. (My memory is not what it used to be: It is better!)

Our family road trips over about two decades included vacations in Vermont (to see family) and weekends on Cape Cod, in Pennsylvania, along the Connecticut shore. We were not a wealthy family, so our family vacations were always road trips to a destination that we could reach in one day or less of driving. My father was the only driver, so this was more than fair. The long(ish) car ride was simultaneously unendurable and somehow, maybe sometimes, the only part of the trip that was worth remembering.
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It Was a Dark and Stormy Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For years it was a recurring nightmare: a storm was coming, and it was coming specifically for me. What plans it had for me, what might happen to me if and when it successfully caught me, I never learned.

(What is the number, how many appearances in one’s psyche does it take for one to realize or decide that a dream is a “recurring” one? I do not often write about dreams because they are too private; I will almost certainly fail in any attempt to bring you into my head, and who wants to visit that strange inner land, anyway?)
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