Home of the brave?  Not so sure.  Looks to me like we are becoming the home of the scaredy cats.  I’ll be the first to admit all the mass shootings going on make me a little jumpy.  That San Bernardino business has to make you wonder if those crazy bastards blowing shit up and mowing people down overseas haven’t decided to move their entertainment venues onto  our more ostentatiously fertile shores once again. We are the land of conspicuous consumption and instantaneous gratification after all, and I think that really bothers them.  But contrary to what you hear it’s not because they consider all the superficial materialism abhorrent..  My theory is they are obsessively jealous over it.  Religious extremism has little to do with religion.  It’s about power.   And I think those looney jihadists calling for a reestablishment of a caliphate like to dwell in the past. They want to bring back what they once had, like lots of superficial materialism.  Muslims ruled much of the civilized world during a good portion of the first millennium.  As I understand the Muslim past, an increasing entrenchment in culturally restrictive religious practices resulted in excessively exclusive institutions and sets of laws that ultimately led to the Muslim world’s inability to keep pace in the industrialized world.  I think I did a pretty good job compressing centuries of history into one sentence.  In the end it all came apart for the last caliphate when leadership decided to back the wrong side during World War I.  Goodby Ottoman Empire.

My friend and neighbor Farhad could not give a shit about the Ottoman Empire.  He is a Muslim and loves his Islamic religion, in a regular, religious way.  He goes nuts with all the kneeling down and praying, like a gazillion times a day.  It makes me feel like shit.  I only get around to that once a week, if I’m lucky.  That happens on Sunday, like normal, but usually it’s more of a plea to let the Packers score so they cover the point spread.  And Farhad really likes the Huskers.  He’ll drop over sometimes and watch a football game with me, but only for a short time.  Then he disappears because he has to go home and pray again.

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Farhad- during his before meal prayer                  Me- during my 4th quarter field goal try prayer

Farhad and I shoot the shit a lot.  I consider him to be a deep thinker, and even though our religious affiliation couldn’t be more dissimilar, I have found he and I have many other things in common.  One of those things is we’d both like to get through the day without getting shot.  Farhad has an extra burden to bear though.  Besides not wanting to get shot, there likely are some people out there who believe Farhad is going to shoot them.  He worries himself sick.  He is certain all of our neighbors are suspicious of him and think he is up to no good.  During the first conversation he and I had after the San Bernardino catastrophe he turned into an emulsified pudding of psychological despondency right before my eyes.  To bolster his psyche, I told him what I always tell him.  I start off by telling him the truth.  People who are intelligent and generally observant at all understand the odds of getting shot by a Muslim are fractional compared to getting shot by a  plain old white American, probably with some distinct but little practiced form of Christianity as a religious background.   I mention that I am certainly not afraid of him, and anyone who knows him is not afraid of him.  Hell, he won’t even let his kids play with water-guns, and in fact he is terrified of anything potentially explosive.  Because he is so deathly afraid of guns, I skip over the fact that I am more concerned about the three white Christians in my neighborhood who go out of their way to brag about the arsenal of weapons they have at their disposal.  One of them lives across the street and proudly professed to me one day this summer that he has a firearm of some sort in every room of his house, all of them lying around unsecured.  He said he always wants to be ready, just in case, and he said this to me while he was eyeing Farhad while Farhad was mowing his lawn.

Is this what we have become in this country, so overwhelmed by fear and paranoia we have to have a gun in every room of our house?   It never ceases to amaze me how worked up we get over what is reported as a terrorist attack and who we associate them with, when all the day to day mayhem caused by firearms is considered normal.  What the fuck is wrong with us?  If you ask me all shootings, mass or otherwise, are terrorist attacks.  The two constant components are the same- guns and dead people.

I feel sorry for Farhad.  But I can console him with the fact that getting shot in this country is totally random.  It doesn’t matter if you are a Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, whatever.  If you extrapolate all the data, each and every one of us are lucky enough to have the same odds of being mowed down by gunfire.  It’s democracy in action.  Well shit, I guess I forgot about the black population.  They are getting picked off at a pretty high clip.  I was kind of fixated on religious preference though.  And that’s how I generally approach my discussion with Farhad when the topic of getting shot comes up.  It seems to calm him down a bit.  Geezuz I forgot about Baptists too.  I don’t know this for a fact, but I think most blacks are Baptists.  That might skewer the data a bit.

Anyway Farad and I are in total agreement that something has to be done. Congress has been sitting around with their heads up their asses way too long.  We shouldn’t have to have second thoughts about going to a movie or shopping mall, or ball game, or a church, mosque or synagogue.  Or anyplace.  So he and I are working on our safe place, a place as gun-free as possible.  He’s home in front of his PC sifting through information about gun violence and the second amendment right now.  That son of a bitch is a computer dynamo.  He’s always dicking around with a computer, or worrying, or praying.  He has a really hot wife and to lighten things up sometimes I like to  tell him that instead of all the praying, he might find  some timely corn grinding to be more relaxing.  And she always has a snack for me whenever I go over there.  As a matter of fact that’s where I am headed in a couple of minutes.  I’m going to see how Farhad is doing with his research.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and snag some baba ghanoush.  I don’t know what’s all in that stuff but I will say it is pretty darn tasty.