She realized she was just a child back then, but she knew something that those that threaten her now don’t — that there is a moral code to this world and that the world as well, did not revolve around our every need and happiness. It was how her parents were raised, and how she was raised. Her parents clothed her, loved her, praised her, and punished her, not without thought and not with an unwarranted decree, but in a manner firm enough it definitely got her attention.
She tested those boundaries when she was a child, because that’s what children do, finding that with those boundaries came accountability. One soon learns that a tantrum in Safeway will not get you that toy by the check stand; it will get you a quick and silent removal to the car and home to think about it in your room, without any toys. One learns that if one lies to a parent, that certain things we enjoy are not a right, they’re earned by responsibility. One learns that if one tries to jump off the garage roof with a makeshift airfoil, the ground will smite thee only a little less than Dad will. One often, much later, learns that if you carelessly play with what one holds dear, there are consequences for more than just yourself, lessons that stay long after the aftermath.
Now, she thought, most kids are given access to most anything good and bad that the TV and the Internet have to offer, at the earliest of ages, not as a lesson in choice, but as a way of entertainment for parents often absent. Through expectation or demand, children are given possessions so freely that neither the object nor the givers have value to them, and, if acting out in their attempts to cajole or control, their actions are forgiven before forgiveness had been even ventured or earned.
As an only child, she was not insulated from the world and its capabilities for harm. She understood the rudimentary principles of physics, ballistics, and stupidity. Current events were discussed, war, poverty, and mans’ evil against other men, but only when old enough to grasp and apply those lessons. She had been given books that would be banned today for being politically incorrect. She had toys that could cause second-degree burns. She had chemistry sets that could actually blow things up. She learned how to safely handle certain firearms and respect the trust of their use, their purpose, which was not to impose our will or to take something we had not earned, but to provide and protect.
But her parents were careful not to give her access to things from which she could obtain knowledge for which she did not yet have the wisdom nor demonstrated the reasoning. Remember Jack and Roger from Lord of the Flies? Imagine them with Wireless connectivity, Mom’s credit card, and free shipping. There are no laws that will prevent what a mind unbound by honor, ethics or the value of others can destroy when their own worth is predicated on unlimited attention and no accountability. And certainly, there are no laws which will sway the actions of a mind caught by madness, who act not with the rational thought of the outcome, but as a man, out of his mind with a gangrene poisoned hand, thirsts for an ax that with its downward stroke will somehow make him whole.
When such evil, by it driven by mental defect, jihad, or ego strikes, it does so at the very lie of safety that are the laws that control behavior, that control our tools, our very actions, for evil knows no such laws. When they strike, there is little left but the invoked ghosts of ones we can never avenge and the media-heralded name of one who should be unnamed, forgotten, buried in an unmarked grave in burnt, damned ground. Then comes the cry that yet another law above and beyond the ones they already broke by their actions.
She gently pats the small firearm in her pocket. It’s illegal, one of the many things, it seems, that’s called illegal here in Cali anymore. Breaking the law is not in her blood, but without it, her blood could be spilled.
From the beginning of time, there have been laws; there have been tools that can be used as weapons, including firearms. There has been good and evil. There have been two distinct and competing impulses that exist among humans, one, the instinct to live by the law, to act peacefully except in matters of self-defense, to follow moral commands for the good of the group; and the other, the instinct to gratify one’s immediate desires without adherence to any such law or moral code, using violence, not as a means of protection, but to simply to obtain supremacy over others or force one’s will on someone without defense.
How did that all change, she thinks, to where we are in a world where everyone expects something for free, laws and the Constitution are whims, and those in power do anything they can to stay there, even if it means blood continues to flow in the street? How did we get to a point where greed and self-entitlement broke this once proud land away from our country, which she STILL believes is HER country, with a savage force that would put any earthquake to shame?
She steps outside to lock the gate. It’s only one additional thing between the forest and her door, but she sleeps better knowing it is locked, not fear of the four-legged creatures but of the two-legged ones. When she first moved here she replaced the pin tumblers on her gate, grooming station and supply shed with magnetic and combination to make them less easy to “lock-bump” and break in.
A hundred yards away, there is a moonlit lane between pine trees and stone. There in the shadows, only steps away, a long shadow shifts. She stops, sensing movement, sensing darkness within the dark, in the woods past her clothesline. Her hand moves to her firearm, poised to use it if needed. It is only a fox, easing back through the trees; a shadow, a form that slides like light through a picket fence, slanting sideways, and then disappears under cover. Her hand eases away from her weapon, but she backs away, towards the candlelight, towards home and sleep.
She walks quietly back towards the house. She goes a different time each day, knowing that predators rely on patterns. There in the distance, a couple of coyotes, trotting along the edge of the meadow, through snow that clutched at their empty bellies, heads cocked, eyes forward, using instinct, tooth and sinew to find that one small morsel there breathing under the snow, trying to hide for its life, a small shivering rabbit, wishing as desperately not to be eaten alive as the coyote desperately wishes to consume. The coyote stops to look at her in the stark moonlight, with what looks to be a smile on his face, not one of welcome but of mockery; the smile of a predator. He watches as she moves on down the road towards her door, round in the chamber, ready if needed.
She walks back towards the house when from the edge of the woods comes motion and sound, a blurred commotion, a high pitched, soft pleading scream that breaks the lie of safety. She looks towards the trees and sees something darting quickly, a dark shape, too small to be human, too quick for her to catch a good glimpse. There, in the ditch, a small white form, a jagged tear in its furry throat, rabbity legs twitching in the remembrance of life.
As she bolts the door behind her for the night, the abandon and innocent glee that was childhood remain forever lodged in her mind, just as do those lessons, even the painful ones. She puts her hands up to her nose and smells the faint, clean scent of soap, something so plain and simple, much like what once stood for truth. Today, she is no longer trusted with either a weapon or a voice but the Calis can’t take her honorable heart. What guides her to maintain that honor is not a law, it is not the dictate of a ruling body, and it is bound to her by the honor of the past and the examples of her upbringing.