This email from Robert Genn was sent to me on December 18, 2012. I have copied it for your perusal with his personal permission. His twice-weekly e-mail letters are always informative and insightful.
Dear Gail,
I’ve always been fond of brushes. Traditional tools going back to primitive times, for the past five hundred years or so, brushes have more or less standardized into a classic form; gently lathed, finely finished, long-handled and short, balanced for holding in various ways and points of view. Brushes come easily to men’s hands as well as those of women and children. In all shapes and sizes, their soft parts help to describe the personalities of those who use them.
Even in the hands of madmen, brushes can do little immediate harm. But, like pens and pencils, they have the potential to be mightier than swords. Every time we pick one up we reinstate our membership in a great brotherhood and sisterhood.
From the first Stone Age flint or adz, man distinguished himself as the most creative and inventive of the tool-making animals. The axe, the shovel, the ploughshare, the book, the brush, the cello, the scalpel, and the CT scan evolved to serve purposes that could not always be visualized by the generations before. Tools within tools within tools now take us across skies and straight up into space so we can look back at the gift of our mother earth. Is there no limit to mankind’s ability to create tools? And do we not have a choice which tools we will use?
Our accumulated culture and the breadth of our character determine the tools we use. The camera tool and its various iterations, for example, permit the re-enactment of lethal confrontations, the depiction of imagined evils and the greatest depths of fear. The camera tool can visualize for us the solving of problems by both violence and gentility. Whole industries glorify the use of our tools, and just cleaning our tools can give some of us a thrill.
Future anthropologists, arriving from another planet, may dig in our middens and determine we were “The People of the Gun.” A brilliantly conceived tool, the gun has evolved to reach a remarkable range and power. Plain or sophisticated, outsized or miniaturized, concealed or openly brandished, apart from its legitimate use for shooting pop cans off fences, the gun has always been a tool for taking the lives of other beings.
Understanding how it is possible to fall in love with our tools, it’s time we study how this gun tool is now out of hand. Do we not need to rethink its value and its presence among us? Can we outgrow the gun?
Best regards,
Robert (This is Robert’s website. You can subscribe to his letters here.)
PS: “We must all work to make this world worthy of its children.” (Pablo Casals)
Esoterica: In the time it takes to paint a small picture, someone, somewhere, will lose his or her life to a gun. Like mental illness and fanaticism, gun ownership is worldwide. And wherever home ownership of guns is highest, gun deaths are also the highest. Let us return to our gentle tools. To brushes and violins, to cellos and palettes. If mankind has a destiny, it should be for greater things than guns.
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Interesting post, Gail. As the saying goes that the pen is mightier than the sword, I pray it is mightier than the gun. I continue to write in hopes that it is. God founded two countries. Israel and America, and I believe He planted seeds of goodness and prosperity in these lands for His people. Seeds do not die, but only lay dormant, and because of that I will continue to write and hope and pray for Him to revive them. I know a day will come when we will see the fruit of those seeds. Don’t give up yet!
Katy, thank you. I thought Robert’s letter was eloquent. It was a wonderful way of expressing the problems right now as Paula concurred.
What an eloquent expression of what so many are thinking right now. Thanks for sharing this, Gail.
The fact remains that even as guns are tools for destruction, there is little likelihood that we will evolve beyond their use anymore than we will put paper and pen to the ground. If weapons are to be had, I prefer them to be in the hands of people with intelligence and compassion. If our goal is to remove them entirely, I’m afraid the only ones who will have them are those who acquire them illegally or mean to use them to perpetrate evil. And make no mistake, those who choose to do evil will find a way with or without guns. There is no easy answer, nor is there any sense in the violence of this world–but live in it, we must. I for one, err on the side of preparedness.
Paula, thank you. Your post is well said. There really is no one answer to stop/end this violence. But haven’t we taken God out of this country, the very God that helped build it? Haven’t we manipulated our allegiance to our flag? Haven’t we indulged our children to the point of what is right and what is wrong? Isn’t there a long list of errors on the side of “so what, who cares?” Have we failed our children?