A Pilgrim's Progress

Last weekend, in a sleepy tourist town nestled on the western shoulder of the Idaho’s Northern Rockies, lynch mobs (or “2^ndAmendment vigilantes” in the current euphemistic vernacular) openly roamed the streets, carrying assault weapons and looking for fictitious “antifa” (read: non-white) troublemakers rumored to be coming down from Spokane, the only sizeable city in our inland region with an inner-city (read: non-white) population. (Lynch mobs in Coeur d'Alene) Four days later and 200 miles to the east, I attended the ongoing Black Lives Matter actions at the Missoula County Courthouse where assault weapons were openly displayed nominally in support of the protesters (!) and, for what it’s worth, I came away with a few thoughts.

Here in Montana and Idaho, the pining for the "Wild West" is still visceral. It's an aspirational ideal for many locals as well as those who have moved up since the Rodney King protests in 1992. If you lived here then you remember them, the ones arriving with a pocketful of down-payment from a house they sold in a city they deemed "too colored", plopping their money down with few questions asked on ranchettes to re-invent themselves as "cowboys". They doubled, quadrupled then exponentially drove housing prices far and away from what our mere Montana wages could possibly justify. Then they'd don the pointy boots, the cowboy hats, dub themselves “constitutionalists”, saunter down to the nearest Walmart (or wherever) and start loading up on assault weapons singly-designed to spray multiple, flesh-destroying bullets in a matter of seconds. The local Ravalli County Republican Central Committee has gone so far down this "white-homeland" road that they’ve been auctioning off an assault rifle every year for about the past decade, displaying the murderous tool at their booth for grade school children with innocent, cotton-candy-sticky faces to walk by, to touch, to be amazed. 

Firepower. It’s all the rage now, isn’t it? The uninfringeable right to openly-threaten those with whom you disagree with death and destruction (or to aid and abet the mass-murder of schoolchildren) while not wearing a facemask during a pandemic is being exercised everywhere these days, but maybe nowhere more visible than in the Rocky Mountain West. There are so many stores and billboards here now openly declaring this most-curious love-fetish that if I went around trying to “capture the moment” by taking pictures all of them I’d probably crash my camera. There’s no denying, it’s a thing.

So where did this infatuation with firepower come from, really, and how did it end up at a nominal "Black Lives Matter" protest in Missoula, where two white people brandishing weapons of war were tolerated by the organizers in the name of  "protecting" our right to peacefully-protest? 

Let’s acknowledge the obvious right now. First, a group of “2^ndAmendment vigilantes (read: a lynch mob) showed up at the Missoula Courthouse before our local "boogaloo bois" did, with assault rifles and handguns on full display. One got pointed directly at the crowd (mostly young adults in shorts and t-shirts, a very threatening spectacle indeed if you’re an Uninfringable) who scattered in understandable fear of the unknown states of mind of these heavily-armed “patriots” (yes, there were flags). What should have been obvious to the Missoula police, but apparently wasn’t, was that pointing a loaded assault weapon at a group of bystanders during a tense situation is the definition of assault. But no, the guy apparently walked because, like the white guy and gal who showed up with similar weapons the following days to “protect” the protesters, he was…duh…white. To be fair to the police, the uninfringable rights of lynch mobs needs to be assiduously-defended if we’re going to have anything left of our Constitution. Right? But still, imagine just for a second if the brandisher of that weapon hadn’t been the approved color? Now imagine for another second if a non-approved-color person had shown up at a Black Lives Matter protest with an assault rifle. Are we on the same page now? Okay, so back to my main issues of concern: Gun Love and WTF. 

As a genetic pilgrim, when confronted with blithe displays of violent minds I can’t otherwise explain, I always fall back on what I can glean from the narratives white folks have written down about the doings on this continent for the last few hundred years. It's sometimes called "history" and it’s a habit of mine. It's actually escapism in a way which, like other naughty, very-human things everybody does, is not easily explained no matter what your political persuasion is. 

I do it, though, because, notwithstanding it’s a bit obsessive-compulsive with a Lutheran tint, I'm looking for those pilgrims, that genetic stock of my maternal grandfather, and, of course, my mother. There’s nowhere else to go for this than books, and so I’ve stacked up quite an impressive pile of primary-source narratives written by literate people who experienced those 19th-Century times. 

Certain things stick and others don’t. It’s a pretty sordid tale, all-told, and a pilgrim can only take so much guilt even if he was raised Lutheran, which this pilgrim was. One thing that stuck, though, was the Texas Rangers, who are said to have been the first state-sponsored, standing police force in this country. They were organized almost exclusively to terrorize and kill Mexicans and indigenous people occupying lands the "Texians" desired for their cotton plantations and, later, their cattle and their settlements. It was, if I read it right, the Rangers’ interactions with the Comanche and Kiowa that inspired the first generations of “automatic” weapons on the planet, the revolving-cylinder pistol. Previous to the development of Samuel Colt’s 5-and-6 shooters, warriors had the firepower advantage over the Rangers in close-range combat, as it almost always was then. Their single-shot pistols couldn’t keep up with the rapid-fire arrows the average warrior (if there was such a thing) could carry in their fist and cut loose with with both alacrity and accuracy. When Colt’s 5-round pistol became available, the Rangers took it up with their own version of alacrity--minus the accuracy--and improved their chances in those close fights. But the first ones were unreliable to downright dangerous to the user. Metallurgy being what it was at the time, the chamber exploded more times than was desireable, so Colt soon teamed up with a Texas Ranger named Samuel Walker and they collaborated to create the Walker-Colt six-shooter to more perfectly fit the Rangers’ 'policing' needs. The Rangers soon took to carrying three, four, five heavy, pre-loaded pistols into battle with them and so at last they could massively-trump the natives' firepower, for a minute or two or five, and then retreat. Guerrilla warfare, in other words, the same technique that was used a few years later by Confederate bushwhackers like the James brothers who rode with Quantrill's raiders in Missouri and Kansas. After the Civil War, when enough of these guns were circulating amongst a war-traumatized population that had long-since confused violence with freedom of expression, they became commercially available to the masses, the cowboys, the Wild West and Viola! Gun Love.

 The native folks, of course, were ducks on a fence to this “Code of the West” unless they could purchase or capture enough of this new and improved firepower to make a difference. They could no longer get close enough to overwhelm their foes without it, and, notwithstanding the Battle of the Little Bighorn, having a six-shooter and having enough lead and powder to keep it sufficiently-loaded were two different things, and so things headed south. Custer’s Last Stand was the exception that proved the rule. For the most part, multiple-round firearms were the domain of the whites and, therefore, the new normal. 

Which brings me back to pilgrims, and my grandfather. I knew him pretty well when I was growing up. He was born in 1882, ran a streetcar with his brother in San Francisco until the route was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, sailed up to Nome, Alaska to build steamboats that ferried miners up the Yukon during the Gold Rush there, then sailed back down to the Central Valley in California to buy a ranch and raise a family. His dad, Silas Halsey Cooper, had been in the 9th Kansas Volunteer Calvary (Company B) during the Civil War and participated in firefights with the Ute people in Wyoming over Ben Holliday's intrusions on their lands with his Overland Trail. In one fight, in the Medicine Bow Mountains near the current town of Ryan Park, the Utes had a few guns and occupied the high ground, but they ended up mostly firing over the troopers’ heads because they didn’t compensate their aim correctly for downhill shooting. I’m guessing that’s because they were in the habit of calculating for lesser charges due to lack of gunpowder and were aiming high on economic principle, but one of the bullets did hit Company B’s sergeant, who died, and Silas was promoted. He was 31 at the time, significantly older than the average trooper, and for awhile after I learned all this I thought maybe I could simply trace my lineage to something two-dimensional and without context. Firepower.

Silas and his wife, Anna, settled in Hanford, California before 1900. Both died a few decades before my time (we're late breeders in case you're wondering how old I am which is none of your business!), but they were always near enough that he remained a part of the family narrative I grew up with, which included how much my Grampa resembled Silas in looks and temperament. Grampa Cooper was 80-something and had long been hard of hearing when I knew him. His hearing aid was a single ear plug connected to a transistor-radio-sized amplifier in his pocket he'd tune down to zero whenever he wanted more peace than was coming from the kitchen and he literally voted for Eisenhower cuz Lincoln won the war. He was taciturn by necessity, but also kind, and his lasting legacy was his honesty and his habitually-giving help and refuge to people who were down on their luck, including tramps, his wife’s Okie cousins and a Japanese family who were interned and had to leave their property in his care, which he returned to them fully-intact when the craziness subsided. This was when “Okie” was a bigoted epithet thrown at vulnerable folks by equally-vulnerable folks who were afraid of these newcomers overrunning their own, wallpapered shacks. This was while my uncle, who had joined the Marines during the Depression and had just bought the family their first five-dollar refrigerator with his wages, was serving in the Pacific theatre. This was while tramps…well, tramps have always been tramps, haven’t they? But there was always someone living out on the ranch in one of the “shacks”, and there was drama, of course. How could there not be? But his kindness was what my imagination always wanted to thread through our family’s Puritan line, and so, as I stumbled into adulthood and, almost by accident, into Montana, I started wanting to know what the hell a piece of that kindness (and, by extension, myself!) was doing up here shooting at the People and why these demonstrably-racist Wild West fantasies were rattling around in my own head?! Jeez, for a “liberal” you’d think I’d get a clue, right?

Well, I did try, but as my mom (his daughter) always said: “People are people are people,” which is still the only excuse I can come up with, along with the following explanation resulting from those deep-dives into the aforementioned historical accounts:

What the hell difference does it all make? The Rangers, the Civil War, the roots of violence? The point is, here we are, and you, my fellow pilgrims, have choices to make. 

Martin Luther King and Ghandi showed us what non-violent action was, and the concept is simple in words. You put your ass on the line nonviolently for something you think is more important than your ass, and hope for the best. A little harder to put into action, and nobody knows what they’re going to do when their time comes. But those are the essentials, and tolerating guns into a movement that has to remain nonviolent to have any hope of success is antithetical to what most people are willing to show up for. Remember: the American Revolution was supported by only a minority of the colonies’ citizens and was decided in the “Bostons’” favor by support from Marie Antionette’s France. It was essentially a civil war played by foreign powers which, like the later one, was a bloody mess perpetrating lasting traumas. More important to remember might be that the 2^ndAmendment was written decades before the six-shooter was invented, and a century and a half before nuclear weapons were. We’re talking about existential firepower now, a different beast. Pointy boots and cowboy hats look downright silly at this dance. Ask Slim Pickens.

So I’ll offer up this pilgrim’s perspective to all you other pilgrims out there. You know who you are, so how about it? How about starting with kindness, which is a simple function of empathy, not condescension, or even sympathy. It’s putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, like that guy, Jesus, used to preach, and it’s guaranteed to require more time than our nano-second patience can endure. Get over it. It takes generations, even if everybody made the effort, which you know they won’t. But we, the privileged ones, have this choice here in this time, and it’s a very simple one. Violence begets violence, and violence indisputably gets passed down generation to generation. The same thing goes for kindness, and so by simple definition we can choose to set the seventh generation up for the next round of bigotry and war or for the long chance of healing. 

Finally, being a pilgrim and a Lutheran to boot means I probably have a hopeless case of OCD. So, in the spirit of not denying who I am I’ll state the obvious one more time. The kind of activism, the long kind that actually works, doesn’t come from the end of a gun.

Duh.