Somewhere in Wendell Berry’s book “The Long Legged House” (I can’t seem to find where), he writes that he doesn’t know what the government is and he knows the state of Kentucky a only slightly better. What he does know is his town of Port Royal and his neighbor.
Knowledge is not just having information, which is why the “government” isn’t something that we can truly know. It has no hands, no flesh and blood. To depend on it then, is to ruin your own humanity. For true humanity is flesh and blood. To depend on the government is to also ruin your neighbor. If all we have is someone else taking care of our neighbors and our communities, then we don’t have neighbors anymore. We have people that are someone else’s problem.
I don’t have a gun. I don’t really care about owning a gun. But let me say this exaggerated statement: guns and community are tired together. Guns are really neither here nor there for me. But the sentiment behind the right to own a gun is deeply important for me. If the right to own a gun is responsibly understood, the sense is, “I can take care of myself. And I can take care of my family. And I can take care of my neighbor. I know the people I need to take care of. Someone that doesn’t know me or my neighbor can’t really take care of us, because they don’t know us.”
There is something actually beneath the right to own a gun that is foundational to having a true community: “We know each other and we take care of each other.”
I love the United States. But I’ve never met the United States. However, I have met you. We might even say this: it would be a greater thing to fight for our neighbor than to fight for our country. To save our neighbor is to save our country. But fighting for your country alone is to lose your neighbor, and then lose your country.
May we not lose each other
Tom+