I am the Eagle Scout.
I am the Missouri Boy’s State delegate in the last summer of innocence. I am 17, and although The Ballad of the Green Beret is in heavy rotation on my favorite local Top 40 a.m. radio station, it means nearly nothing to me. I am thinking of my last year in high school, of tennis and cars and college, but not sure how or where. I just know it will be hard to afford, but I will find a way.
I am the Eagle Scout. I have a rifle, and friends with whom I hunt. While I grew up watching John Wayne, Gunsmoke, and Palladin, I can’t conceive of taking another’s life. Sure, there is occasional violence, but its fistfights in the school hallways, or out on the lawn after the bell rings. A cop car or two might show up, but not an ambulance, not a news cruiser.
But late that summer in Austin, Texas, reports of something different, something horrible. A young man in a tower with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight. Is it a Texas thing, where less than three years earlier, our president was gunned down by a lone rifleman? Could there be more of this?
I am the college student, not as studious as I should have been, and at 21 now, no longer in good standing for a student deferment. I weigh my options and choose to follow my father, grandfather and great-grandfather into the Army, knowing full well that two high school classmates have already died in Vietnam. I enlist, but a Navy doctor tells me — on Christmas eve no less – that I am physically unfit to serve, and thus rejected for military service. I am not religious, but for the first time in my life I understand the theological concept of grace.
At 31, I change careers and pursue writing, a decade past getting my college degree. I am much older than other cub reporters, I am frantic to catch up and learn the craft. I volunteer as a firefighter, because I am needed. I am also near destitute, but am at peace with what I’m doing and who I’ve become.
At 52, I am a husband and a parent of a small child. I am building a house, and a life. I am the boy’s baseball coach. I am comfortable, and for the first time in my life, just a bit overweight. I have life insurance, just in case. And one early September day, I see horror unfold on tv and 3,000 people die. I’ve come to learn that vengeance carried out to spite a grievance isn’t a “Texas thing,” or an Oklahoma City thing, but it has become a thing. It will not merely continue, it will repeat with greater frequency.
Now at 71, we are retired, and that boy is in medical school. Hatred in America has been fanned to an inferno by a psychopathic arsonist in the White House. Like a wind-whipped wildfire, embers jump from acre to acre, incinerating us faster than we can fight it. That “thing” now occurs daily, one grim-faced news conference jostling with another for pre-eminence on the nightly news. I no longer have the stamina to fight the flames, but hope my son one day finds a world with less heat, more light. And healing.
Someday the Eagle Scout’s son will use knowledge, science and compassion to make it all better. His dad did what he could, but to this point, it hasn’t been nearly enough. In retrospect, I was the fortunate son, spared from predatory adults, random violence, prejudice or war, but watching close at hand and taking it all in, a witness who can testify that it all exists.