anybody can’t
tell difference has got whole
lot bigger problem

From the Sheriff Ed Tom Bell Book of Life (Continued) –

I read in the papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country.

Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools.

And they come across these forms, they’d been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions.

And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways.

Chewin gum.

Copyin homework.

Things of that nature.

So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools.

Forty years later.

Well, here come the answers back.

Rape, arson, murder.

Drugs. Suicide.

So I think about that.

Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I’m gettin old.

That it’s one of the symptoms.

But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I’ve got.

Forty years is not a long time neither.

Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether.

If it aint too late.

So says Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in the book, No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy.

Ed Tom’s thought are interspersed through out the book and set off in italics.

One of these days I am to copy out all those pages and create a book titled, Ed Tom Bell and the Meaning of Life.

I always meant to go back and re-read just those parts.

Maybe this would get me around to doing that.

takes very little
to govern good people and
bad people can’t be

It’s a odd thing when you come to think about it.

The opportunities for abuse are just about everwhere.

There’s no requirements in the Texas State Constitution for bein a sheriff.

Not a one.

There is no such thing as a county law.

You think about a job where you have pretty much the same authority as God and there is no requirements put upon you and you are charged with preservin nonexistent laws and you tell me if that’s peculiar or not.

Because I say that it is.

Does it work?

Yes.

Ninety percent of the time.

It takes very little to govern good people.

Very little.

And bad people cant be governed at all.

Or if they could I never heard of it.

So says Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in the book, No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy.

Ed Tom’s thought are interspersed through out the book and set off in italics.

One of these days I am to copy out all those pages and create a book titled, Ed Tom Bell and the Meaning of Life.

I always meant to go back and re-read just those parts.

Maybe this would get me around to doing that.

BTW, the title, No Country for Old Men, is adapted from:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

from Sailing to Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats,

everyone standing
in a pool of gasoline
each with kitchen match

Based on the description of Nuclear War that every country was in a basement room together, standing in 4 inches of gasoline and that everyone had a pack of matches.

One goes, everyone goes.

It was said by either Richard Feynman or Carl Sagan and I could do the Google but just now I am happy to know someone said it.

It wasn’t Enrico Fermi.

It was Fermi who, at the Trinity Bomb test when the first Plutonium Bomb was set off on the New Mexico desert that if the gadget didn’t work, the US had just spent $2 Billion proving that nuclear bombs weren’t possible.

Fermi then added, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing to prove.

Today though, I was not thinking about Nuclear Bombs or Nuclear War even though I had just finished reading On the Beach, the 1957 novel about life in Australia AFTER the northern hemisphere is destroyed in a Nuclear War.

Australia had not been involved in the war but the nuclear fallout created by the bombs in the north slowly crept south and all life under the cloud is wiped out.

More on my mind was the story of of a feller who went into a grocery store in Atlanta.

He was was wearing body armor and carrying six loaded weapons — four handguns in his jacket pockets, and in a guitar bag, a semiautomatic rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun.

He was arrested and charged and then the charges were dropped and he was released and re arrested and is in jail waiting trial on charges of reckless conduct.

His lawyer said, “I mean, all the guy did was be in the store with guns,” he said. “I go into Kroger with a gun, and I don’t expect to be arrested for reckless conduct when I do that. Based on the information from the case, he didn’t do anything that would even remotely constitute reckless conduct. And shame on the state for even prosecuting him for that.”

I am not a gun person.

I do not feel that everyone having guns makes me feel safer.

I cannot understand how, if I owned and carried a gun, I would feel safer.

And it is beyond me how any law abiding gun person would feel safer if I had a gun.

What I feel is that everyone is standing in pool of gasoline and everyone has matches.

So far the gun incidents, known as mass casualty events, have been more or less, one person and a gun.

The mass casualty events that descends into a gunfight at the OK Corral and then house to house street fighting are coming.

It’s a death spiral and there is no way out of this.

Can’t go back.

As Willy Wonka said, You can’t go back, you have to go forward to go back.

I see no resolution to this issue other than the end.

Like the nuclear cloud in On the Beach, it is coming and cannot be stopped.

Inevitable and here now.

In On the Beach, everyone in the end, well …