Guns or Butter
By Michael Boyajian
I had an acquaintance when I worked in state service, a fellow judge. You would come back from your weekend and meet him by the cooler Monday morning and tell him how you had dinner and a movie with the wife over the weekend and he would tell you he had dinner, purchased a gun and went to the shooting range.
This went on weekend after weekend with me seeing dozens of movies and him buying dozens of guns. His home must have been like a fortress and it would have taken a precinct full of New York’s Finest to breach its perimeter.
Some days I would recollect to him how I had been to science lectures at the American Museum of Natural History and learned about string theory, the possibility of time travel and the search for intelligent life in the universe. I told him how I had once heard Buzz Aldrin speaking in Central Park and how much I wished I had shaken his hand, I was just a few feet from a man who had walked on the moon.
The guy at work would tell me how in the old days he would crash communist party meetings as sort of a private spy for conservative groups. He told me once that he was just a few feet from communist leader Gus Hall and could have shot him dead and ended the communist threat right then and there.
Well, communism faded of its own accord a failed economic system and it need no military punch to knock it down contrary to what many would have you believe.
I am writing this in my sunny yard beneath a shade umbrella surrounded by flowers, singing birds and buzzing bees. He is a sick man now locked away in his house shades drawn tight with his guns doing nothing at all and that just might be a good thing.
End