Jeff Lowe's Blog

“The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it,” he insisted. “It has nothing to do with what you’re saying I can’t say. It has everything to do with my right and my freedom of artistic expression.”

Read the article here.

Here's a link to a post at Reason about the FASTER program to train teachers and school administrators how to respond to "active shooter" events. The program apparently covers both defensive use of weapons by school staff and first-aid treatment of gunshot wounds. From the article:

For many years there has been debate about allowing teachers to be armed to protect students. This post describes an established training program for teachers who choose to do so in compliance with school rules. The program is FASTER—short for Faculty/Administrator Safety Training & Emergency Response. Introduced in Ohio, FASTER could be adopted by every state and school, at no cost to taxpayers, and at considerable saving of lives.

I'm not so sure about the "no cost to taxpayers" part, since the FASTER pages linked in the article mention $1,000/trainee fee. But there are buttons for donations or sponsoring a trainee. I can't vouch for the effectiveness of this particular program, but it's definitely on the right track.

As I've said before, anyone hired as a teacher or administrator of a children's school--and indeed anyone with responsibility for a group of children--must be able to answer this question:

What do you do when a killer walks into the room?

Any answer that requires waiting fails. This includes: waiting another minute (or ten?) for the cops to arrive, or waiting for the government to pass another law, or waiting for a better mental health system to be built. Any answer that involves martyring oneself as an unarmed human shield also fails. Any answer that involves the sensibility, "teachers shouldn't have to do that," fails most miserably.

The FASTER program at least points us in the right direction. But I've noted before, and it's still true: attitude trumps training. People without the courage to act in a crisis will fail, no matter how impressive their training certificate looks.

Hire for attitude, then train.

Note: use the links in the Reason article to go to the FASTER sites.

Imagine a surgeon, sworn to heal, to save lives, to do no harm. His country calls him to war. He is stationed on a faraway island, in a canvas tent with a dirt floor that offers little respite from the tropical heat, the insects, the disease. The wounded young men keep coming in, drenching the tent in their blood and agony.

The enemy has breached the defenses. Suddenly they appear at the tent, their war-lust undimmed by pity or mercy for the wounded. The surgeon sees an enemy soldier bayonet one of his patients on a gurney.

What does a healer do?

He does this.

This is why we celebrate Memorial Day.

It is the nature of things that massacres that happen are remembered, those that are prevented are forgotten.

Had Salvadore Ramos been shot by an armed teacher as he entered the school in Uvalde, there would have been no bloody child's shirt for society's noisemakers to wave. The event would not appear in the statistical charts of "mass shootings at schools." It would be a minor news story, perhaps a local one.

But that teacher would have been a greater hero than any of the adults on the scene of the actual Robb Elementary School massacre.

And no one would know the hero's name. No one would thank that hero for saving the lives of nineteen children and two adults.

They wouldn't know. No one would know. But it would be true.

Early info is almost always wrong. For the uninvolved, a 72-hour waiting period for news to sort itself out is not a bad idea.

"Fog of war" is only part of the reason for this. Ineptitude and a CYA impulse on the part of the authorities work into it too.

The similarities among these (Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde, others) indicate that the experts in charge of designing and enacting defenses and responses are wrong.

Adults in charge of children must answer this question: What do you do if a killer walks into the room today? (Answers invoking the need to change laws or improve mental health services earn a failing score.)

A teacher who uses her body as a shield in a doomed effort to protect her students is a martyr. A teacher who pulls out a gun and shoots the killer before he can murder the children is a hero.

The time to stop a killer is before he gets into that room.

Responding to an "active shooter" is not just the police department's job. The true first responders are and must be the adults who work at the school.

An ounce of door-lock prevention is worth a pound of trigger-pulling cure. Or more.

Attitude trumps training. Bureaucracies including police departments and school systems often use training programs more as political theater than as rigorous preparation. The result may be individuals with safety certifications but no steel in their spines. You know who doesn't have any training? These young killers. They are not trained assassins. They never attended some terrorist training camp in Iraq. What's needed are adults who have the personality to play the sheepdog to the killer's wolf. The kind who run to trouble, not away from it. People who will pull the trigger when the trigger needs to be pulled. Hunters. Boxers. Guys who like to mix it up once in a while.

We also need people who can lock a damned door, and supervisors who require it.

We can't sing a cappella worth a durn. That takes specific practice, some talent, and passing familiarity with a pitch pipe.

"Make a joyful noise" is kind of a dodge. We're Methodists, for Pete's sake. It's more like: make an obligatory and self-conscious noise if you have to.

Probably ought to keep the old upright piano somewhere in the sanctuary, instead of down in the fellowship hall, where it hardly ever gets used anyway.

But if we used an acoustic piano, we'd have to stick to the written key, and that would be a problem.

We really ought to get a choir director who knows what he's doing. This poor dude signed up as "interim" director and he's starting to get surly at their lack of effort to find somebody.

The stained glass windows illuminate the pews some, but the choir loft is still too dark to see those tiny little words in the hymnbooks very well.

I probably ought to at least try to memorize some of these lyrics.

The lead soprano should lead the singing. The others should key off her, not the choir director. The director ought to shut his pie-hole and swing his arms to keep time.

Nobody looks at the director anyway. They all look at their hymnbooks and listen to the piano player for the tempo. Without the piano player keeping tempo, everybody slows down so much it sounds like we're singing through molasses. And there weren't a durn thang I could do about it.

I am not a choir director, even with the lights on. I sho'nuff ain't one in a blackout.

There's a family gathering out in Houston this evening to remember and celebrate the life of a man I knew well. He was my first cousin. He died of a violent attack. His son sits in jail awaiting trial on charges of capital murder. Whether and how the son's long history of mental illness will influence the outcome of the case, is not clear.

At his memorial service, the families likely will, and with good reason, avoid any mention of the son, though he is blood relation to many of them. They usually have a slideshow of the deceased's life at these gatherings, and usually the man's children are stars of the show. I don't know if they'll show any pics of father and son back in happier times. It will be a much different affair than the one's I've attended.

Patricide is such an uncommon and unexpected cause of death.

I knew the son, too, from times his family would visit the old home place hereabouts. He and his brother loved coming here when they were little, fishing in the ponds, swimming in my dad's pool, romping in the woods. When the son got married and had a family of his own, he would bring his wife and kids here. This was a little rural paradise for them, too.

I remember with great fondness how the son's two older boys would get so happy and excited when my dad came tootling over to the old house in his Gator. "Uncle James!" they would yell together, and my dad would take them on a jaunt down the dirt road, or around the pond. He was actually a great-great uncle to them, and he was getting quite old and his mind slowing with Alzheimer's, but he cherished the joy they took in his company.

I also saw first hand some of the weird behaviors the son's mental illness was starting to brew. He disappeared from the old house early one cold, drizzly morning. Barefoot, dressed only in shorts and a T-shirt, he ran out of the house, following some unseen phantasm, down the dirt road and across a pasture, into the woods toward Cane Creek.

It had been storming with heavy rains for days. The creek was as deep and rushing as hard as I had ever seen it. A bunch of us gathered to search for him. We feared he tried to cross the creek and got taken downstream in the current. We looked all over, downstream, on the banks... nothing.

A cousin and I went to the other side of the creek and found footprints, we followed the tracks toward the highway. Helicopters were dispatched and found nothing. We drove all around in pickups, stopping at houses and businesses. A woman at a chicken farm said a crazy looking man stopped at the chicken house and asked for directions. We kept driving around the area but could not find him.

Finally, someone brought search dogs. They caught his scent and found him sleeping in the cab of a pickup truck in someone's yard.

At one point, while we were gathered, figuring our next move, a man who lived nearby came up to us. He made some crack about whether we were searching for some escaped convict or drug dealer, as if he should get his gun to help catch him. That pissed me off. I told him the guy we were looking for was a Navy vet and a good man, a husband and father, who was just having some mental problems beyond his control, but he wasn't violent, and if he was going to bring that attitude, he could just get lost.

What did I know?

A lot of members of this close extended family came to help during that episode. Those same people are gathering now with a very different view of things. I never expected patricide. I don't know if any of the others did.

There's a lot I don't know. A story like this is the kind of minefield that drives people to write fiction, because it's the only medium where you at least have a shot at getting to the truth without stepping on mines that makes personal relationships go boom.

The families will manage the memorial with grace and dignity, and no shortage of laughter and love. The old fella was that kind of guy, and his stories will get told tonight.

God bless him, and God bless that family.

My better half & me, at her rental house near nerve-gas central, totin' post hole diggers and pressure-treated 4x4 posts and bags of quick-setting concrete, fixin' to do a cheapskate fix on a problem that mos' def qualifies for a total ripout and rebuild.

Back yard retaining wall has begun its slo-mo fall. Pulled away from the ground behind it several inches and leans precariously. Whole thing was put in wrongo: just a wall of brick 1 layer deep, no backward lean, no anchors, no backing gravel for drainage or drain holes, and a bunch of hollies and oaks planted right on the other side with very patient, insistent roots.

Of course, like everything else in this problem pit of an investment house, the wall had failed at some point in the past and had been poorly repaired by the amateur cheapskate who used to own the place.

The wall had been obscured by the big rotten deck and the gargantuan holly bushes, so we were unable to assess its state when we bought the place. That's my excuse.

So here's what we did: cut the four 8-foot 4x4s in half to make 8 posts. Dug 8 holes in a line 6 inches from the wall, 18" deep. Connected each pair of posts with a horizontal 2x8 (salvaged from the old deck) to make 4 connected pairs, each looking like a short section of a wooden fence.

Drilled two 1/2" holes in each horizontal connecting fence rail. Inserted a 6" long 1/2" carriage bolt with washer and nut into each hole to use as a jack.

Set the posts in the holes with the quickset concrete.

Cut short pieces of 2x4 and drilled one shallow hole in each piece, to be used as a pad to set between the jack-bolt and the brick wall. The head of the bolt fits into the shallow hole to keep it from slipping off the pad.

Screwed the nut down the bolt against the fence rail, which extended the bolt against the pad on the wall (a cheapskate jack). We were hoping that this might provide enough force to push the leaning wall back upright, but no dice. It did, at least, serve to buttress the wall so that it won't fall down go boom on some poor tenant.

It looks, of course, like crap. What we should do is tear the wall down, rip out the hollies, root and branch, and eliminate the need for a wall by digging the ledge into a nice, smooth slope. Then maybe install a French drain at the bottom, like we did next to the house.

I think this 1970s housing development was built on a swamp. When it rains a lot, the water table rises to the surface. The ground gets soggy and springs form in the crawl space under the house. Plus, rainwater drains down the slope in the back yard toward the house. The retaining wall, pushed by water, earth, and root slowly topples. Especially a cheapskate wall like this one.

All the little victories--digging the holes, setting the concrete, making the jacks--don't rate even a giggle from Ma Nature, who can (and likely will) crush them just rolling over in her sleep.

And yet we persist. Head, wall, some assembly required... repeatedly.

She was named after Lena Horne, that icon of suave, sophisticated jazz, and she is as thoroughly unlike her namesake as a bitch can be.

She is energy and power and speed, her preferred mode of movement is the all-out sprint, she leaps and spins and tears across lawns and through thick forest with equal abandon.

When I go into the woods to work with limb lopper or chainsaw, she plunges enthusiastically into the effort, digging with her paws, yanking on root and branch with her jaws, leaping to grab high branches and vines, yipping and squealing and barking with a cheerfully weird intensity, and when I move to the next work spot, so does she.

When she chases a squirrel, it's more like a race than a hunt, though she has caught and killed one, and with Goon, a fawn, but if the squirrel runs up a tree, the other dogs will besiege it while Lena will sprint a victory lap around the field.

She is the joy of muscle and movement, the ecstasy of speed, a whirligig in a windstorm, a bouncing ball of happiness when you come home.

When she chews a stick too successfully and a piece gets wedged in her upper jaw, she runs to me and lets me yank it out, and then she leaps up to kiss me in the mug before racing off to chew another stick.

She leaps into any pond or stinking muck puddle she can find, heedless of your screams to get out and threats to bathe her when we get home.

She eats more than the other dogs, and yet she hasn't an ounce of fat on her, just lean, hard muscle. Pound for pound, maybe the strongest, fastest, and most durable dog I know, and she will take a morsel of food from your fingertips with perfect gentleness.

She has a weird obsession with patterns of light that the window in the door to the garage sends across the utility room when you open it. She is at her most still when she hides in the shadowy room, waiting for the lights, like fleeting angels, to move across the wall. And when they do, she explodes into action, but never catches them.

.

In the summer of 1974 I left my home in the Canal Zone to go to college at Kings Point, NY. Stopped over in Alabama to see some of my dad's family, then flew from Atlanta to New York on my own. It was in the days before the feds deregulated the airlines, and certain routes and schedules were required, regardless of whether there were enough passengers to make it economically feasible.

It was a 747, and it was almost empty. The emptiness made for a hollow, cavernous feel that made my mind reverberate with a weird mix of anticipation and melancholy. The airline gave us plastic earphones, and as I listened to the music, two songs dug into my brain like permanent ear-worms.

One was Rikki Don't Lose That Number, by Steely Dan. The other was Sideshow, by Blue Magic. Both had been released in April of that year.

There's some combination of age and emotional state that softens the ground to let certain songs dig real deep into your psyche and stay there like buried treasure. Years or decades after not hearing them, a chance encounter on the radio unearths them, as fresh as ever.

Here they are: