Status Updates From Violent Spring (The Ivan Mo...

I’m digging it.

Monk believed you made your own luck, what little there was to be found in this rapacious world.

“Maybe this will be, at least for some of the gang members, their moksha,” Chalmers.
“Their what?” Monk.
“It means liberation. A release from the bondage of endless reincarnation. In this case, a release from the endless warring and cycle of self-hate and self-destruction. It is good
karma, and one creates it by living a good life.”

He hated the lawyer for all that had happened;
the machinations, the avarice, the killing and the
blood. And that one, if not two, men were dead by his hand
and his gun. He’d done it to protect his and Grant’s lives,
but the act of eliminating a human existence was a malignancy
too many in the world shared. And if there was
anything Monk was sure about, it was that guns didn’t cure
the disease.

“Go ahead,” Monk challenged. “I’m itching to send my
story around to the papers. Oh, and not the Times, I know
you and the publisher both take breakfast at the Odin Club. But the folks over at the weekly alternative in town, and the
Black paper The Sentinel, and hey, maybe somebody at The
Nation or Mother Jones might think it’s worth a few inches
of ink.”

It took too long for Monk to learn that guns were not
the answer to crime, only the end product of flawed social
and economic policies.