Hello, My Name Is Doris has been on my radar since I saw the trailer last fall, first because of Sally Field and second because of the movie’s basic premise, that people over 60 ain’t dead yet. As of April 2, the movie hasn’t come to my town, but  a friend in Los Angeles who saw it said it was nice to see a decent part written for a 60-something female. The fact that this was my friend’s take-away says a lot about Hollywood’s disdain for Women of a Certain Age.

It makes sense, I guess, that an industry built on visuals would insist that its female visuals be pleasing to its customers, although I could make a case for the beauty of a face lined with the experiences of a lifetime, like the total babe at the bottom of this post, whose hands were soft and smooth as peony petals. You had a grandma—maybe you are a grandma—you know what I mean.

Or I could talk about movie demographics. I could tell you that 31 percent of the population is aged 18 to 39 and buys 36 percent of movie tickets, while 35 percent of the population is over 50 and buys 25 percent of tickets—but that the numbers in the younger age bracket have been shrinking while the numbers in the older age bracket have been growing as the Boomers move through the demographic pipeline. I could tell you what Rebecca Pahle reported in 2014, that 52 percent of moviegoers are female but that only 15% of the main characters in the Top 100 grossing films of 2013 were women.

Small wonder so many people stood up and hollered "You go, girl!" when Jessica Chastain announced in February that she was launching Freckle Films, a production company with all-female executives. Chastain (who credits her grandmother for her career), Queen Latifah, Juliette Binoche and Catherine Hardwicke have joined the production company We Do It Together to produce films and TV that boost the empowerment of women, including Women of a Certain Age. Women like Doris. Like me.

Empowerment is good, because most people—women, especially—are afraid of getting old. I get that. It’s tough to acknowledge that your buns of steel have turned into buns of bread. It’s disappointing when, after a couple of babies and a couple of decades fighting gravity, you have to trade in a handful of silk for an industrial-strength brassiere because your boobs look like the ones in National Geographic. My brother knows what I’m talking about.

But I think it’s not being old that scares people. I think it's getting old after being young first, especially in a country that warehouses the old and the frail so we don’t have to look at our own future. A young-sounding reporter on a March 25 Wisconsin Public radio broadcast of This American Life titled “It’ll make Sense When You’re Older” stated, “There are a lot of things that make sense when you're older, as in a grown-up. And then there are things that make sense when you're actually getting old, when you start to make sense of losing things. That is what I'm sure most of us cannot fully grasp until we get there ourselves, to know—to really know—there is no path back.” The reporter on this piece conveyed  a distinctly mournful attitude toward getting older, maybe because she saw her own future in the folks she interviewed. It's tragic, because older people are brimming with wisdom.

But I do understand the fear. Aging is sneaky. Once you're an adult, time passes so slowly, day after day, year after year, that it feels like nothing will ever change. Then, one day: Pow! Men notice their hairlines receding. Women notice for the first time that when they smile, those lines at the corners of their eyes don’t smooth out. You see something shiny in your hair, but when you yank on it, you find out it’s not a silver lamé thread from a sweater—it’s a gray hair.

This is the point at which people who have spent the first part of their lives chasing things outside themselves—education, jobs, relationships, career advances—slow down and say, “Holy crap, I’m getting old!” They buy Rogaine and hair dye and face cream. They join a gym. They try to stop time, even though youth isn’t anybody’s to keep forever. You only get a little bit for a little while, and then you get the bum’s rush: Move along. Nothing to see here.

But something I have noticed as I've edged closer to my own Good Night is that I...actually...like getting older. The pressure is off, in so many areas of my life—and apparently, plenty of other people feel the same way. According to psychologist Laura Carstensen, getting older is when your life actually gets better because “recognizing that we won't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways.”

Carstensen’s research shows that older people are actually happier than younger people. According to Carstensen, “When we recognize that we don't have all the time in the world, we see our priorities most clearly; we take less notice of trivial matters; we savor life; we're more appreciative; we're open to reconciliation; we invest in more emotionally important parts of life, and life gets better.” You can listen to Carstenson’s fascinating 11-minute TED talk “Older People are Happier” here.

Carstensen validates what I’ve felt ever since I retired: I am tickled pink to be exactly where and who I am, a female dancing along in my own Doris shoes. My income is (mostly) sufficient for my needs, so I don’t have to punch a time clock to make ends meet. My body and I have known one another long enough so I can tell whether it needs a session on the elliptical or a square of chocolate. Either or both. If I want company, I can find it, even though I’m an “older lady,” like San Francisco’s Donnalou Harris sings about (if you haven't clicked on a link yet, pleeeease do yourself a favor and click on that one). Harris sings,

“Well, I ain’t 16
Not a beauty queen
And my eyes are baggin'
And my skin is saggin'
And if that's the reason that you don't love me
Then maybe that's not love.”
 
Betcha a bright, shiny nickel that Donnalou still gets The Look, and so do I. If made an effort, I could have all the companionship I wanted.

I don't make an effort. I'm perfectly fine spending time on myself, quenching my own thirst. This, too, has gotten a green light in the larger society; apparently, being alone relieves stress, boosts confidence, and makes a person more creative.

Travel? Yes, please. Challenges? Yes, always yes. Time enough at last? Well...I know I won't get the 500+ years I'd need to write all the books I have in me or read all the books that make me tingle all the way to my toes, but I'm having a ball going for it anyway. When I was a teen, I read columns by Sydney J. Harris in Chicago newspapers. In one column he said, “The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure.” At 16, I decided that meant I should stuff my eyes with wonder, like Ray Bradbury says. So that’s what I did. That's what I do.

If I'm not stuffing my eyes with wonder thirty years down the road like these folks, well, I hope I'm still able to hit the ground running—straight for the coffee pot—and then spend all day doing what I always wanted to do. Yes, I do know how lucky I am to be here.

I think I learned to appreciate where I am and what I have from my mother, who at age 84 is still the life of every party, and from my paternal grandmother, Bessie Woodford Peterson, who reared eleven children during the Great Depression, who sent a fiancee to World War One and a son to World War Two, and who grew up in the horse-and-buggy days but lived to see a man walk on the moon. She was the foundation of a very big family and a woman who taught everybody in it how to grow old with grace.

For me, so far, getting older has been as great a gift as being born in the first place. If I can hang on for a few more years, I might even become a Grandmother of a Certain Age.

A conversation about the “corrupt” media inspired me to write about how the media have changed in my own lifetime. The more digging I did, however, the more I saw that corruption is like the legendary hydra: if you cut off one head, the hydra grows two in its place.


Hydra Head Number One: Government

Bernie Sanders reminds me of the boy who cried wolf. You know the story: a boy is sent out to guard the villagers’ sheep. It’s boring. One night, just for kicks, the boy hollers, “Help! Wolves!” Naturally, the villagers run to his side to fight off the threat, but when they arrive huffing and puffing to the field, the sheep are peacefully browsing and the boy is laughing like a loon. The angry villagers go home. The boy does it the next night with the same result. But, as often happens in these kinds of stories, on the third night things change. Wolves really do slink out of the woods and attack the sheep. The boy cries, “Help! Wolves!” and the villagers roll over in their beds and go back to sleep. The sheep and the boy are devoured. The moral of the story is don’t pretend you’re in trouble if you’re not.

But Bernie Sanders' hollering about Wall Street and greed in every speech isn't "crying wolf." When Sanders talks about the longstanding, ongoing, pervasive mutual back-scratching that exists between wealthy donors and elected officials, he's talking about something real.

Don't get me wrong. Being wealthy isn't bad. If it were, the lottery would go out of business. The problem is that, throughout human history, rich people have enjoyed privileges that poor people simply don’t have access to: adequate food, clothing and shelter; protection from enemies; proper medical attention when they are sick or injured. It also is true that those who Have want to hold on to what they have; those who Have Not must stand in the snow and look in through the window. This is the way the world has been, is now, and probably always will be. Jesus himself said “The poor you will always have with you.” But Jesus also said it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven.

He wasn’t saying he didn’t like rich people; he was saying rich people generally care more about money than about improving their souls or helping poor people—some call this greed—and we all know Jesus was all about seeking god first and loving your fellow humans second. Got questions.org explains, "The rich man so often is blind to his spiritual poverty because he is proud of his accomplishments and has contented himself with his wealth. He is as likely to humble himself before God as a camel is to crawl through the eye of a needle." Major world religions recognize that greed exists and urge their followers to help their fellow humans. One of the five pillars of Islam, for example, says that Muslims should give alms to the poor.

Some rich people do help others. Other rich people, however, use their money to influence public policy, and the connection between government and business is...messy. Government regulation of business is supposed to prevent companies from making a profit at the expense of people’s health and safety, but regulations sometimes are pushed aside. It happened at Love Canal in New York, where the government approved the dumping of industrial chemicals—and then had to come in and clean up the mess after people started getting sick. Koch Industries, one of the top three polluters of America’s air, water, and climate, has paid and continues to pay fines and penalties but goes on polluting. The toxic water in Flint, Michigan, has been in the news for months. By now, we know that the government knew the water was bad but did nothing. In the state of Wisconsin, the past five years has seen an unprecedented dismantling of the state's environmental laws in a partisan effort to smooth the way for big business.

These examples of corporate greed colluding with government and trampling on human welfare are troubling. But greed and government have been in cahoots from the founding of the republic. Mother Jones shares a timeline of campaign finance transgressions going all the way back to George Washington. This disheartening list shows that few presidential administrations—no, not even Lincoln’s—have been corruption-free.

One of the best-known and longest-running corruption machines was New York City’s Tammany Hall, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order. This organization was founded in 1786. It played a major role in controlling New York City and New York State politics from the 1790s to the 1960s.

To be sure, Tammany Hall provided real, necessary help to immigrants in a pre-welfare era. Tammany Hall provided food, money, legal advice, and jobs. No immigrant had to watch his children starve if Tammany Hall embraced him. According to The Reader’s Companion to American History, Tammany Hall’s popularity and endurance resulted from its willingness to help the city’s poor and immigrant populations.

But there was a catch. Tammany Hall didn’t help immigrants just to be nice. Under William M. “Boss” Tweed, Tammany supporters filled out paperwork, provided witnesses, and loaned immigrants money for the fees required to become citizens. They also bribed judges and other city officials to go along with whatever Tammany wanted. In exchange for all these benefits, immigrants voted for political candidates Tammany favored. Tweed biographer Kenneth D. Ackerman, quoted in Wikipedia, says, "... The Tweed ring at its height [controlled] key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box…Tammany depended for its power on government contracts, jobs, patronage, corruption, and ultimately the ability of its leaders to control nominations to the Democratic ticket and swing the popular vote."

Another alliance between government and business that caused an uproar was the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, which, before Watergate, was the "greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics" according to Robert Cherney in Graft and Oil (2010, History Now).

What went down is this: in 1921, Warren G. Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert B. Fall, secretly leased naval oil reserve fields at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, to Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny without anybody else having the chance to bid on the leases. This was legal under the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. What was not legal was that, in return for the leases, Fall got loans and gifts from Doheny and Sinclair totaling about $404,000 (about $5.36 million today). Fall funneled the money into his ranch and his businesses.

Lawsuits related to the scandal went on for years. Finally, in 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that the oil leases had been fraudulently given out. The Court invalidated both leases and returned the land to the government. Fall was convicted in 1929 for accepting bribes and became the first U.S. cabinet member to be imprisoned for crimes committed while in office.
 
Did this scandal end bribery? Nope. It continues through the present day. This video clip shows a meeting between the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Georgia legislators in June 2015 during which ALEC wined and dined legislators so they would propose legislation to benefit the corporations ALEC represents. To make it easier for the lawmakers, ALEC kindly wrote the laws they wanted passed.

That’s right: lawmakers don’t write these laws; ALEC does. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, "through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that…often directly benefit huge corporations." ALEC is at work in all 50 states.

Every generation expresses outrage when corruption rears its head yet again. The Occupy movement, for example, is about the intersection of state and corporate power. Unfortunately, corruption is easier to hide nowadays when money can be moved electronically with nobody the wiser, and political contributions can be made by corporations who, due to the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, have been granted the same rights as actual living people.

Hydra head Number Two: Media

In both Tammany Hall and Teapot Dome, the media played a part in bringing the corruption to light. In the 1970s, the Washington Post brought to light the skullduggery of the committee to re-elect the president. Last year, the video clip exposing ALEC’s machinations was produced by an NBC affiliate in Atlanta. But the media itself aren’t now and historically haven’t always been on the up and up.

One example of corrupt media is the Yellow Journalism that existed between 1895 and 1898, which helped push the United States into war in Cuba and the Philippines.

According to the U.S. Department of State, Yellow journalism was a style of newspaper reporting that emphasized sensationalism over facts. Named for a popular comic coveted by major newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, Yellow Journalism referred to both publishers’ profit-driven coverage of world events. Pulitzer’s and Heart’s coverage of the Spanish-American war was so intense  and captured the attention of such a vast readership that when the U.S. government wanted to go to war over Cuba, public support for the war was already in place. According to PBS, "Without sensational headlines and stories about Cuban affairs, the mood for Cuban intervention may have been very different."

Yellow Journalism isn't over. Think about what your favorite news medium offers as "news." Think about the last time your favorite medium presented both sides of an issue. Furthermore, the "free" press nowadays has a big problem.

The student mentioned at the top of this post was asked by her professor whether a liberal or conservative bias exists in the media, and, if so, whether that made her trust the media more or less.
The five media she was asked to examine were Fox News, Microsoft National Broadcasting Company (MSNBC), the New York Times, the Washington Post, and National Public Radio.

The problem with this professor's premise is that only five corporations own the vast majority of magazines, books, music, news feeds, newspapers, movies, and radio and television stations in America.
Clearly, a liberal or conservative bias in the media can exist only if the parent company allows it.

According to "Democracy on Deadline," a film featured on PBS’s Independent Lens Series, in 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the American media; by 2000,only six corporations had ownership of most media. Today, the five corporations that dominate the industry are Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany and Viacom (for the record, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR do not belong to any of these). Even on the internet, 80 percent of the top 20 online news sites are owned by the 100 largest media companies.

Liberal? Conservative? The professor’s question is moot, because he didn't mention other kinds of bias (racial bias, coverage of electoral politics, coverage of foreign news), nor did he mention the most insidious kind of bias.

A dangerous bias in the media is their corporatist bias, a tendency to select and to slant specific news stories that increase a corporation’s profits. A liberal or conservative bias can exist only if the media are free to arrive at an independent conclusion; the media cannot lean left or right if they are forced to choose programming and take editorial stances according to whatever is likeliest to increase profits.

This is hard to take. I grew up in an era when the press was seen as playing a central role in a functioning democracy because it acted as a watchdog. Back then, the press was called the "Fourth Estate," a term invented by Edmund Burke, which conveyed that an independent press was like a fourth branch of government. According to "Journalism in the Digital Age," a Stanford University research project, the Fourth Estate means "the role of the press is twofold: it both informs citizens and sets up a feedback loop between the government and voters. The press makes the actions of the government known to the public, and voters who disapprove of current trends in policy can take corrective action in the next election. Without the press, the feedback loop is broken and the government is no longer accountable to the people. The press is therefore of the utmost importance in a representative democracy."

Do the media still serve this function? Does anybody think that the independent Washington Post, which broke the Watergate scandal in 1972, would have pursued the story that led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 if the Post had been owned by, say, a corporation that had bankrolled Nixon’s re-election? Woodward and Bernstein would have been told to back off.

Even major players in the journalism world who remain independent are said, by some, to lean one way or another. News Junkie says, “We all remember that during the buildup to the war in Iraq many journalists, even at the New York Times, were beating the drums of war to make America’s public opinion favorable to the invasion. The New York Times has also a long history of bias in favor of Israel. More recently, some serious allegations were made of collusion between some journalists of the Washington Post and their sources at the CIA." Are these allegations true? I don't know, but I'm glad somebody is asking questions.

Are there journalists who want to tell the truth? Certainly, but many, according to Into the Buzzsaw, which won the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most extraordinary titles of 2002, have been prevented by corporate media ownership from reporting major news stories. Worse, the number of the number of full-time journalists at nearly 1,400 daily newspapers has shrunk from 55,000 in 2007 to 32,900 in 2015.

The love of power is the root of all evil

But controlling the media and influencing the government aren't enough. Some corporations also want to control the future of the country. A graphic by Represent us shows the top five donors to the top six presidential candidates as of February 18, 2016. Jeb Bush dropped out of the race last week, but his top donors come from Wall Street. Both Hillary Clinton’s and Ted Cruz’s top donors are Lawyers.  Marco Rubio’s top donors are people from the Real Estate industry. Bernie Sanders’ top donors are people in Education, although Sanders is the only candidate who, so far, has not accepted large political donations (as of January 2, the average donation to Sanders was $27.16). Last but certainly not least, Donald Trump’s top donor is… Donald Trump, which may be one reason his party is having a hard time controlling him.

The United States is going to elect a president in nine months. Money is affecting the election because it is determining what voters hear on the airwaves and in the press. Money is financing campaigns. So it's important to know who is paying whose piper.

How much have corporate contributions contaminated elections? According to USA Today, the result of Citizens United has been a deluge of cash poured into political action committees (super PACs) in support of political candidates. Worse, much of this spending, known as "dark money," never has to be publicly disclosed. Speaking of Citizens United, USA Today says the "definition of corporations as people protected by the First Amendment created a loophole that campaigns and PACs are all too happy to use to their advantage."

And get this: USA Today cites a Brennan Center for Justice study from 2014 that found that of the $1 billion spent in federal elections by super PACs since 2010, nearly 60 percent of the money came from just 195 individuals and their spouses.

Are you OK with 195 couples providing over half the funding for federal elections? Do you suspect those folks might expect something for their contributions? As Bernie Sanders says, “People aren’t dumb.”

How did we come to this point and how can we change our course?

The whole hot mess started in 2002 when the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002 limited the contributions that could be made by interest groups and national political parties to political campaigns. It required candidates for  political office, as well as interest groups and political parties supporting or opposing a candidate, to include in political advertisements on television and radio a statement identifying the candidate and stating that he or she approved the ad. 

The act was challenged in late 2007 by a conservative organization called Citizens United, which wanted to run TV commercials to promote a political documentary that dissed Hillary Clinton. Months-long wrangling resulted in the Supreme Court’s decision in 2009 that the BCRA’s prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech. The Court said that corporations, as associations of individuals, have speech rights under the First Amendment. The Court said it is wrong to limit a corporation's ability to spend money on campaigns because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.

In other words: a corporation has the same right to free speech as a person. The catch: a corporation's pockets generally are deeper than yours or mine.

Not every justice on the court agreed with the majority decision. Justice Stevens wrote the minority opinion, saying the 5-4 ruling in favor of Citizens United, "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution." He further wrote that "A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold."

Is it possible that our democracy isn't the one we grew up with? Is it possible that the people we have been, the people we want to be, isn't who we are any more? John Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, gives ten reasons the United States is the most corrupt country in the world, and they all have to do with the contaminating influence of money.

Long ago, one of my professors wanted to illustrate the idea of integrity. He told this story:
Pat and River met in a bar. Pat asked River for sex. Offended, River said, “We just met. I’m not that kind of person.” Pat asked if River would have sex for $10,000,000. River said “Sure.” Pat handed over a ten dollar bill and said, “Let’s go.” River said, “What do you think I am?” Pat said, “We’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling about the price.”

The purpose of this post is to pose a question: If people who “donate” to prostitutes expect to get something for their money, isn’t it possible that people who donate millions to candidates and corporations who gobble small, independent media outlets like potato chips expect to get something for their money as well?

Lincoln contemporary and poet laureate of the United States Walt Whitman said, "Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn — they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account." Whitman is talking about people being cut off from the blessings others enjoy. Do we have citizens born in America today who are "made of no account" as Whitman describes?  Of course we do.

How can we fix that? One thing we must do is end corruption. Another thing we can do is seek out independent news groups and organizations (NPR is a beaut). We can contribute to candidates who don't take huge sums of money from questionable sources. We can spread the word to our friends.

Because if we take an interest in our country, maybe we can take it back.

When my son was in high school, his math teacher used a game called Zobmondo to teach critical thinking and group discussion. "Zobmondo” is slang derived from “Zob!” which is a word somebody might yell if he or she felt horror, pain, or frustration. The game requires players to choose between two options, from the intriguing “Would you rather be granted the answers to any three questions or be granted the ability to resurrect one person?” to the horrible “Would you rather eat a newly born baby rodent or a small sack of crawling caterpillars?” Players aren’t allowed to choose “neither” or to change the question in any way. Besides having to consider abhorrent scenarios, players must correctly predict the consensus choice of the other players. My teen-aged son loved the game. (More Zobmondo questions here.)

Zobmondo came to mind last week after I had watched The Revenant (set in 1823) and The Martian (set in 2035) within five days of one another. The films tell the same story told 200 years apart. Naturally, I tried to decide which situation would be worse.

Both films feature a man left for dead by his companions.  In both, the environment is  a major factor in the action, with nature-based disasters (a bear/a storm) providing the inciting incident for each protagonist’s struggle. In both, procuring adequate food is a problem solved by ingenuity (building a fish seine of rocks/growing potatoes). In both, critical help appears at a critical moment (a Native American man traveling alone/a planetary probe left behind by a previous mission).

Granted, the stories aren’t exactly the same. Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), the scout in The Revenant, isn’t alone in the world. Oxygen and water are plentiful. Resources exist—if he can find them. Mark Watney (Matt Damon), the astronaut in The Martian, is alone, and he has limited resources he can lay his hands on. Even though both men struggle against their hostile environments, Glass’s worst enemy (arguably) is hostile humans, whereas Watney’s worst enemy is time, as in too much time for him to last given his dwindling resources. In addition, very different hearts beat in the two protagonists. Different motivations keep them going even though each knows the tiniest mishap could kill him.

Hugh Glass pushes himself to survive near-death experiences because he needs to kill the man who murdered his son. Glass is gritty. He’s a growler and a yeller and an eater of raw fish.  

Mark Watney pushes past several near-death experiences because he won’t allow something without a brain—the environment—to beat a human whose intellect got him to Mars in the first place. Watney sees the irony in his situation. He’s a joker. One of his lines reveals his wry approach to survival: “In the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option, I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this.”

Personally, I’d rather be in Glass’s situation, injured and freezing, but on Earth. Why? I have been injured and have come out the other side. Bodies heal. And don’t tell my neighbors, but I like winter. I understand cold weather. When the weatherman says “significant snow event” I get happy. If I were in Watney’s situation, however, I would not survive. I could grow potatoes, but I couldn’t rig up a water source. So, yeah, I guess if I had to choose, Zobmondo style, I’d pick wandering into the path of a mama grizzly over wandering around on Mars waiting to starve to death.

However, if I had to pick an attitude toward death, I’d pick Watney’s because I’d rather grin than growl. That’s what I did the first time I faced death thirty-five years ago this month.  
 
It went like this: to support myself in college, I drove a school bus. One blizzardy day, school got out early, so I was put on the biggest bus ever made as a sub on a route I’d never driven. “The kids will tell you where to go,” my dispatcher said, and it was so. Visibility was poor. By the second half of the route, the roads were getting clogged, but the bus already was half empty. We were going to make it.

Then my child-guide directed me to drive down a dead-end road.  “Are you sure about this?” I asked. “How will I turn around?”

“At the end of this road,” my guide said, “you go up that hill and there’s a turnaround at the top.” I dropped off two sets of kids and drove up the hill with half a dozen riders left on the bus.

Indeed, there was a turnaround at the top of the hill. But there was no guardrail to prevent anybody from plunging over the edge of the hill and rolling end-over-end to the valley below. It was too tight to back up. I had to take the turnaround. I didn’t dare slow too much lest I get stuck, but I couldn’t go so fast I would lose control. It was one of those situations where you are heading into a danger you can’t avoid so your only choice is to keep going and pray. Ever hit a patch of black ice on a sidewalk and feel your feet go out from under you? It was like that. Literally.

Because when the tires hit the outside curve closest to the drop-off, the bus started to slide. There was sheet ice under the newly fallen snow. The kids shrieked. I prayed.

The bus stopped before we went over. I asked the biggest boy to exit the bus and go get help at the last farmhouse we’d passed. He took off running though the blinding snow. I couldn’t leave my seat because I didn’t dare let go of the steering wheel. If I did, the wheels might shift, and the last stop on my route would be at the bottom of a ravine.

I had to get the kids off. So I started them singing “99 bottles of pop on the wall,” and as they sang, I had them exit the bus and go stand on the other side of the bus in the middle of the turnaround. It took just a couple of minutes, but it felt like forever until there was a knot of kids safely away from the bus and its driver, sitting with her hands clamped like death on the steering wheel.

You might think I would let myself feel my own fear once the kids were safe, but even though I knew the bus might go over before help came, I remember feeling pretty calm. I remember thinking, “I’ve had a great 24 years on Earth. I wish I could have had more. I wish I could have gotten married and had a kid. But this was pretty good.” I waited to slide over. I wondered if I would see my whole life flash before my eyes like they say you do just before you die. Would I see something I’d forgotten about?

Then I heard a chug-chug-chug. I heard the kids cheering. I saw through the falling snow the red cap of a farmer. I saw the smoke billowing from his tractor as it slowly climbed the hill.

The farmer sized up the situation in seconds. He didn’t get off his tractor until he’d positioned his vehicle. Then he got off, sent the kids back out of the way, attached his chains to the bus—gingerly—and climbed back aboard his tractor. He put it in gear and eased incredibly slowly forward. The bus eased incredibly slowly away from the edge of the cliff until the whole bus was off the ice and headed in the right direction.  I still didn’t dare leave the bus, so I hollered  “Thank you!” out the window and hollered at the kids to get back on. I focused on two things for the rest of the route: driving safely and breathing deeply. When the last kid was safely delivered to his home, I drove back to the bus garage, my vehicle covered with snow and my heart singing because I was going to get more than 24 years after all.

Life is as precious now, all these years later, as it was that snowy day. I got the family I hoped for, a career I loved, and a retirement many would envy because it lets me do this. Oh, yes, I still want more.

But I learned that day—and The Revenant and The Martian reminded me—that life is not a sure thing. There are no guarantees. Sometimes, the only thing between you and freezing to death is a horse carcass. Sometimes, the only thing between you and starving to death is a package of potatoes. Sometimes, the only thing between you and a fiery death is a farmer with chains and a tractor.

I don't know about you, but I plan to enjoy every minute.  

If you follow Downton Abbey, you’re aware of the strained relationship between sisters Lady Edith and Lady Mary Crawley. Mary disdains Edith; Edith avoids Mary. The sisters undermine one another every chance they get. “I know you!” Edith says to Mary, “I know you to be a nasty, scheming b*tch!" Between the two lies an unrelieved…let’s be kind and use the word “coolness.”

My sister, Janet, was born one year and 364 days after I was. When she and I were little, I wanted to be front and center in the middle of the action; she was an unwilling tagalong. I, the oldest, bossed her and our baby brother. When Jan got older, she realized if she refused my commands, I couldn’t do a thing about it. That was the beginning of an ongoing…coolness…between us.

Our younger brother usually played with Jan because the two were closer in age, but once in a while, he hung out with me. Unlike Jan, he went along with anything I suggested. One cold early fall day, he and I holed up in the corn crib with a bucketful of rotten tomatoes. When Jan wanted to join us, I pelted her with the tomatoes. My brother reluctantly threw one. Jan ran inside to tell Dad what we had done, so Dad made my brother and me stand in place while he and Jan let fly with the rest of the tomatoes. “How do YOU like it?” he said. Not so much, dad. Lesson learned.

As Jan and I got older, unlike Edith and Mary, we began to find things to appreciate in one another. Jan had a wicked sharp sense of humor. She was a terrific artist. I asked her to illustrate a poetry magazine I edited in high school, and she appreciated the positive attention she got for her fine pencil drawings. A couple of months before I graduated high school, my sister and I took baby steps toward a grownup way of interacting. We shopped together. We hung out. We laughed. I hoped Jan and I would continue to grow closer.

 It didn’t happen. When I left home at 17, I grabbed my freedom with both hands and dove into life on my own. I felt like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life who says, “I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I'm gonna see the world." I ran like sixty from my past toward new things, new jobs, new people. I moved to the West Coast, to the Twin Cities, to England. I assumed, incorrectly, that with my family, no news was good news.

Jan finished high school. She got a job at a fast-food restaurant. She started college. She met a man. She fell in love. She stopped doing art. She dyed her hair blonde and began intense dieting. She dropped out of college. She moved in with the man. And one day he beat her up.

I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me, and I didn’t think to ask. I could never have predicted that the spitfire I grew up with would let anybody hit her without paying him back in triplicate. Jan’s infrequent letters were full of chit-chat: how her job was going, how cute their trailer looked. Her letters never said she missed days of work because

of black eyes and ripped-out hair and broken bones. Her letters never said her trailer was cute because her husband went on a rampage and broke everything so she had to buy new. In one letter, Jan told me a little porcelain vase I’d given to her years before had broken, but she didn’t say her husband had smashed it to bits in order to hurt her. She didn’t tell me one of his favorite forms of torture was to grab her wrist and use her hand to hit his own face over and over.

Finally, Mom told me what was going on. I went to visit my sister. It was tense in their trailer. Jan told me Dick (not his real name, but the shoe fits) timed her whenever she went for takeout. He constantly accused her of cheating on him. She walked on eggshells around him. She strove to please him. She fit every textbook description I’d ever read of an abused woman, which I haltingly pointed out and which she angrily denied.

I invited her up to visit me for a weekend. Dick gave permission, even though I lived 300 miles away. While she was there, I cut my hand on a glass I was washing. I asked Jan to take me to the hospital. She refused, because, she said, “I never get to be alone.” I drove myself to the hospital with a dishtowel wrapped around my bleeding digit, but instead of feeling bewildered about why she didn’t take me in for stitches, I should have seen that she was so desperate for peace she’d grab it any time it came along. That weekend was our last good time together.

The family tried not to badger Jan about leaving her situation but also reassure her that any time she wanted to escape, we would help. But Jan said she had married Dick and that was that. If she gave in to our meddling, she would break her marriage vows. I said he broke his vow to love her every time he hit her. No, she said, he didn’t mean it. No, she would not leave him.

She found two ways to escape without leaving. She began to suffer mental problems when her husband beat her. She told Mom that sometimes when Dick beat her, she felt her mind floating above her body, allowing her to see Dick’s fists pummeling her without having to feel the pain or sense the damage he was doing to her body. She would wake up later, bruised and bloody, and he would apologize, and they would have a honeymoon period of bliss until it happened again. And again. She began to drink, her second means of escape. Alcohol poured on that situation was gasoline on a flame.

They had a child. When Dick abused the child, Jan finally decided she had to get out. She typed up for the judge a record of the abuse she’d suffered, which read like a police blotter. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that she’d endured things that shouldn’t happen to anybody, let alone the sister I’d shared weeknight suppers and Sunday dinners with for 17 years.

Jan and Dick divorced. We thought it was over.

But some time after the divorce was final, Dick came to her house and beat her and threw her down the basement stairs. She was in a coma for long, horrible weeks. She suffered permanent brain damage. The beating knocked her eye loose so it looked out at a different angle from the other eye. She could handle only menial jobs, which she lost one after another because she kept drinking. She telephoned my mother several times a day and my brother several times a week. Her diet was horrible. She hid cash under furniture cushions and was robbed more than once by “friends.” Her gait was unsteady, and we worried about her falling down the exterior stairs she had to climb to reach her second-floor walk-up. Her life centered on old TV shows and booze and cigarettes. She began to suspect that the FBI was spying on her, and when I laid out logical reasons that was unlikely, she began to suspect I was in cahoots with them.

Over time, in Jan’s mind, my failure to prevent or end her suffering morphed into deliberate malice on my part. I became somebody to blame. If I hadn’t been so mean when we were growing up; if I hadn’t left home right after graduation; if I’d been more of a friend; if I’d paid her more positive attention; if I’d written or visited oftener—if I’d been a better sister—her life would have turned out better.

Her physical and mental condition deteriorated to a point where Mom found an assisted living facility for her. My brother and I boxed up her stuff and loaded it into the moving van. The day we moved her out, we started to wash down the walls of her apartment, sticky with nicotine residue. My brother scrubbed just a small section of wall before declaring the whole place would have to be professionally cleaned, particularly since cockroaches had built their own Atlantic City under her stove and no self-respecting bacteria would have been caught dead in her toilet.

Jan resented Mom and me for "making" her move. Not my brother, of course, because he was only following orders. Not our father, who, by that time, had passed away. Not Dick, who never was brought to justice for what he had done, unlike this abuser.

Unfortunately, moving my sister into a nicer place did not move her into a happier frame of mind. She ignored her doctor’s orders. She stopped taking her medication. Her body began to fail. A large, laminated poster I’d given her to brighten up her new place she used instead to slide across the carpet from place to place because her legs stopped working. A new chair Mom had bought for Jan became soaked with urine. By December 2008, Jan was in the hospital. She was done being unhappy.

My brother and I went to see her. We stood on either side of her bed, each of us holding one of her hands. She had lost much of her hair. Her face was puffy. Her skin was the color of old parchment. We listened to the machines that breathed for her, that drained her bladder, that pumped nourishment through a tube into her stomach. We listened to the December wind blowing under the eaves outside. We spoke softly: “Remember when we built that fort in the haymow? Remember that time Penny and Shirley rode their horses all the way to our place? Remember the kittens?”

She opened her eyes. She saw and heard her brother. She saw and heard me.

Then she did something completely in character that surprised me anyway: she threw away my hand and clasped our brother’s hand with both of her own. “I do not forgive you,” her gesture said.

Jan died a couple of days later, the day after Christmas 2008. She was 50 years old. We buried her two days later in the pajamas I’d bought her for Christmas and a cap I’d sewed to cover her poor bald head. I wish she'd felt able to forgive me before she died.

I never expected to share my sister's story, but forgiveness has been on my mind lately because of something going on in my city: the county treasurer and his secretary recently were convicted of having stolen $1.39 million of taxpayer money from the county treasurer’s office between 2001 and 2013. Two weeks ago, a front-page story in the local paper indicated that the ex-treasurer and ex-secretary were hoping that the judge in their case would be lenient when he sentenced them.

They wanted forgiveness. They wanted mercy.

Four days after that story appeared, letters to the editor indicated that some taxpayers did not feel mercy was warranted. One letter writer said, “They had excellent employment, insurance, benefits and retirement that many of us can only imagine. They betrayed the public trust…They did not steal for need but for greed.” Another said, “As they ask for leniency, we should be reminding ourselves of the old saying, ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’ ” A third writer said, “Throw the book at them.”

Clearly, showing mercy is not natural. Our first instinct is to lash out when we're hurt. Mercy and forgiveness go against that instinct, which may have been why Jesus said we should turn the other cheek when we're wronged. If we can forgive others as we have been forgiven, we're living the Golden Rule.

Shakespeare considers the matter of mercy in The Merchant of Venice. In the play, a Jewish moneylender named Shylock demands gruesome interest if a loan isn’t repaid: a “pound of flesh” carved from the man who guaranteed the loan, Antonio, Shylock’s enemy. When the loan comes due, Shylock takes Antonio to court to demand his pound of flesh. An attorney urges Shylock to show mercy and reminds Shylock that everybody needs to be cut some slack now and again,

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown…
Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy….”  (IV.i.179–197)
 
But even though Shylock is offered twice what he is owed, he insists on extracting his pound of flesh. The attorney tells Shylock to start carving, but that the contract doesn’t say anything about blood, so if Shylock spills one drop of blood or takes one iota more than a pound, he must forfeit all his lands and goods under Venetian law. Shylock changes his mind, but it's too late.
 
The duke shows mercy to Shylock, but it’s a vindictive kind of mercy: Shylock must convert to Christianity, he must bequeath his entire estate to his daughter and her Christian husband, and he can never loan money to anybody ever again. Shylock’s costly lesson is that if you want mercy for yourself, you have to show mercy to others.
 
In my town, regarding the money stolen by the county treasurer, the judge was not merciful. He sentenced the treasurer to nine and a half years in prison, which will become a longer term if restitution isn’t made. The secretary will be sentenced in March. In his remarks, the sentencing judge said, “Misconduct creates cynicism...To say it spits on the face of democracy is an understatement. If we can’t trust public officials…we have anarchy.” The threat of punishment is supposed to keep people on the right side of the law, so if people choose to do wrong anyway, society must follow through with the promised punishment. Right?

But what about mercy? Mary shows no mercy to Edith, nor does Edith show mercy on the rare occasions she has the upper hand. Shylock shows no mercy, so none is shown to him. I thought I was doing my best for my sister, but she couldn't forgive me for not doing enough.
 
The next time I'm in the position to extend forgiveness and mercy, I hope I will remember that a pound of flesh isn't worth it. I hope I will remember what it is to have my hand flung away by a dying woman who can never take hold of it again.

Rest in peace, little sister. I hope you are finally happy.

How do people decide what to name their children? How do writers decide what to name their characters? It depends on where you (or your characters) live. It depends on when.

For example, in China, naming schemes often employ a generation name. That means every child in a given family’s generation shares an identical character when the name is written in Chinese characters. But English is taught in China's secondary schools, so many Chinese teenagers acquire English names, which they may keep and use. This sometimes leads to teens choosing English names like Chlorophyll, Candy, Devil or Whale. Periodic fad names like Aoyun ("Olympics") also appear.

In England, babies traditionally were named after relatives of both parents in a fascinating pattern that was popular in England from 1700 to 1875. This naming pattern definitely influenced my choices for character names in the JEM books. Here's how it worked:

    The first son was named after the father's father
    The second son was named after the mother's father
    The third son was named after the father
    The fourth son was named after the father's eldest brother
    The first daughter after the mother's mother
    The second daughter after the father's mother
    The third daughter after the mother
    The fourth daughter after the mother's eldest sister

Going by these rules, in the JEM books, Margery’s eldest sister, Nessa, was named for Margery’s father’s mother. But if you’ve read the JEM books, you know that Margery’s grandmother is named Kestrel. What’s up with that? Then, as now, people call themselves what they wish to be called; in this case, Granny Kestrel chose to honor a bird with which she shares a magical bond.

But Granny couldn't have done that in Malaysia, where the names of all animals, fruits and vegetables are banned.  

Other countries have naming rules too. New Zealand bans names that might offend a reasonable person, including King, Major, Knight, Prince, and Princess, although other names have been allowed in the country, including Number 16 Bus Shelter and Violence. In New Zealand’s defense, a 9-year-old girl named Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii was allowed to change her name, and parents who tried to name their children 4Real, Fish and Chips (twins), Yeah Detroit, Keenan Got Lucy and Sex Fruit were turned down.

In Saudi Arabia, forget about naming your child anything that offends religious sensibilities, is affiliated with royalty, or is of non-Arabic or non-Islamic origin. Morocco is a tad more lenient, allowing you to pick a name not on the approved list if you pay a fee, although Moroccan dads living outside the country have to be careful: babies given a name not on the approved list may have trouble entering the country to visit their relatives.

Germany and Japan have naming rules, too. In Germany, you can’t use a last name as a first name. German law dictates that first names must be gender-specific, may not be a trademark, and cannot endanger the child. Italy won't let a parent bestow an embarrassing name.

Even in the freewheeling United States, some rules apply. Many states ban obscene names or limit the number of characters in a name because of the limitations of record-keeping software. Some states ban the use of numerals or pictograms. "Black" sounding names have been shown to minimize the likelihood that a job candidate will be interviewed, but from the beginning, black Americans have had unique names, according to Salon's David Zax, who writes, "the folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett turned up thousands of such names culling records from 1619 to the mid-1940s, names like Electa, Valantine and Zebedee." The practice of choosing a unique name for a black child skyrocketed after the 1960s, Zax says, when Black Pride and Islam began to influence parents' choices—but creating unique names doesn't happen in Iceland.

Iceland has strict rules; for a story set there, I spent half my research time hunting appropriate names for the characters. Why? Because Iceland doesn’t use family surnames. A spouse cannot take his or her spouse’s name upon marriage. If the couple produces a child, they must choose a given name from a limited list.

It works like this: The last name of a male Icelander usually ends in the suffix -son (“son”) and that of a female Icelander in -dóttir (“daughter”). So a boy and girl in the same nuclear family won’t share the same last name. When it comes to first names, Icelanders often don’t name a child for its first three months so the parents can get to know the child (before it is named, a child is called stúlka, “girl,” or strákur, “boy”). When it’s time to pick a name, the parents have to stick to a list of legal first and middle names, none of which contain the letter “C,” which isn’t in the Icelandic alphabet—sorry, Charlie. Currently there are about 1,712 male names and 1,853 female given names on the list. If you choose a name that isn’t on the list, your child will have problems, like being denied a passport.

This summer, online magazine Parent Society listed some of the more unusual baby names out there, but for names like “Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116,” go here. The article doesn’t explain why parents would do that to their own flesh and blood.

For writers, the naming rules of the countries in which our stories are set should figure in when we name our characters, but we also want to embed meaning into their names, right? So, do you name your female romantic interest the name you wish you had been given? Do you name your action hero something short and dashing? How about last names?  How do you decide?

One author who is good at crafting names is Nora Roberts. In THE SEARCH, the hero is Simon Doyle [Simon=sigh man, which is what he does because he keeps getting yanked into doing things he doesn’t want to do]. The heroine is Fiona “Fee” Bristow [Bristow=bristle, which is what she’s about, at least initially]. The villain’s name is the most perfect of all, but if you don’t want to know it, don’t click here because I don't want to spoil it for you. It could be I’m reading into Roberts’s choices, but I don’t think so. Roberts is an intelligent, successful writer; she knows that names are important. So do most writers. (Tangent: You can answer ten short questions to find out which Nora Roberts character you “are” here. Me? Margaret Mary Concannon. Thanks for asking. )

A name can suggest personality. A character name you initially dislike can grow on you if the character does; conversely, if you initially favor a name (or are at least neutral), when it is bestowed on the bad guy, you may dislike it forever after.  A character named after your eighth grade nemesis may even keep you from fully engaging in the story.

My JEM character names (at least, the ones not culled from history) were chosen deliberately based on a number of factors including literal meaning, geographical accuracy, mouth-feel, pronounce-ability, and so on.  When I was in the process of crafting a surname for the bad guy, "Patch," I wanted something that would suggest his Darkness, but I didn’t want to minimize his power or his danger. (I chose “Duncan,” which means brown warrior—a name that also suits his geographic origins).

Using the British naming rules above, it took an entire morning to name Margery’s siblings and near-family relations, including the name of Granny Kestrel’s husband, Dylan, who crossed the moor from Wales to find her.

A good source for name discussion is an oldie titled TREASURE OF NAME LORE by Elsdon C. Smith, which includes sections on American Indian names, anagrams, names in other countries, extra-long names, and names popular in different religions.  Smith writes, “In writing fiction, since all the author has to put his ideas across to the reader are the words he uses, he cannot waste any by selecting names for his characters that do not have connotations that help to describe the character. Even the sound may be used to convey an impression of the one named . . . Dickens was an expert in selecting names that contained a subtle half-suggestion of other words in our language which are associated with the traits embodied in the characters he delineated.”

There you go: let the great Charles Dickens be your guide. Use the magical power of names to boost your story’s impact.

America's gun control laws are the loosest in the developed world, and its rate of gun-related homicide is the highest. A 2013 study that correlated gun ownership rates to homicide rates here between 1981 and 2010 found that "each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of household gun ownership" translated to a 0.9 percent increase in homicides. According to the study, gun ownership mattered even when race and poverty were accounted for.

We Americans love our guns but our guns don't love us back, even though gun shops outnumber grocery stores in the United States by nearly 15,000. 

You want to talk about the Second Amendment to the Constitution? The Second Amendment says, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." That Amendment was included because the brand new United States of America had just whupped the Big Dog in Europe, England, but there was no guarantee she would stay whupped. Farmers and merchants and coppersmiths had to be ready to defend the new country.

But some of the writers of the Constitution who saw a potential problem with this Amendment proposed on September 9, 1789, that the Amendment should include the words "for the common defense" next to the words "bear arms." That proposal was defeated. According to an essay by John Paul Stevens, associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1975 to 2010, published in the the Washington Post in April 2014, five words similar to the defeated proposal ("when serving in the militia") would make the Second Amendment adhere more closely to what we think the Founders intended when they insisted on the right to bear arms.

Five words in place of 30 murders a day? I could get behind that.

Some gun proponents say that if more good guys carried guns, they could stop the bad guys. But that isn't true, according to Dr. Stephen Hargarten, a leading expert on emergency medicine and gun violence at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In an article in Mother Jones, Hargarten says that armed civilians attempting to intervene are actually more likely to increase the bloodshed.

The Second Amendment isn't going away. Guns aren't going away. So how about we consider going in the same direction as other civilized nations that have decided a person needs more than a trigger finger to own a gun? How about stricter laws concerning who gets to own a gun? Even a majority of National Rifle Association (NRA) members support that.

According to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, 84% of gun-owners and 74% of NRA members support universal background checks for all gun sales; 76% of gun-owners and 62% of NRA members support prohibiting gun ownership for 10 years after a person has been convicted of violating a domestic-violence restraining order; and 71% of gun-owners and 70% of NRA members support a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison for a person convicted of selling a gun to someone who cannot legally have a gun.

Laws that are more restrictive would be particularly helpful since nearly 80 percent of the killers in the Mother Jones investigation obtained their weapons legally. What might happen if we tightened our rules?

Guns aren't illegal in Australia, but you can’t own a semi-automatic rifle or a semi-automatic or pump-action shotgun. Gun ownership has been tightly restricted for the last 20 years. Since the laws were changed in 1996, Australia hasn’t had a mass shooting and firearms-related deaths have plummeted. In that time, the United states has had 52 mass shootings with 408 dead.

In Japan, citizens are permitted to possess firearms for hunting and sport shooting, but only after submitting to a lengthy licensing procedure. To get a gun in Japan, you have to attend an all-day once-a-month class and pass a written test—and you have to repeat the class and pass the test every three years. You must take and pass a shooting range class. You must take and pass a mental test and a drug test, which you'll file with the police. You must pass a background check for any criminal record or association with criminal or extremist groups. Once you get your gun in Japan, you must provide police with documentation on the specific location of the gun in your home, as well as the ammo, both of which must be locked and stored separately. Once a year, the police will inspect your gun. Do strict measures like this make a difference in gun violence? In 2006, Japan experienced two firearm-related homicides; in 2008 there were 11—compared to 12,000 in the United States the same year.
Guns aren't illegal in England or Scotland, but after mass shootings in the late '80s and '90s, the U.K. in 1997 banned semi-automatic and pump-action firearms, introduced mandatory registration for shotgun owners, and banned private handgun ownership in mainland Britain. The government launched a $200 million buyback program, which led to the collection of 162,000 firearms. By 2010–11, gun crime had decreased by 53 percent.

A Swede who wants to own a gun needs a license. To get one, he must be 18. He must be a member of an approved shooting club for at least six months or have passed a hunting examination. Gun deaths in Sweden are 1.47 per 100,000 per year compared with 10.64 per 100,000 here.

Switzerland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world. Switzerland ranks fourth after the U.S, Yemen, and Serbia in the number of guns per capita. Every Swiss man of fighting age is issued a gun so he can defend his country. But to keep his gun after military service, a Swiss citizen needs a weapon acquisition permit, issued by the police. He can’t get the permit if he has a criminal record, an addiction, or a psychiatric problem. Heavy machine guns and automatic weapons are banned, as are silencers. If a Swiss man wants to carry a gun in public, he needs a permit, which he’s likely to get only if he works in security—and only if he’s passed theoretical and practical exams. Yet the violent-crime rate is low in Switzerland: government figures show about 0.5 gun homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010. Why? For one thing, the gun culture there emphasizes responsibility and safety. Kids as young as 12 belong to gun groups. In addition, Switzerland’s gun ownership is deeply rooted in the country’s tiny size: the Swiss see it as their patriotic duty to be able to fight their way to their regiment’s assembly point because an enemy could invade the country quickly. The Swiss see gun ownership as a duty rather than as an inalienable right.

You get the picture. Other countries handle gun laws differently. The United States isn’t as violent as some countries in central America where drug cartels operate or Africa where countries are ravaged by civil wars—but isn't it shameful to even be making that comparison?

Pry your gun from your cold, dead hands? Nobody wants that. We just want lunatics to stop killing college students and children. Mmmkay? Can we agree on that?

For an overview of gun ownership laws, go here. For a chart of gun-related deaths country by country, go here. For articles on both sides of the gun control issue, go here.

I don’t read bestsellers when they’re hot and all the cool kids are talking about them. I figure, a book isn’t a banana. It won’t spoil, so what difference does it make if I pick it up when the ink is still wet or pick it up later at Goodwill for a couple of bucks?

So the book I just finished is Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. It’s about a Baptist missionary family, the Prices, who in 1959 move from Georgia to the Congo to win souls to Christ. The chief agent of this move is Nathan Price, who drags along wife Orleanna, teen-aged Rachel, 'tween twins Leah and Adah, and five-year old baby of the family, Ruth May. The book is divided into seven sections, and the five females in the family, all of whom respond to Africa and to their enforced missionary status in different ways, tell the story alternately. Nathan Price never gets to narrate; he just gets to be narrow-minded, stubborn, abusive, and crazy as a bedbug. He’s about as far from true Christian charity and kindness as a person can get. And yet, as patriarch, he’s the boss, and the hapless Price females follow him like ducklings.

Full disclosure: I have mixed feelings about missionaries. I grew up in a church with missions at its heart and a banner on the wall that read, “Go Ye Into All the World and Preach the Gospel to Every Creature.” One Sunday a month, all of us Sunday School kids turned in little wooden barrel-shaped banks stuffed with loose change for the Boys and Girls Missionary Challenge. We were doing our bit to evangelize those poor brown, yellow, and red children all over the world, about whom we knew very little other than that they needed our pennies, nickels, dimes and dollars. We wanted them to have enough food to eat and nice clothes to wear! We wanted them to sing, “Jesus loves me / This I know” and mean it! It is not a bad thing to foster generosity in a child’s heart. It is not a bad thing to teach a child to care about the welfare of other human beings.

But I’m not a child any more. I’ve studied and traveled and learned a few more Bible verses, one of which is “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” I certainly would not want foreigners who know nothing about me or my country or culture to plunk themselves into the heart of my town and start telling me I was lost and stupid and had earned eternal punishment just for worshipping my own god instead of the big pumpkin they set up in the village square. I’d avoid the strangers and join up with anybody who wanted to give them the boot.

Cultural arrogance as demonstrated in this hypothetical is at the heart of The Poisonwood Bible. Kingsolver’s book reminds readers that barging into a place that has evolved its own way of living in a specific environment and attempting to force change is disrespectful at best and dangerous at worst, to both parties. Somebody, perhaps everybody, will suffer. Of course, in Kingsolver’s book, they do. The Prices, the only whites for miles around, do learn from the blacks, and vice-versa, but the lessons are wrought from pain far oftener than they are wrought from acceptance of a better way.

Woven into the fictional domestic events of the Price family in The Poisonwood Bible are the real-life events of Congo’s struggle for independence from Belgium. Congo had been appropriated first by Belgium’s Leopold the Second as a private enterprise his country did not support. The “Congo Free State,” established in 1885, used forced labor, mutilation, and murder (some reports say as many as ten million Congolese were murdered) to increase rubber production. So horrible were conditions that international pressure forced Belgium to take over Leopold’s private colony in 1908. The abuses were curbed, but segregation continued along with a paternalistic attitude (“dominate to serve”) on the part of whites that they knew best what the Congolese needed.

Of course, the Prices don’t know this history, nor does it matter to single-minded Nathan. The Price females, though, begin to realize they aren’t in Kansas anymore just as Congo’s struggle results in independence from Belgium (June 1960). Congo elects Patrice Lumumba as its first president, but the departing Belgians foment rebellion in the southern region of Katanga, source of Congo’s mineral wealth, in order to cling to its hold on the natural resources of the Congo (diamonds, rubber, copper).  Lumumba asks the United Nations for help. It refuses. He turns to the Soviet Union, which sends aid. Lumumba is labeled a Marxist, and the United States masterminds and funds the assassination of Lumumba. In his place, the U.S. in 1965 sets up Joseph Mobutu as leader.

Mobutu has been described as the "archetypal African dictator." Mobutu embezzled between four and fifteen billion U.S. dollars during his 30-year reign. He owned a fleet of Mercedes-Benz vehicles that he used to travel between his numerous palaces, while the nation's roads rotted and the Congolese starved. Public service workers went months without being paid. On trips across Zaire (Congo’s new name), he appropriated the droit de cuissage (right to deflower) local virgins; this practice was considered an honor for the virgin's family. The United States propped up Mobutu for 30 years.

This history comes out in bits and pieces because the novel’s focus is on the tragically misguided and misinformed Price family. Nathan Price refuses to accept that western ways do not—and should not be expected to—work in Africa. For example, he plants a garden just like the one he had at home to show the Congolese that they can grow their own food, as though they are too stupid to have figured that out for themselves. Nathan doesn’t even suspect there might be a very good reason the Congolese don’t have gardens—in fact several reasons, such as flooding, army ants, drought, and so on. Nathan’s garden flourishes at first but then withers away without producing fruit because African pollinators cannot fit into the blossoms of western plants, just as Nathan’s mission makes a big show but produces no saved souls because white ways cannot be shoved into native hearts. The failure of Nathan’s garden parallels the failure of the Prices to evangelize the Africans, who, despite Nathan’s offensiveness, do all they can in secret to keep the Price family alive in a beautiful but dangerous environment.

The Poisonwood Bible is a story of the small and the vast ways humans misunderstand one another at a cost of misery and misshapen lives. The book doesn’t present Africa’s people or politics as inferior to Euro-American people and politics. Kingsolver, like the whites murdered in Congo’s violent struggles and the blacks murdered daily in American cities, knows that skin color matters. To many. But Kingsolver tries, and succeeds, in showing that skin color doesn’t matter to nature. Nature succors and annihilates evenhandedly without regard to race—or even to species—and nature is Africa’s beating heart.

My take-away, apart from seeing yet another dysfunctional family inflict scars on one another, was this: in Africa, western “civilization” blundered in to perfectly balanced systems that had become that way over thousands of years and ruined them. Missionarying has been going on for hundreds of years and will go on forever; it occurs any time one human being disrespects another human’s choices. As Kingsolver says, “everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.”

Good book. Screws on your head a bit differently. Educational and surprising and worth your time. Can be bought for the price of a cup of coffee at a used book store near you.