My Christmas List for President Obama’s Second Term.

My first Christmas memory – at least I think it was Christmas – is of my sisters and I playing Nintendo (just plain old Nintendo). I was so young that for all I know it could have just been some random day, but anytime I think about it I get that sort of rush that you only feel on Christmas morning. It’s a level of excitement that can’t be replicated by any other event – save for (maybe) a really awesome birthday present, or being totally surprised by an engagement proposal. Christmas morning, when you’re young, is just about the coolest day of the year; Christmas morning, when you’re an adult, however, is a little less glorious. It’s most likely spent recovering from a Christmas Eve spent drinking too much eggnog or too many vodka-tonics. Christmas, as a kid, was so great because it was the one time every year where we basically get to tell our parents our wildest wishes, and tell them to buy us whatever the fuck we want. In my family that didn’t necessarily mean much – I’m pretty sure I asked for a pair of Jordans every Christmas and never once got a pair, same goes for dogs. But looking at those big ass boxes under the tree you get your hopes up that maybe there were a pair of Jordan XI’s or a Nintendo 64 in one of them. And when you finally tore off that corny looking gift wrap and found that Nintendo 64/Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time bundle pack, it was the greatest fucking thing ever.

Christmas sucks now, though. It’s not because there’s some insane War on Christmas that Fox News keeps babbling about, but it’s because that Christmas euphoria is gone. When you’re twenty-five, you don’t have any Christmas lists filled with the latest video games, or whatever the cool shit is at the time. Christmas presents, when you’re a kid, are a bunch of things that you want; Christmas presents, as an adult, are just practical things that you need. I once, recently, received a fogless shower mirror for Christmas. Seriously. I’m not hating on the fogless shower mirror (okay, yes I am), it’s just that tearing open gift wrap and finding a mirror, or sweatpants, or socks, isn’t a particularly exhilarating experience – I’ve had more excitement watching You’ve Got Mail. As much as I would love a maxed out 13-inch MacBook Air, I know it’s not happening – not that it would have happened as a kid – because it’s not a practical purchase. Instead, I’ll probably open my Christmas present – or presents, but likely the former – and find a sweater, or an iTunes gift card (which I actually wouldn’t mind), or a book that I probably already own.

Below is a copy of my Christmas List. For the sake of practicality, though, there’s nothing on the list which is a tangible item that I want or need. What you’ll find, instead, are things which are far more important, not just to me, but to everyone in our country. Since we all know Barack Obama won re-election by giving away “gifts” to young people, women, and minorities, I’ve decided to cash in. What you’ll find below is my Christmas List for President Obama’s second term: things that I – a two time Obama voter, donor and campaign volunteer – believe our president must accomplish over these next four years.

Maybe it’s time to re-think the constitution, guys.

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. – Second Amendment, US Constitution

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. – Thomas Jefferson

Two-hundred and twenty-one years ago – to the day – the US Bill of Rights was adopted, having been largely written by James Madison, and ratified by the vote of white men – the men whom we now refer to as our “founding fathers” – who owned slaves, who believed blacks were equal to three-fifths of one white person, and who actively worked to disenfranchise not just blacks, but women and the poor as well.

What we seem to forget when we (all too often) cite these founding fathers in our political discourse, is that these founders were nothing if not flawed men. There is no greater proof of this than our nation’s history – the landmark amendments of the post-Constitutional era are all amendments which explicitly overrule their judgments. Seventy-four years after the Bill of Rights was enacted (in 1865), the thirteenth amendment emancipated the slaves; five years after that (1870), the fifteenth amendment prohibited the denial of suffrage based on race or color; fifty years after that (1920), the nineteenth amendment finally afforded women the franchise.

The question I have to ask, then, is why do we seem unwilling to compromise the language found in those twenty-seven words above? If we – through ratification of the thirteenth, fifteenth, and nineteenth amendments – are willing to admit that these founding fathers were incorrect in their assessments of women and minorities, why are we similarly unwilling to admit that, maybe, the founding fathers were incorrect about guns? After all, if George Washington saw the Bushmaster .223 that Adam Lanza used to murder more than two dozen people, mostly children, he’d shit his pants. Advanced firearms in 1789 (when the second amendment was written) were fucking muskets; are we really this dumb, as a society, that we believe that a twenty-seven word piece of legislation, written (poetically) 223 years ago, envisioned a nation filled with automatic and semi-automatic weapons? Of course not. But our ability to harness this simple fact for meaningful change is dependent on our answers to the two previous questions, which, in turn, are dependent on numerous outside factors – none of which are common sense.

The gun control debate is – by all accounts – a fairly nuanced one. There are issues of constitutional law, existing gun laws and states’ rights, mental healthcare and healthcare in general, campaign finance, and the separation of powers. Any measure of comprehensive gun control requires compliance from a wide range of people and institutions.

Missing from all of this, however, is the moral imperative: on 9/11 terrorists murdered 3,000 innocent civilians and we entered two wars; drugs have historically led to gang violence, so we’ve entered a war on drugs; 10,000 people have been killed in gun-related deaths over the last year, and we, apparently, have done nothing.* How can we live in a society where we not just allow, but codify and protect one’s abilities to purchase firearms? These are firearms, which, in the hands of civilians, are only used for two purposes: to kill people and animals, and to practice killing people and animals. Purchasing a firearm is nothing more than one’s implicit declaration of his or her willingness to not just fire this weapon, but to kill – even if only in self-defense.

*I’m not advocating for the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, nor the war on drugs, but, rather, that proportionate measures must be taken.

There’s always the libertarian argument of the inverse relationship between guns and violence – that more guns lead to less violence. This is not just patently false, but ridiculous to its core. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center, in fact, found that there is overwhelming evidence that in states and countries where there are more guns, there are more homicides.* Still, somehow, this seems to be an argument which fills our political discourse – whether made by congressmen, or by Ann Coulter. We know better than this, and yet, somehow, we allow this argument to be perpetuated, from ignorant generation to ignorant generation. So how can we, as a people, as a government, and as a nation, live with ourselves when we legally sanction one’s ability to purchase a weapon that’s only purpose – even if used in self-defense – is for killing other living beings?

*Also false is the argument that guns are essential to our right to overthrow the government, considering that Tunisia – the birthplace of the Arab Spring – had the lowest rate of gun ownership in the world prior to their revolution.

Love, Guns, and Other Drugs.

Some time ago (“some time” being a relative phrase given my age, and an ambiguous one given the anonymity I’m about to protect) I went on a few dates with a girl who we’ll refer to as “Karen” (“few” also being purposefully ambiguous). Karen was kind of amazing – she was tall, pretty, hilarious and genuinely smart; she was the type of girl that makes me feel dumb, and considering I think I’m the smartest motherfucker in any given room, that’s not an easy feat. As far as exes go, Karen’s tastes were the most simpatico to my own; she liked the same music and the same shitty movies as me, and she’s the person most responsible for turning me on to Woody Allen. Karen also had a scary, kind of morbid side to her. If she were a movie character she’d be a mix of Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Winona Ryder in Reality Bites, and Charlize Theron in Monster (thankfully, though, with a much prettier face). Now, I fully admit that I have a weird fascination with Jim Jones or with Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris – essentially, I’m obsessed with serial killers* – but she seemed truly captivated by the idea of suicide; it wasn’t that she wanted to commit suicide (or that I want to commit mass murder) but that she was transfixed by the idea that someone could leave everyone they loved behind (given, of course, that they actually had anyone to love, or be loved by) with one simple gunshot, or a bad night with Jack Daniels and some quaaludes. She hated a guy like Kurt Cobain, and yet was absolutely obsessed with trying to understand his mental state. It didn’t seem weird at the time; we were both, really, just curious as to how anyone – serial killers, or suicidal rock stars – could be so selfish.

*I’m also obsessed with people like Hitler, Stalin and bin Laden. It’s unclear how many women I’ve just turned off by typing that sentence.

One night we stayed up talking about the things we like to do when we’re stressed, or just generally pissed off. I told her I like to just get drunk and either read or write – it doesn’t matter what I write or what I read (I could probably read about 17^th century agrarian economics and be just as happy as if I were reading about the ’98 Yankees), but merely that the idea of sentence construction and syntax is therapeutic, in my own nerdy way. I told her I loved the process of writing – of how I, or whoever I’m reading, develop our (likely) booze-addled ideas and turn them into legitimate, coherent thoughts. Putting a thought into words was my release. She told me her favorite thing to do was “go to the range” – being from the northeast, I simply figured she meant the driving range. I was very wrong. She loved to shoot guns – she was sort of like Robin Scherbatzky, but not as tall, and not as Canadian. She suggested we go shooting the next morning. Now, I’m wholly against guns on a moral basis, and under normal circumstances I would never have shot a gun in my life, but here was a girl who I was absolutely smitten with, and who was basically letting me see her in her most vulnerable place…how could I possibly say no to that and still think I could be with her?

So the next morning we drove out to some bumblefuck town and shot some guns, and, while I can see how it could be therapeutic, I would probably never do it again – not because of my moral objection to the very idea of guns, but because of what ideas holding an actual, loaded gun placed in my head. There’s something amazing and yet terrifying about physically holding a gun. And in that moment, on that Saturday morning, I felt – for the first (and only) time – homicidal. If I turned 180 degrees and simply clutched my right index finger, I could kill Karen. I started to wonder whether or not the state we were in had a death penalty (it didn’t). I had this scary, euphoric rush of power – as if, in that moment, I could do anything – and I suddenly realized why she loved coming here: guns get you high. I imagine the way I felt that morning would be pretty similar to how I’d feel if I had smoked bathsalts – I just felt invincible, and yet murderous.

Just a few hours later that same night, we were at a friend’s apartment, to which someone had brought an illegally-imported bottle of (I think) Swiss absinthe. Karen had a knack for getting me to do things I’d never done before, so, naturally, I had some. As someone who drinks quite a bit, the buzz from absinthe was unlike anything else I’d ever really felt. I didn’t hallucinate or see any green fairies like the dude in Eurotrip; I just felt clear. After a couple of shots of absinthe I had simultaneous thoughts of “Ohmygod, I really need my notebook,” and “Holy shit, I think I’m in love with Karen” (I wasn’t).

In the same night I felt two different sorts of highs – one of homicidal power, and another of what I can only describe as mental clarity mixed with an emotional rush towards a person I had only (then) known for about two weeks. Absinthe made me (momentarily) fall in love with Karen; a gun made me want to kill her. I will pay anyone $1 if they can explain to me why absinthe is illegal in this country and guns are not.

– bhb