Lord of War vs. the Prince of Peace

As a boy growing up in rural Alberta guns were just part of life. Dad owned a number of guns, .22, .303, shotguns, all for the purposes of hunting & pest control. They were stored mostly in the open (this is the days before the gun registry bill) & there was never an issue for us. We knew that guns weren't toys, they weren't to be touched, messed with or treated lightly. Sure they had an allure to them. They were almost symbols of manhood & as young boys we didn't touch them... There were times where I'd pick up one of the shells, hold it, look at it, imagine them in the gun, but that was about it.

We were taught to respect firearms. As young kids we knew not to touch them. As older kids, part of the 'rite of passage' into adulthood was at 13 (though I think my brothers maybe were a bit younger) Dad took us out in the field with the .22 to teach us how to shoot & proper gun safety. Rule number one was to always treat a gun as if it's loaded, even if you know it's not. With that came the rule to never point a gun at anything you didn't intend to kill. Hence, even an unloaded gun should never be pointed at anyone or anything, even in jest. Dad bought a new .22 at about the time he taught me how to shoot. I liked the gun. Partly because it was a semi-automatic with a 10 round or 30 round clip & you could squeeze off a number of shots between needing to reload. (Shooting lessons always involved target practice & I had a hard time hitting targets & hence never got to 'rambo' things & fire off a lot of bullets in rapid succession). The other thing I liked about the gun was that there were about three different safety mechanisms that would prevent you from firing a bullet. This just seemed like good design to me, to create a bunch of redundant systems that prevented you from accidentally firing a shot.

We had a BB gun for a bit & used it to hunt gophers. Hunting gophers was easier in the early spring because there was a new 'crop' of them, most of which were young & stupid & you could nearly walk up to them before they'd run away. Later in the year, those that survived were the ones we'd missed & they knew well enough what the grey stick thing (or however little gopher brains interpret what a gun is) could do & so they were much harder to 'draw a bead on'. I didn't really like shooting animals much. Sure I know gophers are a pest on the prairies & chew up fields & cause problems, so there was a necessity to it, but I never really found it fun. Maybe it's a good thing to really look at death when you're little - it makes you realize that there is no glamour about it, nothing beautiful or noble. You shoot an animal & watch it lie there twitching, fluids oozing out & it's just not pretty... My dad hunts & we relish the meat & some years that meat supplemented our diet & kept us well fed & not in the poor house, so I understand the necessity of hunting (that & the population control/conservation of the animal species), but it was never something I wanted to do. I went on a goose hunt with my dad once. I brought a camera. Took lots of pictures of geese with folded wings plummeting to the ground.... even that didn't feel so good.

What I did enjoy was playing with guns. These were, of course, toy guns. And we had a range. When we were little, we had the cap guns, the wild west six shooters that would bang away on a little roll of caps & make loud noises & sparks & wisps of smoke & the smell of cordite... When we ran out of caps, we made our own 'bang bang' noises.... In my teens, Dad cut out wooden guns for us on the jigsaw. Dad had bought an illustrated 'weapons and warfare' encylopedia set that went through the military gear of the modern age & so we'd point out a gun we thought would be 'cool' & he'd draw out the shape on 3/4" plywood, cut it out with the jigsaw & round the edges with the router. Those guns were the best & we became the envy of the cousins 'cause of the arsenal of weapons we had stocked up. When the cousins were over, everyone would get a 'weapon' & we'd pair off into teams & spread out over the forest, field & old buildings that was our acreage & play games like 'capture the flag'. When it was just the three of us boys, I'd make up games, usually involving each of us having a stockpile of about 10 different weapons each - most times we only used 1 or 2 guns per game, but I tried to make up rules that would require the need for multiple weapons to be used.

For us, the toy guns were fun. It was part of a role playing thing. We got to be soldiers, to be brave & courageous people (or in my case, cannon-fodder 'cause I was often too lazy to sneak through the bush & kept getting shot out in the open). It was a test of skills to see who was better at sneaking up on each other, or hiding, or who was the fastest draw (there were many, many arguments over who shot who first). At the core of the 'play' was, I'd like to believe, some sense of nobility, some sense of fighting for something. Mostly though it was just play, the competition of strength that all young boys have to see how they rank against their peers, to try to answer the questions of whether or not they are 'enough'.

Ultimately though there was an innocence to it. No one stayed dead in our games. You either counted to 30 or 60 & then got back up to resume the fight. Most of the counting time was spent strategizing how to get under cover & 'shoot' back at whichever brother had you pinned down. One of the biggest shocks I had with my history of guns was a youth group event in Calgary where we went paintballing & I stuck my head up to look out a hole in the little shelter I was in & a paintball struck the center of my goggles, splattering all over my field of view & jerking my head back with the impact. I was a wreck for the rest of the night 'cause it made me realize how fast you could actually die in a real battle. Somewhere in that moment some of the innocence of the games got lost.

I've always had a fascination with military stuff. I have a love of fighter jets. They especially captured my attention as a young boy & I remember writing extremely detailled papers on them for school contrasting various generations of fighter aircraft. But honestly there is a lot of military equipment, tanks, guns, ships, etc. that captures my attention. There is an incredible level of function that goes into these things. They are designed to do their job well. There is also a styling to most military stuff that for some reason makes it look 'cool' to my brain.

This is part of the love of G.I. Joe stuff. I was introduced to G.I. Joe at age 11 or 12 when a friend brought in some of the comic books, written by Larry Hama. Larry was great (is great). He took what was suppossed to be a cheesy kids comic, one big commercial to sell product, and treated the stories & characters with a level of respect & dignity. He put a lot into the stories & included a lot of military jargon, a lot of information about the technical aspects of the weapons & the strategies of the battle. He did a lot of poking fun at the ideologies of the cold war & managed to throw in a lot of subtle commentary of the geo-political climate both before and after the cold war. The main characters of the story received some pretty good character development & so each character became more than a name or an action figure, they became 'friends' - 'people' whose stories I knew & had invested part of myself in.

Part of that story became my 'mythology'. The power of fiction is that it lets us pretend, it lets us ask questions & explore the answers that we may never experience in our lives. What the G.I. Joe mythology taught me was that governments & politics can't be trusted, what can be trusted are the hearts of good & noble men & women who are willing to lay down their lives not for a cause, or a slogan or a flag, but who will lay down their lives for what is right- for freedom, for truth, for justice - and these are not the tarnished words spoken by politicians, but the values that each of us has in the core of our hearts, values we know that we & our governments have compromised. Mostly the mythology taught me the nobility of self-sacrifice, the courage & loyalty to lay down your life for your friends. This, in Jesus, was in a lot of ways a 'mythology' I already owned....

...but again, throughout the stories, the heroes (and even the villians) didn't die. The good guys won in the end & the only people that lives were maybe ended were nameless, faceless people. Later on in the comic book run, people demanded more 'realism'. They demanded more people die & so Larry gave in & killed off some people in his stories... I never really liked that. It was always a tragedy to see someone's story end....

Tonight I just finished watching "The Lord of War". I'm never sure whether or not to watch a Nicolas Cage movie. Too often I just find his acting really bad - & I never notice bad acting. Other times I love his character & in this one, I sort of liked him. Hard to really 'like' an arms dealer, but he kind of made Yuri Orlov into an 'everyman' character.

I 'enjoyed' the movie in some ways, but it left me troubled. It paints a picture of arms dealing & the true cost of war. There are a large number of really solid political statements that help lay blame where it really belongs. They bring up the idea that the AK-47 is the real Weapon of Mass Destruction, because all the nukes stay in their silos, while AK's are in every conflict, held even by children. They bring up the idea that the US providing arms to both Iran & Iraq in the past was in the hopes that they'd wipe each other out. They bring up the idea that the U.S. wasn't supporting one side or the other, they were hoping that both sides would lose & lose their ability to cause some of the problems they do today. A lot of the movie dealt with the chaos in Liberia (and somewhat in Sierra Leone). I know people who work at an orphanage in Liberia & so I've heard the first hand accounts of the brutal civil war & the atrocities committed. I've heard lots about the powerful, cannabalistic, brutal leaders of that nation & how they've slaughtered, abused & raped an entire nation for years. At the end of the movie, they bring up the idea that the U.S., Russia, China, France & the U.K. are the worlds biggest arms dealers & the 5 permanent members of the U.N. Security counsel.

The movie leaves me disturbed (which I think was it's intent). Leaves me again where my mythology fails me. I don't see bravery, courage, nobility, self-sacrifice. I don't see the ideals of freedom, truth, justice. Instead I see a world bent on making a buck, or causing conflict so weapons can be sold (another idea that Larry Hama raised a number of times in the G.I. Joe comics). Most of all, the ideals fall short as the governments of the 'free' world are the biggest offenders. It scares me.

I'm wired to want to change the world, to try to make it a better place. Lately it's been stuff like this that has left me frozen in my tracks. I see that people really don't want to be saved. As John put it, "men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil." To fight corruption & evil, there has to be someone above the corruption, someone who is untouchable & who has the power to effect change. When our governments are the source of the corruption, what then? I know our governments won't save us, but what then? Everything is run by the power of the buck & there is no way to enforce real change when people would rather reach for the forbidden fruit than turn to what they know is right & good & made from love.

What happens when an idealist loses his/her way? I'm not sure. For me I used to have a vision for how to change things, or at least eke out a little 'stronghold' of love, a bastion of light against the coming dark. Now I just don't know... so mostly I've just gone about living. Trying to mind my own business & live my life & yeah.... in it I've gotten bored. I've started my own arms-race in the middle of that boredom. I've amassed a good sized army of G.I. Joe toys in my house. It's bad, though not as bad as some of the stuff I've seen on the message boards. But I've spent a lot of time organizing them, finding new figures & vehicles. Finding my own 'gunrunning' sources to make sure each of the figures are well armed. I tell myself that part of it is being able to relive some of my childhood, to get the stuff I wanted when I was little, but didn't have the money for. Part of it is the God given creative bent to create structure & order. Part of it is a spiritual thing where I figure at my core I'm made to raise 'armies' (& by this I mean that maybe part of my 'call' is to help call people into love, to 'war' on behalf of others by laying down their lives, not with bullets & guns, but with acts of kindness & compassion)..... tonight I'm wondering if it's just that I'm trying to find my mythology again.... trying to find lost innocence... trying to find direction.

I've been lacking in direction lately. The voices from last weekend would tell me this is another reason why I'm single. Chicks dig a guy who has a purpose (or so I've been told). They like a man who knows where he's going & so they know, if they choose to join his 'adventure', where their life is headed, too. Me, I really don't know what the 'next step' is. I've been in a holding pattern for a while with that. Mostly I've been learning I'm loved... but that doesn't help set much for goals - rather it gives me the freedom to exist & enjoy whatever moments I'm given. I no longer have to pick a direction out of fear, instead I get to pick what my heart wants - though I guess that will require figuring out what my heart wants....

Towards the end of the movie, Yuri contemplates this idea: "They say, 'Evil prevails when good men fail to act.' What they ought to say is, 'Evil prevails.'"

I pray to God that he's not right. Tonight I almost believe his is though... I know in the end there will be a judgement. I know in the end all of our dark hearts will be exposed. And I know at that time there will be a reckoning. But I know that my dark heart isn't quite so pure, so free of sickness & sin. I know the heart that somedays wishes it could hold a gun, feel the power of that. I know the part of me that relishes the movies where guns are blazing & the 'hero' or 'anti-hero' walks out amidst a sea of shell casings & blood... I know the angel-beast of being human & I know that there will be blood spilled on my behalf, the blood of the only truly innocent One who ever lived among us, that will cover my sins, my 'war' against heaven & against love... & it's almost ludicrous to think tonight that that blood would cover the sins of both the gun-runner, the barbarian war lord & the 'innocent' victims of war & that all could receive the same measure of grace despite the level of depravity they've exhibited... & there's an odd sense of 'injustice' about that, though I guess that's what the big story, the only true 'mythology' is all about. The Just dying for the unjust & offering forgiveness, freedom & love to all of us who are still at war with God & at war with ourselves....