Seven years ago, while hunting in a very remote area, I found a puppy. Really, he found me. I was walking down a trail, turned around and he was following me. He was in bad shape. He was malnourished and had a festering wound on his head. He looked at me with sad eyes and gave me no choice but to bring him home.

Buddy is the kind of dog that everybody likes. He is a people magnet. Everyone that sees him wants to stoop down and pet him. My wife and I have joked that we should rent him out to people who are looking to meet other people. Take him for a walk down the walking trail in the park and you are guaranteed to have people come up and talk to you with smiles on their faces. Forget internet dating services, just take Buddy for a walk.

Last Tuesday’s homework reading for my six-year-old was a Berenstain Bears story: The Dare. Brother Bear starts with good – if somewhat ill-advised – intentions, confronting Too-Tall Grizzly about a stolen jump rope. The gang is impressed with Brother’s fighting spirit, and he is talked into a series of poor decisions, culminating in a stolen watermelon and a lesson about sheep. With news of yet another murderous outburst, where a teenager walked into his school and killed several classmates, the idea of a stolen watermelon feels almost antiquated, even quaint. It feels like a time gone by, and listening to today’s conversation, it feels like a historical fantasy story of slingshots, baseball diamonds, nickel movies and watermelon-intrigue, in a world where we’ve discovered the awful power of guns, bombs, and genuine hatred. It feels silly, and almost foolish, to sit down with a six year old and talk to him about thinking for himself, when at any minute, he may be needing to help stack all the chairs against the locked classroom door before climbing out the window; when that “safety-protocol” drill is no longer a drill. What is morality, versus the primacy of life over death? How can we talk about watermelons when we need to be talking about guns?

The best conversation about guns is still, somehow, a conversation about Dads, and I’ll begin with my own Dad’s yearbook. There is a picture of my dad, tall and lanky, socially awkward and looking a bit too much like me, but wearing a uniform and holding a rifle. He is pictured next to most of the other males in his class, all upright, looking slightly older than teenagers, soberly staring into the camera, all holding their rifles. Each kid had the word Vietnam in his head, rattling around along with math, college, girls, music; my own dad was drafted just a few months before the war ended. But it’s hard to look at that picture and not see all of those guns, and, according to my dad, each teenage boy proficient in the disassembly and reassembly of not only those rifles, but their counterpart 1911 handguns, each at least somewhat proficient in their use. This was before “anti-bullying” campaigns, it was before the great micro-aggression awakening, before anyone was “woke” at all, it was in a time of social upheaval and a time when teen-angst carried with it the actual existential threat of war; and with a gun in every locker, it was a situation without all of today’s great progressive safeguards – a ticking time-bomb.

My hometown newspaper (The Island Packet, here in Hilton Head) had a front-page news story today about “Dreamers.” Note: this was not an editorial. This is supposed to be news. The headline: “Dreamers work long hours, face uphill path to college.” Subhed: “Supporters say tuition policy hurts Dreamers, taxpayers.” The first paragraph: “While South Carolina taxpayers spend roughly $13,200 annually to educate each K-12 student, state policies obstruct one group of SC students from advancing their education beyond high school.”

The “news” story makes the point that because “Dreamers” must pay out-of-state tuition rates at SC universities, they have “few affordable in-state options” and some don’t go to college at all. So the author believes, apparently, that it’s ok to pay out of state tuition if you’re from Georgia, but not if you’re from Ecuador. This seems like satire, so I included a picture of the front page, just in case some of you weren’t sure if this post was a parody or not:

Franco(@franco) put up an outstanding post about Glenn Beck and Ben Shapiro crossing over due to resentment at the media’s hysterical, inaccurate declarations of Trump’s lack of character, racism, bigotry, and total unfitness for office. In the post, he had a perspicacious (William F. Buckley word-of-the-day used in communication? check) video from Scott Adams. Good vid. Watching the vid, I realized that Scott Adams reminds me of Skippy. Imagine a guy with Adams’ intellect as an E-3 (Private First Class, in the Army) or E-4 (Specialist or Corporal, depending). That’s Skippy.

Sometimes people ask me (Okay, sometimes I ask myself) why anyone would spend 25+ years in the Army. The answer is Skippy. Straight up. Don’t even get me started on Skippy if he’d made it through selection and went SF. We’d probably have allied countries that were Wiccan nudist nihilist interpretive dance specialists.