I wanted to buy a BB gun. I visited a sporting goods store in the mall and found what I was looking for. As I was paying, I asked the salesclerk for a shopping bag, but she didn’t have one large enough for my merchandise, so I carried the un-bagged box out of the store.
A picture of a gun was clearly visible on its side, which was the reason I had asked for a bag. I knew my car was at the other end of the mall, and I didn’t want to walk through the crowd carrying a visible gun, even a BB gun in a box.
That is when I thought about change.
The first thing I thought was that when I was much younger, I wouldn’t have thought twice about carrying a gun in public, especially a gun I considered a toy. I grew up in an area that was transitioning from farmland rural to housing-addition suburban. It is likely most of the households contained at least one gun. Several of my childhood friends had guns of their own and would carry them along the road as they headed to the creek or to White River to shoot at discarded cans and bottles. Guns were just part of growing up. That casual approach to guns, I think, has changed, at least in the place where I once lived.
As I was walking to my car, I kept my arm wrapped around the box to hide the picture. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but I was thinking about how attitudes in America have changed toward guns. I was worried that I might offend or perhaps encourage some mall shopper who had a real issue with guns and/or gun ownership. I didn’t want a confrontation. I also briefly considered that I might be mistaken for a crazed shooter getting ready to create yet another tragic news story. I especially didn’t want that sort of confrontation. Although they are still unlikely in our country, those sorts of encounters are more common now than they were in the past. In my past, anyway.
Thinking about it, I realize we Americans have always wrestled with change. It’s in our DNA. We have been modifying and adapting, debating and wrangling with ideas about what makes the US us since we first embarked on this experiment in self-government. Sometimes we appreciate and embrace the changes, sometimes it takes us a long while to accept them, and once in awhile we feel we must take a stand against a particular change. Most of the time the changes are peaceful, but sometimes, because our convictions are so heartfelt, they can become violent. Those are the saddest periods in our collective history.
The beauty and genius of this American experiment is it is largely self-correcting. The ability to change is built into the system. We can effect change via elections. We can change our founding document, the Constitution, by amending it to make it more inclusive and more just. We even have do-overs if we realize we have made a mistake (see Prohibition). Of course, those are legal changes done on paper. The harder part is to change the culture, to reshape the hearts of people.
As we observe, honor and celebrate our country’s birthday, my wish is that all Americans would look inward, even briefly, at what great gifts we have been given and what our responsibilities are to keep them. My Fourth of July hope is for real change. And I realize that for such a thing to happen, I must be the change I want to see.
