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Minnesota native Bob Dylan wrote his epic song “The Times They Are A-Changin” years ago but it is still appropriate to describe what is happening as the decades pass. (You can still get the melody as a ringtone on your cell.) Here we are in Minnesota, with young Gophers going through school tuition nightmares and economic stress, and politicians and gun controllers and carry-and-concealers arguing about allowing guns in the state Capitol. Let’s take a look at one stanza of his lyric poem:

“Throughout the land/ And don’t criticize/ What you can’t understand Your sons and your daughters/ Are beyond your command
Your old road is/ Rapidly agin’/ Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend a hand/ For the times they are a-changin’.”

To illustrate how things “are a-changin’,” I recall when I was principal of Fargo South High with 1,800 students a young neighbor man on a cold, rainy fall day walked into the school with a 12-gauge shotgun draped over his shoulder. I happened to be in the commons area when he began to saunter through tables in mid-morning probably seating about 500 students. Very few of the students even looked up or told other students about the “intruder.” I stopped the man and asked him what he was doing with a gun in school. He said it was raining and cold so he had decided to walk through the school to his favorite duck hunting swamp just southwest of the school. In those days that area was undeveloped.

I told him he could continue to his hunting spot–but not to bring the gun into the school again.

Yes, the times they are a-changin’. If that happened today we would have a complete lockdown of most schools in the immediate area, 20 sheriff and police cruisers would surround the building, ambulances would have lights flashing, the local SWAT team would be called, and administrators and counselors would be thinking about calling in extra counselors to sooth stressed students and parents.

Dylan: “The Slow One Now
Will Later Be Fast As The
Present...”

Yes, the times they are a-changin’.  An ad by Satrom Travel & Tour and the Greater North Dakota Chamber advertised travel to Cuba in January, 2014. Travel has not been allowed to Cuba for almost 60 years until now. Cost you a bundle of a fine if you got caught, even if you went through Mexico. Cuba has a special meaning for me because I spent five months as a Marine training at Gitmo and the island of Vieques and spending some time in Havana and Santo Domingo (Ciudad Trujillo in those days) in 1956, just a few years before the Fidel Castro revolution. I see the tourists will spend six nights in that once-beautiful city, visit Hemingway’s Havana House, and drink a little-or a lot-of wine. I wish I could go.

With our recession and failure of our big banks to control their appetites for mortgage profits, seven out of ten Americans say they regularly suffer from physical symptoms caused by stress.  They also suffer psychological damage. The top three causes of stress: money, work, and the economy.

How can you relieve yourself of stress besides winning a $300 million lottery? Well, you can buy the Dream Weaver Light and Sound Mind Machine from Deepak Chopra for $299–which relieves his economic stress while adding to yours. I have always thought he was a real scam-con man, making lots of bucks off an accent and sincere exotic looks. With the Dream machine you wear goggles that give you light and sound pulses “to reach a beneficial state of consciousness.” Can anyone sane believe that crap? Other solutions? You can buy an $8,000 massage chair which massages you out of your wallet and is programmed to do many different massages, take yoga classes at $100 an hour, or buy new “relaxation” drinks such as Slow Cow, containing “natural” ingredients other than alcohol, to raise the spirits. The nation’s largest therapeutic massage chain, Massage Envy, is at the top of a $13 billion industry. For $100 you can buy an Ostrich Pillow. It fits over the head and has openings for only the mouth and nose, so it is like sticking your head in the sand.

Dr. Michael Marmot is an expert on the “status syndrome.”  He claims the higher you are in the social hierarchy the better your health. Conversely, the stress that kills is one where you feel you have no control over your fate.

Another Sure Way To Kill Your Stress

   The Fargo Forum recently had articles and an editorial about Craig Paul Cobb, a person who professes white supremacy. Cobb is buying lots in Leith, North Dakota, population 19, so he can establish Cobbsville, a town where white supremacists, Adolf Hitler, and Jew haters could live with each other without stress. Idaho is already a state filled with conceal-carry people who are stressed out by modernity and diversity, and they may have new neighbors in the northern part of the state.

A group of extreme right-wing Christian gun lovers are planning a one-square-mile walled “citadel” which the founders say will be a “fortified bastion of liberty” This smells like Tea Party again. If you decide to join this group you must sign a “Patriot Agreement” pledging to protect the citadel and its inhabitants from “natural or man-made disasters.” The citadel will accept only able-bodied adults 13 years old or older who possess an AR-15 assault rifle (evidently an AK-47 will not do), five magazines, and 1,000 rounds of ammo. They will also have to pass annual pistol and rifle shooting tests to stay within the confines of the citadel. It will be a walled, gated community with very controlled access.

These citadel people remind me of lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” that describe stressed-out people who have no control over their lives:

“I am no prophet–and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat , and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.”

I have always thought that these are the most depressing lines in literature.  When Death holds your coat and snickers you are probably in deep doo-doo.

This Guy And His Family Are Part Of The Six Percent

The American Psychiatric Association claims that six percent of Americans are seriously wacko at any one time. That means that over 18 million are strolling the streets, manning bunkers, swallowing mood-altering drugs by the bottle, and hosting radio and TV talkshows.
Others are protecting mile-square “citadels” in Idaho, establishing white power towns in North Dakota, or are inmates in a 20,000 capacity concentration camp for public and government enemies near Anchorage, Alaska.

I saw one of this large crowd on a national TV program a few nights ago. Have you seen “The Doomsday Series” on the National Geographic Channel, sponsored by a once reputable magazine? At first I couldn’t believe it, but over the years I have kept a file on snoopin’ and poopin’ private and “state” militias, and individuals such as Gordon Kahl of North Dakota and Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City fame, so in the end, I was not too surprised by the actions of Brent, Sr.

Brent is building a medieval castle, his “ultimate bunker,” somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina, to protect his family during the horrors of the “Christian” rapture–and before they are lifted by God’s power to heaven naked as the day they were born. Whew! However, his greatest fear is not the end of the earth. He is spending millions on his castle to protect his family from an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from somewhere that will destroy all U.S. power grids. If this disaster strikes, millions of Americans will be looking for food and shelter. Brent and his three daughters and two sons are building their castle to keep marauders, thieves, and murderers out. As an ex-infantryman he schools them constantly on shooting and survival skills. It was not revealed during the show where the mother of his children is-or was. Inquiring minds want to know. Perhaps she is studying paranoia at an on-line “university.”

Guns In The Minnesota Capitol And The Paradox Of Two Wes Moores

There’s an excellent chance that some politicians and other citizens discussing guns and security at the capitol are members of the six percent who suffer from a serious mental illness, particularly paranoia. The urge by some conceal-carry permit holders to protect kindergartners while visiting the capitol rests somewhere in the broadband of paranoia. There is an online book “The Other Wes Moore” by Wes Moore with a fascinating description: “Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other. Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods; both hung out on street corners with their crews; both ran into trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence? Wes Moore, the author of this fascinating book, sets out to answer this profound question.” If the one Wes Moore can answer this question he should win all the Nobel prizes.

State Rep. Tony Cornish is in favor of gun-toting in the Capitol and said people who oppose guns at the Capitol “wet their pants at the sight of a gun.” As a former Marine Corps commander of a heavy machinegun platoon and rifle company I don’t “wet my pants” at the sight of a gun–but they certainly get my intense attention. Guns really tear through human flesh. Ask the woman who was buying a cup of coffee in Starbucks when she was shot by a gun another customer dropped on the floor.

A Response By Another Person Who Does Not Wet His Pants

But let’s let a retired federal law enforcement officer from New Brighton named John Mattson answer Cornish. It’s a beaut. Should be published in every paper in the country: “So, is allowing people to carry weapons at the State Capitol a ‘reasonable accommodation’ for people who are so handicapped by paranoia and their inability to overcome fear that they cannot transact business there without the security of guns? If you could handpick the people who would carry a gun at the Capitol, would you choose people who are paranoid? Or who haven’t learned to overcome their fears? Or who are so delusional that they believe a shooting at the Capitol is a highly probable event, instead of a remote possibility?  Or who believe that a mass shootout among gun owners with permits is preferable to a lone gunman encountering law enforcement? Should people be allowed to carry guns who ‘wet their pants’ at the thought that something could happen that law enforcement couldn’t handle?” Send copies to Wayne LaPierre, that guy at the National Rifle Association who always talks about good guys with guns shooting bad guys with guns.

School Clerk Antoinette Tuff of the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy of Decatur, Georgia didn’t wet her pants either when she kept Brandon Michael Hill, definitely a member of the six percent, from shooting off 500 rounds at 800 students with an assault rifle and other weapons. She said she desperately needed to go to the bathroom while talking to Hill, but she had the will to wait until the police put cuffs on him. Now here was a member of the 94 percent who kept her emotions, her empathy, her courage, and her bladder under absolute control. She is a definite candidate for the Medal of Freedom.