a signed memorandum drafted soon after Brandon Stuckey’s passion

safety
< salvus
~ salvare
> salvation:

deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss

There’s this idea in our society that… well… see… one of the old timers sipping his ale in The Golden Dragon pub said it better: “Keep your nose outta trouble and no trouble’ll come to you.” With all do respect to respectable, good, admirable hobbits, the old hymn had it right:  When trouble comes                       —                        not if.

Today, I rode three miles in a machine that uses explosions to move forward. Specifically, if I want to move one mile in the span of one minute, it takes roughly 12,000 explosions to get from point A to point B. In fact, we seek the results of this mathematic equation when we buy these machines, “I just need something that will get me from point A to point B.” The explosion machine is attached to 4,000 pounds of twisted metal and breakable glass and every explosion coughs out poisonous gases — some odorous and some odorless. Most human beings will die if they fall from a three-story building, the momentum stopped up short at stone will ruin their organs (vital parts of the human frame that boast the dexterity of water balloons). These machines, however, move much faster forward than plunges from buildings fall downward and you shouldn’t forget that if they run into each other, the speed of twisted metal… doing… doing… what do they call it?… oh yes… crashing into twisted metal is enough to kill any man, however strong or brave or innocent or true. These explosion machines kill 50,000 people every year – including a formerly current student of my alma mater, a student well-loved by his friends, a student who fearlessly prayed and dreamed despite his (and our) mortality. Even young dreamers, young passionate men like Brandon are not safe. After all, the only two things keeping them and us from crashing into one another are a line of yellow paint and some willpower. Well not “some,” that’s understated…

It’s more like what Moody calls… sorry, called… CONSTANT VIGILANCE.

Three months ago, I rode in another machine. This one lights air on fire after sucking it sideways into a pit through a giant fan blade made of real blades — a pinwheel of knives. This particular machine could crush a herd of elephants — kill ‘em dead — if it “landed” on them. It flies in the air like a bird, this elephant-crushing machine, up where there’s no oxygen for breath — a crucial ingredient if you’re trying to whip up a batch of living human souls. Because of flying where there’s no air, this flying, air-burning machine (also formed of twisted metal like the explosion machine) comes stock with plastic bags that may or may not fill up with oxygen if ever its insides bleed all the good air out. Those plastic bags are quite similar to the ones used by the Mafia for an activity known as “the Boston fogger.” This machine is dangerous enough that anyone who rides it cannot take more than 3 ounces of any liquid, any sort of stabbing, cutting, trimming, maiming, grinding, sawing, hacking, burning, or other normal household or travel items on board. Why? The owners of the air-burning machines fear that someone may turn it into an elephant-crushing machine or a missile for towers twin and single alike. These owners are tragically under the illusion that such restrictions prevent the machine from being able to crush elephants or destroy buildings, and every year these air-burning machines surprise them by crashing and exploding.

Sometimes even right on top of poor, innocent elephants.

There’s a machine in my sink that’s supposed to help me dispose of the large chunks of food on my dinner dishes. This machine is made of blades and the switch to turn it on looks identical to the switch that turns on the light in that same room — in fact, they’re right next to each other. Turning on the light while my hand is digging out something that I shouldn’t have disposed of (like my wedding ring) may result in fingers that lose the capacity to wear rings at all.

Also death by blood-letting.

There’s danger in the streets, especially where there’s no streetlamps. And even where there are streetlamps, those streetlamps attract more of the explosion-powered machines, and then you’re back to square one (an metaphor taken from the precise moment in board games when your pawn dies).

There’s danger as I type, for the roof could gave in and crush me or snap my neck. Does that seem ridiculous to you? It didn’t for Chicken Little. The sky did fall.*

*see also Daniel Craig as James Bondº

ºsee also Adele’s^ song for said film

^see also Adele’s dead ancestors^†

^†etc.

Wash your hands too little, you get infections. Wash too much, you mutate germs into superbugs and megaviruses — radiation to komodo dragons; Godzilla crap, man.

Take too little aspirin, you die of heart attacks. Too much? Your liver fails.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Right Bilbo? Oh yes, look at what Mr. Tolkien did to cute, little, respectable, good, admirable hobbits: HE THREW THEM INTO A VOLCANO.

} so to speak {

There’s coughs and wheezes, choking precautions, SIDS, cancer, saucers (the flying kind), terrorists, communists, capitalists who practice corporate assassination, oppressors, gangrene, poisoned tangerines, house fires, betrayers, cannibals and human filleters, wildcats, vampiric bats, bloody shats and molten vats.

Also guns — machines made of still more twisted metal that use a single compressed explosion to propel pointed hunks of metal through the air at hundreds of miles per hour in hopes to find a heart (or other vital human organ, remember those internal water balloons?) to pierce and thus end the life of the father, brother, mother, sister, daughter, son,

grandchild

of another human being who’s no different than you or me. Not where humanity’s concerned.

“DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T,” says my uncle and King points to the dance of death. It reminds me of that movie The Box. Push the button, someone dies. Don’t push the button? You die.

Maybe pushing the button isn’t the whole story…

It’s not that we need safety, security, on the personal or national level. Even if we did, we cannot find such things in this world of barbs and barbed wire, guns and roses (NOW including free thorns with every purchase). Death finds us all, and we do well to “meditate on our deaths and the common circumstances which attend death,” as Johnny Edwards said. Get rid of the button — that was the moral of The Box. Don’t kill somebody so your life can be better. Stop pushing it and chose to die. You die. You die. You choose to die.

Not them. Not those people. Not your neighbor. Not your enemy.

You.

Don’t push the button so that you can be safe.

We don’t need to be safe.

We need to be saved.

If saved, we get a chance to save others – Brandon knew that, wanted to go serve a nation far poorer than his own, push all-in with his own mortality that others might have life. Risky? Yes, but so is getting blinded out, letting your chip stack dwindle with every pass of the dealer button, letting your stack get smaller and smaller until the last two chips fall into a pot which will inevitably be a side pot (not the main pot), one that, even if you win, won’t give you enough cashflow to carry you through to final victory. No, the slow surrender never suffices. We all must go all-in at one point or another, must risk to overcome, or we shall fade, some slower, some faster, into the loser’s bracket, blind following blind after blind until the bubble bursts and we fail to make it into the money.

Duly noted, Brandon.

We hear your message and hereby sign this memorandum – let the record show:

One put Himself in harm’s way for us.

We must put ourselves through harm that others might be

safed.

 

 

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