'International -'
'Of course. That's the unrealized promise of the Net - a stateless community of educated people working toward enlightened goals, including the pursuit of truth. A civilized New World Order in which you don't kill people for believing differently than you -you educate them if you can, learn from them what you can, and promote mutual tolerance.'
'I hear no small amount of idealism there.'
Idealism is the horse,' Schrock admitted. 'But reason is the rider. Well, that brings me to tonight.'
'You said something had changed -'
Schrock nodded. 'Some of us - a lot of us, I think - have been working the disarmament issue for some time. But the events of the last two days have galvanized the membership in a way I've never seen. We've been meeting continuously in the well since Senator Wilman was murdered, and I've seen as many as thirty thousand avatars logged in at once. And out of that came something I never expected - we formed a committee. We're going to organize a coordinated effort in support of you and Mind Over Madness - there are already thousands of volunteers.'
'To do what?'
'To resist those who want you to fail, who want disarmament to fail, who think loss of privilege is too high a price for peace. They've been out there for months, pushing hard. We know they're organized - everyone speaking with one voice, making the same monkey-brain appeals. They don't debate, they propagandize. And they're very good at making themselves heard.
'We're going to bet on reason winning out over propaganda. There are countless places in the real and wired worlds where people gather to talk - chat rooms, public meetings, reader forums, talk Web, bars, park benches. We'll be there. We'll make sure that there is a patient, thoughtful voice speaking up for sanity. And we will make ourselves heard.'
'I envy you your optimism, Wendell. I confess I've been struggling to find mine.'
'Don't give up, sir,' Schrock said earnestly. 'I could not have been more proud of my President than I was watching you wade into that crowd just forty-eight hours after your friend was murdered. You changed one mind tonight. We'll change ten more tomorrow, and a hundred the next day. Just keep speaking to that spark of reason, and little by little we'll breathe life into it.'
The briefcase Jammer made its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Toshiba showed a slick three-piece system with a powered docking cradle for the home, another for the car trunk, and an eight-kilo briefcase capable of an hour of continuous operation at short range or three long-range bursts. It was aimed at executive anxieties and came with a five-figure price tag which did little to dampen interest. Safeco introduced the Safe Passage, a civilian version of the Suppressor backpack which police forces in twenty-eight countries had adopted, and the Sentry, an add-on to its modular home-defense system.
But the runaway hit of the show was the Celestial Silver Shield, a bare-bones Jammer packaged for the home. Built from less-refined components than the other offerings, the Silver Shield was the size of a small end-table and the weight of a small refrigerator, with the voracious electrical appetite of a resistance heater when set in 'con-tinuous' mode. But it was offered for the price of a good television, and the packaging and positioning - straddling the line between an appliance and furniture - was inspired. Show preorders soared to record levels, and within six weeks Celestial had sold the entire first year's projected production, sending Goldstein to the Asian Rim on a quest for more capacity.
The sudden emergence of Horton devices as a commodity brought a swift response from Congress, which tried to strangle the infant market with regulation. Senator Hap Neely's 'Self-Defense Parity and Fairness Act' was a bald attempt to hamstring privately-owned Jammers by limiting them to a range of thirty meters or the nearest property line, whichever was less. It passed with a veto-proof margin, but lawyers for LifeShield Arsenal buried it in paper before it went into effect.
'If the authors of this legislation want to come forth to publicly demonstrate that the firearms and ammunition commonly in use have a range of only thirty meters and respect property lines,' the lead attorney said from the courthouse steps, 'the plaintiffs will gladly withdraw their petition. Otherwise, we count on the court to expose this law for the sham it is.'
The district court came through, but Congress went right back to work. This time, it was a triple-barreled attack using the Federal bureaucracies.
A House committee ordered the Federal Trade Commission to investigate 'health and safety issues' regarding prolonged exposure of young children and pregnant women to Jammer fields. A Senate panel directed the Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Communications Commission to jointly investigate the possibility that a VentureStar crash in Dallas was caused by interference from the Jammer installations at the spaceport. And the Food and Drug Administration was asked to look into reports that Horton devices were killing people by damaging the microprocessors in medical implants.
Bach and every charge was specious, even fraudulent. But together they offered not only the prospect of months of bad publicity, but of the whole spectrum of regulatory actions from recalls to outright bans.
It was all part of the ongoing war of perceptions being waged on every front where public opinion was shaped. But as the year wore on, that struggle more and more strongly resembled a desperate endgame with an outcome that was foreordained. There was not going to be a grass-roots revolution against the government. The middle class was not signing up for a civil war.
Instead, there were signs of an evolution in public attitudes toward not only guns but violence - an awakening of outrage and revulsion, a retreat from the casual cynicism which had allowed the country to accept the slaughter with a shrug of inevitability.
'Now that we finally know we're sick, how will we know if we're getting better?' asked the hero of the sell-out stage hit Asylum.
Little by little, an answer emerged.
* * *
30: Harder than War
'Making peace is harder than making war.'
- Adlai Stevenson
For the first time in history, the number of Federally licensed firearms dealers fell below the number of National Health Service crisis counselors. By then, storefront gun dealers were already an endangered species. In the span of only a year, one out of every three had closed up shop, and only stubbornness was keeping many others open in the face of unrelenting red ink. The gun-show circuit simply imploded, with sellers outnumbering buyers and prices in free fall.
The firearm and ammunition manufacturers were scarcely better off - a wave of mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies had thinned their ranks, and still no one could say how many bullfrogs the shrinking pond would support. Remington-Colt went through four rounds of layoffs. Winchester's parent company spun it off to a German tool-and-die concern more interested in its factories than its products.
Seeing the criminal use of firearms plummeting, the State of Massachusetts repealed all of its 'time, place, and manner' regulations on firearms - and added a law which made disabling or deactivating a Horton device a felony. Within a month, thirty-five other states followed a similar course.
Ordinary citizens were seeing less crime as well. Millennium Media, the largest English-language program syndicator and push-cast server, dropped the Crime Witness channel from their Home Essentials lineup due to 'ratings erosion'. Crime Witness had fea-tured around-the-clock live video of crimes in progress and police pursuits from six continents. It was replaced by Wonderful Planet, a new virtual-tourism feed from National Geographic.
The bad news continued for Crime Witness, which was forced to cut its rights payments by a third and go to a 'deja vu' schedule with twelve hours of repeats a day. Those steps were not enough to save it. Two months later, after a key advertiser bailed out, CW tried to carry on as a subscription service. In another six weeks, it was in bankruptcy.
That key advertiser had been rental property and relocation giant Halstead Homes, which had been pitching the security features of its premiu
m rental communities with the slogan 'Sleep easy - come home to a Halstead Home'. With occupancy rates falling, Halstead's president announced that the company was repositioning itself as the 'middle-class luxury and convenience alternative'.
'You can't sell people what they already have,' she told the Wall Street Journal, 'We need to offer more than personal safety to entice the step-up relocator to move.'
Whether all those developments were truly as connected as they seemed was open to debate. But the debate did little to stop the connections from being drawn, or hope from starting to bloom.
To be sure, there were still places which were not safe, and people who could not be trusted. But there were signs of a determined search for ways to address that reality without recourse to the gun.
In the often-quoted words of New York City's 'blue ninja', Detective Sergeant Jan Flynn, 'Being armed isn't the same as being safe - and being unarmed isn't the same as being helpless.' The petite, blue-eyed Flynn made herself into a symbol of the new attitude, tirelessly demonstrating both propositions in auditoriums and studios throughout the northeast. Hundreds of community-ed programs adopted the NYPD Guide to Self-Defense as the Bible for their new adult classes.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania went a step further, mak-ing not only self-defense but anger management training part of their new common-schooling curriculum for children aged five to fifteen. Incorporating scream-offs and foam-bat duels, the train-ing copied successful pilot programs in Youngstown, Ohio, and
Baltimore, Maryland, where juvenile assault rates were down more than ten percent.
In Los Angeles, the charismatic leader of the Islamic Confraternity declared that Allah had blessed husbands and fathers with 'the antidote to emptiness, the essence of togetherness, and the key to righteousness.' Warning that the 'idle hands' of a man who was not married by age twenty were a danger to himself and his community, Benjamin Muhammad announced that the Confraternity would begin arranging marriages for single men as young as fifteen and single women as young as fourteen.
'It is only when we know our place that we can find our way,' he proclaimed at the mass wedding of the first twenty-one couples joined by the matchmakers. 'Love civilizes us, and marriage fulfills us, and faith uplifts us.'
In Atlanta, an alliance of Southern Baptist churches recruited a team of ministerial mediators with the idea of doling out a different flavor of street justice. Armed only with a folding stool and the moral authority of the collar, the mediators set about to resolve conflicts where they arose, conducting their cleric's court on street corners and playgrounds and front porches. The compromises they arbitrated were sealed with a handshake and a hand on a Bible, and enforced by the expectations of the witnesses to that oath.
In community there was conscience, and in conscience, community.
But however many such collective affirmations could be found, in the end change depended on individual acts of courage and commitment. Most such acts were private, invisible, and uncelebrated. But some found a place in the public spotlight, and their influence went far beyond mere example.
Fifty-eight-year-old widow and grandmother Marge Winkins, a branch bank manager from Rochester, New York, awakened to the sound of breaking glass in the rental half of her duplex, occupied by a sixty-six-year-old retired schoolteacher with osteo-arthritis. Concerned for her tenant. Marge picked up a can of wasp spray and an Indian juggling club and went to investi-gate.
She surprised two teenage intruders armed with knives. One burglar went to the hospital with severely bruised testicles; the other, blinded by poison and bleeding above the ear from Marge's blows which gave him his concussion.
I'll say you surprised them. But why didn't you call 911 first?' every interviewer asked as Marge made her tour of the talk shows.
'Why, because I was there,' Marge would reply. 'You would have done the same for your friend, wouldn't you?'
Pop music idol Kip Knight, lead guitarist for the power-improv quintet Mach 5, shattered his own devilish playboy image with a video confession on the front page of the Mach 5 Web site. 'I'm a drunk. And when I'm drunk, the nasty shit I carry around inside me leaks out. I've hit and hurt every woman I've ever cared about. And a lot of the women I didn't care about - all those eager women who got the nod from the manager to come backstage and come back to the hotel - got the same treatment.
'I'm not gonna talk about why, about where all the anger is coming from. But I want to apologize to those women - to Dove, and Paula, and Noria, to Sam and Mackie and all the rest - for not finding another way to handle it, for taking advantage of you that way, because I was Kip Knight and you knew there was a long line of women waiting to be where you were. I shouldn't have done it. I wish to Holy Pete I hadn't.
'And I want to say something to the guys. This'll be short, because it's not at all complicated. But listen hard, because it's important: of all the stupid things we do, the worst of all stupidities is to raise your hand to someone who loves you. Whatever your problems, whatever your demons, whatever flavor of poison you've been sucking up, don't do what I've done - don't throw away those gifts. Find another way. That's what I've got to do now - find another way.'
The response to that appeal was so extraordinary that Knight joined forces with three other celebrities to found Another Way, a 'no-support group' for abusive men.
No one, however, surprised more people, stirred a stronger or farther-reaching response, or more aptly symbolized the evolu-tion than media commentator Herbert Rogers, whose top-rated broadcast Funhouse was almost as influential in the entertainment industry as it was with the consumers who checked in twice a week to hear his opinions.
'Those of you who can remember the twentieth century know I've been reviewing popular entertainment since the days when "movie theater" meant a projector and a flatscreen and "home video" meant VHS tape and a nineteen-inch television in 4:3 aspect ratio,' a somber Rogers said at the opening of his People's Choice Awards special.
'In that time, I've willingly allowed the images of the murders of tens of thousands of human beings to enter my eyes and thoughts. By my calculations, I've seen more crime scenes than any detective, more combat than any career soldier, and more corpses than any pathologist.
'I'm embarrassed to remember how many times I sat here and recommended that you pay someone money to push those same brutal images into your thoughts. But I'm far more troubled by the realization that, over the years, I became so numb to violence that more often than not I sat in the screening room watching blood fly and bodies fall and was bored.
'Along the way, I shrugged off complaints that the film industry had turned killing into a spectator sport. It's a violent world, I told myself, and these films are only mirroring reality.
'I dismissed charges that those action-adventure blockbusters cater to paranoid power fantasies, that they're a pornography of violence. These films are cartoons, I told myself, that no one could take seriously.
'I shook my head at the idea that the mutilation and execution of men for entertainment was the product of a vicious sexism. I told myself that the real sexism was selling tickets to see young actresses' bare breasts.
'I was wrong. I was wrong right down the line.
'Our entertainments depend on our willing suspension of dis-belief. We trick ourselves into thinking that what we're seeing and hearing is real. Well, it's worked too well. It's worked so well that we can never quite get those images out of our heads. When I wonder if I remembered to lock the back door, it's not the reality of my life that makes me bounce out of bed to double-check -
it's the demons from a thousand horror flicks and crazed-killer mysteries, still alive in the back of my mind.
'We all want to hear stories that confirm our view of the world - but we've turned things upside down, and now expect reality to be like our fiction. Fact: even before the Trigger showed up, most police officers went their whole career without firing their weapon at a suspect, much less shooting or killing one. Where c
an you look in the Blockbuster catalog to discover that reality?
'Many of us firmly believe we live in a dangerous place at a dangerous time. But the truth is that only a few of us actually do. How many real people did you see beaten or stabbed or burned or blown up or shot this year? How many imaginary people? Now think about the body counts you'd run up in a lifetime of "entertaining" yourself.
'Why have we allowed the lie to drown out the truth? Why are we assaulting our senses and poisoning our sensibilities this way? I can't find a good answer - and that tells me that it's time to stop. It's nothing more than an addiction to adrenalin.
'Well, enough, then. I'm going into detox. I'm giving up the juice. I've seen enough of war and murder and deaths that only matter because they connect page two of the script with page four, enough of gangs and gangsters, ruthless terrorists and crazed serial killers.
'I want to hear from writers and directors who know something about the rest of our lives, about all the kinds of moments that fill our days and make being human so glorious and perplexing and tragic and paradoxical. That's this man's choice. From here forward, I want to be connected to life, not disconnected from death.
'Meet me here next time if that's what you want, too.'
Not every viewer did - Funhouse's ratings dipped sharply at first, and Rogers's mail was full of complaints about 'censorship' and 'paternalism' and even 'creeping cultural fascism'. But after the first wave of defectors had departed, Funhouse's ratings began a steady climb to levels that equaled and then exceeded the old numbers, and the mail started to praise Rogers's 'uncommon sense' and applauded the 'outbreak of sanity'.
Still, a thousand philosophical miles away from Jan Flynn and Herbert Rogers, there were those who viewed any accommodation with the new order as treason, and who were inalterably opposed to allowing it to become the status quo. These dissenters had been unaccountably silent, but they were about to be heard from.
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