Gunless? Gutless!
SILENT night, O holy night . . . The silence and stillness, was it ever there as we rushed through Christmas in a crush of traffic, shopping, delivering presents, partying with friends and bonding with family? The joy of anticipating Christmas for four months, now that it’s here it will be gone in 24 hours. Just like that.
Christmas and the reason for the season notwithstanding, “this is the most un-Christian country,” in the exact words of Nandy Pacheco. Nandy, who’s a better Catholic than most, should be yelling at the top of his voice to keep society gunless, but if he has lost his voice, “I’m not giving up.” He will keep distributing stickers for peaceful folks to stick on their cars and doors.
In the ‘90s Nandy fought to keep guns silent especially during the Christmas-New Year’s Eve revelry after a painful pattern of lives wasted by bullets fired by gutless men “celebrating” the birth of the Prince of Peace. In those days cops taped their guns on Dec. 24 and 31. Nandy’s artist drew a gun with a twisted, knotted barrel, a message that was eloquently clear, though it must’ve looked like a joke to the alpha-male machos.
Not only are we un-Christian in the way we worship the gun, we have political candidates who are seasonably driven to apply for gun permits for their bodyguards. “They’re afraid to die and they’re afraid to live,” Nandy says of them with no small amount of contempt, echoing an earlier warning by Charito Planas that “if you’re afraid for your lives, you should not seek public office.”
Nandy was so serious about his advocacy that he enrolled in a short course in the “theology of active nonviolence” in a seminary in Ontario, Canada. Upon his return to the gunful society three years later, he toyed with the idea of using the gunless platform to form a political party. Kapatiran was doomed from the start but he had a point to prove.
With the election fever about to infect us all over again, he prays for an end to this insidious gun culture, for the peace not of this world (an eye for an eye, etc.) but the peace of Christ (love, truth, justice, nonviolence, reconciliation and forgiveness), without which, what is Christmas?