Living with RA -- The Bitch

RA, short for rheumatoid arthritis, is my companion.  I didn't ask her to come along for this ride, didn't invite, imply or deserve her company -- one day she just crashed the party and she never left.  Then she went totally nuts.

Who is this RA?  Well she is a misguided, confused, and nasty little thing who insists that she is doing me a favor.  She riles up my internal army, MY own immune system, and gets them to march off to war.  She INSISTS there is war. There is no war -- it is all in her head. But she insists and leads her equally confused army off to battle every god damned day.  And now she thinks that I am the enemy. She is a lot like Hitler, she has a charisma that instills a fervor in her followers -- they never question her; they never doubt her; they just rally and roll.  They no longer listen to me, their genetic master. They have forgotten the common language we spoke for 27 years.  She is a powerful leader and I have utterly lost control of the army. Wasn't this my party?

There are times it seems they have retreated into the hills -- sending out only small guerilla forces, engaging in small skirmishes in random places. They really are insane. I think those times they are just in training, getting stronger, more organized and more determined. Damn this girl is messed up.  I have tried to talk to her, reason with her but she is convinced that I am part of a great conspiracy to rid the world of her.  She is right.  For a while I would have been willing to reason with her -- now I want her dead.  Drawn, quartered and offered up to the devil himself. I have to keep those thoughts to myself though.  I must continue to be kind, to be gentle and to be patient.  When I get riled somehow she knows it.  She has spies who send messages back to camp.  She knows there is a price on her head but I have to make certain she doesn't know that it is me who wants to collect that bounty. Hell I don’t want the money -- I just want her dead. The moment she perceives a threat she raises holy hell.

She is mean too and narcissistic; everything has to be about her.  When something else is going on, when I am down, when I am struggling with some emotion or other physical pain she has to put on a bigger show.  She hates it when someone else gets the attention.  Again, she must have spies in every region of my body who run back to her and tell her that she is losing her limelight… She thinks the whole world is hers anyway and any sort of perceived weakness must be destroyed.  So when I am weak she is more hell-bent than ever. Sick, sick, sick.

What is crazy is I don't know where she got her training!  She is a bit like Mendel too -- a mad scientist. She breeds and produces an army at an uncanny rate.  She must be gestating them in jars or something -- Brave New Fucking World.  I have had to resort to buying my army -- hired guns really and I can't seem to buy them fast enough to keep pace with her production rate. They do their best in a land that is not their own -- their heart isn't in it -- it isn't their land they are defending.  Think about, she has invaded my own land with my own people and turned them against me. My hired army is very expensive and she knows it.  I don't have the luxury of releasing my army for surprise attacks.  They show up, regularly schedule once a month -- I inject them into my thigh, hoping that they can seek her out and destroy her. 

My army is usually moderately successful.  They take out a lot of her forces -- but with that breeding factory she has she never runs out of soldiers.  She never has to go into battle herself either.  She just sits on her throne, eating Turkish Delight, ordering her minions to do her bidding.  I on the other hand am exhausted after 27 years -- I am in every single skirmish, battle and scrap. I am beat.  I grow old; she never ages. There is no end to this war.  She is betting on the come that I will give up, retreat, bruised and battle-weary.  If I do that I give up all my land…and my land is me. So I have no choice but to fight.

I wish she could see the land she claims to defend is being destroyed by her.  There are regions that will never recover -- there is just too much damage.  The grass will never grow; the waters never run clear, they are gnarled outcroppings of brutality. Yet as damaged as they are she still leads battles to those pathetic places and damages them even more. These places are now filled with brambles of rusty barbed wire, craters and polluted soup that was once the lubricant of the life that lived there. She doesn't care.

I write this from a weary camp of soldiers who need to be fed.  We are shivering, our boots are worn and our supplies are low. The mystery is when I feed them, sometimes her army seems to get into the soup line too.  When I feed my army, sometimes hers gets stronger.  There are certain foods that seem to make them uber warriors and sometimes I never know what that super-food is until it is too late.  Her army is ever-changing -- mine is the same every month.  We do the best we can.  It takes so much time and money to train my army that advances in strategy are rare and sometimes dangerous -- if you get an untested army in there you never know what else they might do.  That is a chance I cannot take.  I have lost too much already.

My hope, well there are many, but I guess my primary hope is that she doesn't damage this land to the point where it is not worth defending.  I have slowed her army but there is no way to stop them. This war will never, not ever end.  It ends when the land dies and with that would go everything. They never sleep, I don't think she even has to feed them.  They live off the morsels they snatch from me.  I don't know how she does it. They flourish under the worst of circumstances.

The first thing I feel every morning is the war, the ravages of now decades of battle.  I have to live each day with the battle but not IN it.  There are times when all I can do is fight -- those times suck.  They are times when nothing else seems to matter but the fighting -- her narcissistic nature loves those times.  But each time, I have to deliberately trudge through the carnage and continue to pretend that other things matter…until they do.

So it is off to another battle again today.  Maybe this one won't be as bad as the last.  Maybe worse -- but it is mine to fight.  My army gets reinforcements soon.  Hopefully that will buy me some relative peace…they seems to have lost their edge of late but that happens from time to time.  Here's hoping they are more effective this month.  I would hate to have to change battle strategies again.  I hope she hasn't figured out how to beat this one… I am running out of options.  She never runs out of options and never has to change her strategy.  It isn't fair but this isn't a gentleman's war.  If there were rules she wouldn't follow them anyway.

Love your battle weary general…

Kyle

Part II - A Gun Owner's Perspective

Okay in Part One I think we established a reason why "more bullets" might be better than fewer bullets. With my snub-nosed revolver I have five and the caliber is .38.  Honestly there is not much "stopping power" in my revolver -- again that is why I practice shooting and it is why I have hollow point bullets in it.  Ack!  Hollow points?  Sounds pretty nasty doesn't it?  The odds of any of my shots actually hitting my target is low.  So IF only one makes contact it MUST have as much stopping power as possible.

The other thing that most people never, ever consider simply because they don't know is that a hollow point bullet mushrooms upon impact.  That is why it causes damage -- it makes a bigger hole than just an unchanged or "whole" bullet would.  That ALSO protects innocent bystanders.  Upon "mushrooming" is slows the bullet down and does not allow it to "pass through".  If a bullet can simply pass through an object it 1) often just creates a little hole in the first object (or person) causing little damage unless it hits something vital and 2) It still has the velocity to continue on and strike another object or person.  We know from Part I even if I hit something vital, short of the spinal column, my attacker often still has lots of time left to inflict damage on me.

So we have that element of "why more bullets is better" covered.  I would like to have at least 15 rounds in a clip for personal protection and now to at least some degree I hope I have explained why that is not unreasonable nor is it "redneck" or "gun happy".  It is the reality of the need when presented with it.  When people ask "why would you own a gun that was specifically designed to kill a person?"  My answer is because people pose the biggest threat to me.  If I ever have to fire on a person -- my intent must be to stop them by any means possible.  A deer rifle is not designed to stop a person -- I want a weapon that is.

People rarely "stockpile" guns -- the ones that do, make headlines and we both know what that does to public perception.  It is a term used that is generally laced with innuendo and of course political charge.  The term connotes someone building an arsenal for nefarious reasons.  Many people do collect guns and people like me are getting them, "while we still can." Government -- whether Republican or Democrat -- is insidiously taking away freedoms and rights… Since 9/11 so many have allowed this to happen for the sake of "national security".  The UN Small Arms Treaty possibly being signed on July 27th is a big deal to gun owners.  It is, in essence, a beginning to at least attempt to transfer power FROM our government to an International body that does NOT govern us nor does it have the US as its primary focus and/or interest.  It doesn't seem like a big deal to people who don't own or care to own guns but to us it is a huge threat and the first step at the idea of disarming Americans.  The UN does not represent the United States and any transfer of power or governance TO them away from our own government is putting our needs as a nation, second, or worse.

I personally would like to pick up a few more weapons.  Why now?  Again, I want to do it while I still can.  Most of us who are staunch supporters of the 2nd amendment have seen our rights eroded and eroded.  It is harder and harder to buy and possess legal firearms.  When news stories like the one in Aurora come out the impression the "world" gets is that anyone can amble up to a counter anywhere and purchase a weapon.  That is simply not true.  Gun control advocates often demand "we need gun control" when in reality many mean we need to ban guns.  When I purchased a rifle for my boyfriend I had to go through a thorough CBI (Colorado Bureau of Investigation) report.  If you are a law abiding citizen it doesn't take long -- a couple of hours maybe a few more.  But they check everything and I am now on record as owning that firearm -- they know where I live, they know where I work, they know what I do, they have my fingerprints.  When I get pulled over the officer knows as he is doing it that I have a permit to carry.  I am in many, many databases and have very little privacy from government.  As a law abiding citizen who has NO record of ANY bad behavior, is that right?  Why should they know all that about me and not about anyone else?  I know that guns are scary but see if from my perspective if you can -- Big Brother really IS watching me.

Since the Brady Law was enacted instant background checks have been a mandate -- More than 100 million such checks have been made in the last decade, leading to more than 700,000 denials. (FBI.gov website). Things like "transfer taxes" are imposed -- it costs a gun buyer or seller (depends on who agrees to foot the bill) of a "used" weapon a $200 "transfer tax" when they sell a firearm, no matter what the price of the firearm -- and this is a private transaction. What right does the government have in imposing such arbitrary fee to a private transaction? When you sell your car you don't have to pay that unless you want to drive it on publically funded roadways and you register it.  The registration fee covers in part -- your use of the roadways.  A car is far more deadly than a gun. I can and will if you want provide you a list of all of the restrictions and requirements in buying a selling firearms -- but for now, just know that it is not that simple and as you can see, more people have been denied (70% of them) than approved. Lastly, and probably the most challenging to convey is our distrust of government.  I don't trust government and I REALLY don't trust a government who is trying to or wants to disarm me.

"Second Amendment rights" versus "more gun control", it's a debate that has gone on and will go on for years.  Neither side can fathom why the other feels the way they do.  What is true is that it is fueled by emotion and fear.  I fear my government and the other side fears my guns.  As a supporter of my right to bear arms I put real stock in my ability and my right to protect myself and feel genuinely threatened when anyone talks about taking it away.  The vast, vast, VAST majority of legal owners of firearms never commit a crime much less one with a gun -- yet the few that do, affect the nation's perception of all of us and want to penalize ALL of us for those random and statistically infrequent occurrences. As a person trained to use a firearm -- it is a great choice for self protection. Those who oppose the right to bear arms think guns kill people. People kill people.  Let me ask -- do you feel safer because your friend, your neighbor has weapons and knows how to use them or do you feel threatened because he has them?  Most, almost all of us, who own guns are "your neighbor".

If you were to believe the media you might think that firearm related crimes were an epidemic.  They are not.  Firearm-related crime has plummeted since 1993. From 1993 through 1997, less than 1% of serious nonfatal violent victimizations resulted in gunshot wounds.  In 1993 there were 1,054,820 non-fatal firearm related crimes.  In 2009 there were 326,090 non-fatal firearm related crimes. The rate of victimization in 1993 was 5.9 people in 1000 -- in 2009 it was 1.4 in a thousand.  That means that you have a .14% chance of being a victim.  Not epidemic.  Of course when "Aurora" happens all rationale and attention paid to the real numbers goes away because we are all emotional beasts.  We are rushing out to buy guns because we want to protect ourselves from "Aurora" and the other side is clamoring to bans guns to protect ourselves from "Aurora".  My desire to buy more is rooted in fear of my government -- an emotion, I know, but a trend that is insidious and I believe on a trajectory.  I can only make decisions on what I believe to be true or not true and I do as much homework as I can to avoid being purely emotional about it.

I understand though -- for someone who is not familiar with guns, they are scary.  They are unknown and in untrained hands they are dangerous.  But the response to guns by the media and many in America is purely an emotional one. I wish every American owned a gun and knew how to use it.

Let's look at some statistics to get perspective. Forty-eight point five (it's math, I know you can't have .5 of a person) people die from lightening strikes while playing golf every year.  But on average 1 person a year in the U.S. is killed by a shark.  We have a much more emotional reaction to sharks than we do golf -- but statistically golf is much more dangerous.  Sharks are scary, golf is not.  There has never been a Hollywood movie about "deadly golf"; there is not a "Golf Week" on The Discovery Channel every year.  Golf doesn't scare us. Heck more people a year are killed by vending machines falling over on them than they are killed by sharks! A far greater number of people in America are viciously attacked by deer than they are bears -- but bears scare us more.  Thirty-one people a year are killed by pet dogs -- on average one person a year is killed by a mountain lion -- which is scarier? Our emotions color how we feel about things -- they ARE what we feel about things and so often we make decisions or base "rational" on them; it is not a rational thing to do.

There have been 278 revolutions in the world since 1900 alone. There are 198 countries in the world (give or take over time).  It probably never will happen in the United States but with those numbers I am going to be certain that my government, no matter how much I like them, does not get my firearms.  Call it an insurance policy.  It is an insurance policy when a thug wonders if he should mug and rape me and it is an insurance policy when a government begins to feel omnipotent. Do I have the delusion that if it came down to "the people" vs. "the government", me and my squirrel gun would have a chance?  Of course not.  But it is my hope that globally our government would not want to risk that.  Sounds crazy?  Ask the 278 countries that fought a revolution in the last 100+ years.

So yes, I fear my government and it is a healthy fear.  Because of that I am a more prudent citizen.  I don't fear the revolution as much as I fear the laws around guns getting so strict that gun ownership is all but an impossibility.  Once we are unarmed our "insurance policy" is gone.  Then I would begin to fear my government in a new way.  I don’t at all expect to convert you or to convince you to feel the way I do.  I just want to let you know how "we" feel and why we are so ardent about protecting our rights.