Month: February 2018

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A lot of people have been speculating about the best thing we can do to prevent further school shootings.  Some people say, “Vote Democrat.” Others say, “Study the problem scientifically.” But I’ve got the real answer.  

Join the NRA.

I remember during the 2016 election some pollster — I think it was Nate Silver — joked that the best thing Democrats could do for Hillary Clinton was not to get out the vote, but simply to get out: move away from the urban, Democratic areas to red states where their votes would matter more.  Another 400,000 blue votes means nothing in San Francisco or Park Slope.  But in the Rust Belt?  That’s an election.  Go West, young hipsters!  But not too far west.  Stop somewhere around Des Moines.   

Here’s my point: right now the NRA casts a long shadow.  But its membership is only about 5 million.  That’s just 6-7% of all gun owners.  On the other hand, there are a lot of us.  Out of 323 million Americans, I’ve got to believe at least 100 million of us are interested in sensible gun control.  Yes, they’ve got the guns, but we’ve definitely got the numbers.

So here’s the plan: We’ll all join the NRA.  We’ll show up at board meetings.  We’ll pack the house, demand to be heard.  We’ll take control.  We’ll vote in new officers.  Remember when people were joking that if Hillary Clinton got elected, she should nominate Barack Obama as her Supreme Court nominee, just to stick it to Mitch McConnell?  We’ll do stuff like that.  George Clooney for NRA President.  Howard Dean as Treasurer.  Maybe Lebron could be Secretary, or maybe Steph Curry, or — I’ve got it! — Draymond Green.  

What’s so strange about this?  The NRA, like any organization, responds to its members.  Plus, it’s happened before.  Back in the mid-70s, the NRA was still largely run for sportsmen.  But a hard line faction within the membership staged a coup and ousted the old guard, installing a new brand of “from my cold, dead hands”-style Second Amendment fanatics far more recognizable to today’s NRA fans.  

So why not stage our own takeover?  If you can’t beat ‘em, dilute ‘em.  If you and I joined up, yeah, we’d be giving them our money, but we’d damn well be expecting something in return.  We’d clog up their meetings with our talk about reasonable restrictions on magazines, bump stocks, and all that other stuff.

We’d say, “We love hunting.  We love target practice.  We love the responsible gun ownership — like the student of mine in Vermont who a few months back admitted to skipping school to go turkey hunting.  We like those gun owners.  We like those guns — you know, the non-Rambo kind.  And we want that kid off shooting in the woods with his father — not getting shot up in his classroom.”

We’d say, “We’re scared of our government, too — but that doesn’t make us want to stockpile ammo.  Besides, we don’t like our chances against the U.S. Army.  Let’s say they turn on us.  Would it matter if we have AR-15s, or just regular rifles?  They’ll have the helicopters, the tanks, the warheads, the cool jackets, and we’ll have . . . our cherished assault rifles?   I’ve got news for  you: just because these weapons work against a roomful of fourth period trigonometry students doesn’t mean they could’ve beaten back Crooked Hillary’s Calvary, which I know you were worried about.  Don’t be those Confederate boys at the start of ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘One AR-15 could lick six Yankees!’ As Rhett Butler pointed out to you gentlemen, ‘Wake the fuck up.’”

Plus, we like to smack our government around the old fashioned way: at the ballot box.  Look at the last election.  You won!  You didn’t Lock Her Up, but you sure as shit got your man elected, the tangerine Idi Amin.  You don’t need to stockpile weapons.  You stockpiled votes (with a little help from Vlad and his bots).  Democracy works, my NRA brethren.  You don’t need to wave an automatic weapon in anyone’s face.

So, fellow Reasonable People, I say:  Just stop.  Stop having pointless Facebook debates.  It’ll only entrench us all further.  Some of us are just freedom-loving people, dammit — the kind who’re just fine forcing kids and teachers to walk through metal detectors and do survival drills and basically live under martial law.  There’s no need to raise a stink on social media.  That’s not where the money’s carved up.  Let’s walk back into that cigar-filled room and light up our own stogies like we own the joint.  Let’s be part of the solution — from inside.  Let’s keep our enemies real nice and close.

There’s only one surefire way to beat back the NRA.

Let’s join it.

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The other night, watching 17 year-old Red Gerard win a gold medal, man-hug the same two teammates at least 25 times each, then drop an F-bomb on live TV, it got me thinking: I am old.  After all, this kid is only 17.  I’ve got skis older than Red Gerard.

Teenage medalists are hardly unique, but it did get me thinking about what a strange experience this must be.  I wonder, for many of these young athletes especially, how much of their Olympic pursuit is managed by parents or especially coaches.

There’s nothing wrong with coaches.  I’ve had lots of great ones.  I wish I’d had more.  But it struck me that my own Olympic pursuit, as a canoe racer, was largely a coachless one.  And that was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.

Why?  It’s simple.  I discovered the joy of learning everything on your own.  If you are training because a coach tells you to train — if you work on a certain skill because a coach tells you to work on it — if your last thought after a bad run is, “Coach is not going to be happy” — you’re missing the greatest part of being a training athlete in pursuit of a goal: taking responsibility for yourself.

The best part of the Olympic quest isn’t the victories.  It’s the journey.  It is the — to borrow a line from a former kayak coach — “fascination with the process.” And if you’re just along for the ride on the journey — if the process is being run by someone else — you’re missing the best part.  

When I started racing kayaks seriously at 19, I knew I wasn’t good enough — and there weren’t coaches enough — for me to merit much of their time.  Instead, I learned many of their skills for myself: setting a yearly training plan, setting my own weekly goals, seeking out my own training partners, and evaluating my own performance with an eye toward constant improvement.

On Sunday mornings in the mid-2000s, I’d drive out to the Dickerson whitewater course in Maryland and walk up and down the shore with my training partner, Steve Graybill, planning exactly what we wanted to work on and adjusting the slalom gates to suit our ends.  We didn’t have a coach to set the gates for us, but that made us that much more astute critics of ourselves, and that much more invested in the workouts — because we’d set the goals ourselves, not a coach.

I never knew those things as a high school athlete, playing soccer and lacrosse.  A coach scripted our pre-season training, a coach monitored our fitness, tailored our drills, responded to sloppy game play with targeted interventions, scripted our playbook, and configured the playing field, filling out the roster with each of us at whichever position he liked.  We went to practice and did what we were told.  The athletic fields were an extension of the classroom.  We were students and the coaches were the teachers.  

The idea of not being in charge of your training is so foreign to me now — not just as a former coachless athlete, but as a teacher whose job is directing the learning process of others.  I can’t imagine being on the other end now.  It’s almost hard for me to imagine playing a coached sport again.

Some athletes are lucky enough to have a coach who becomes a partner in this quest — more like a peer, a helper, rather than an authority.  These can be incredibly meaningful relationships, but they can only happen for athletes mature enough and invested enough that they’d be training at 5 am even without a coach.  If you need a coach to get you up early, that’s not an equal relationship, and you’re missing out.

My favorite dynamic from back when I was racing was the group of coachless competitors.  When you had two or three guys, all very close in performance, all serious about improving, who came together to train, the dynamic was fantastic, because you’d be pushing yourselves to do things no reasonable coach could’ve ever asked you to.  In some ways, it’s purer than a coached workout: athletes thinking things through for themselves, and bringing out the best in each other without intermediaries.  Internal motivation — true motivation — is always the most rewarding.

Let every Olympic athlete, no matter how young, feel the joy for at least one season of taking responsibility of his own training, of targeting his own weaknesses, of developing his own strength and skills, of dragging himself out to the river on a cold morning at 5 am.  

After all, ask any Olympic athlete and they’ll tell you: it’s not about the medals.  It’s about the pursuit of excellence.

But a medal would be nice.