My father showed me a gun when I was around 10 years old. It was a pistol; a small semi automatic weapon meant for standoffs and self-defense. Though a pistol is a defensive form of weapon, it is still a lethal one as bullets can easily pierce anything and nowadays they can be modified to be almost as lethal as assault weapons. He then told me how it was a weak weapon. He said that, as he repeated the Gardner family motto to me “A Gardener must ensure a beautiful garden around him, even if it means pulling out a few weeds.” My family is beyond traditional or conservative, more reactionary; they think we are in the feudal times still in some aspects. One that day my father showed me why weapons are weak, simple tools for simple jobs and how your enemies must truly be destroyed.

You see I was raised with the belief that your enemy is not your target; to kill someone teaches them nothing. I was raised to believe to destroy someone you must go after everything. The love for the objective of war is to not destroy your opponent, but to take their will to fight. Their loved ones, the closest to them, their livelihoods—all of it is your objective to destroy. A cruel way to raise a child if I say so. When they have lost everything they will have three options after that:

1. To kill themselves in losing their loved ones and friends and what makes their lives them.

2. To come at you in an all or nothing attack, they will only have their lives to lose at that point.

3. The last one would be to try to rebuild. My father said these ones must be put down over and over until solution one or two happens.

That’s very f**ked up, isn’t it? That is why I take every effort to befriend everyone I know. If my family was to learn that I had any enemies, they might do just what I described. Some members of my family—my grandmother in particular—seems like they live in a different world with a different view, and it scares me.

Then there is me, the heir, the prodigal son with a love for creative things and a passion for all of the joy to this world. Two masks that have to be chosen every day, cruelty or love, which is it that I must strive for in today’s world. Violence is commonplace, or I dare say on the rise, and how do we fight that? Do I try to fix this problem with discussion, or do I fight defensively striking the problem when it hits me or the ones I love?

Where do I draw the line from the “Gardner family policy” and my own desire for peace? I feel like a walking weapon, in both marital and social sense. Despite my autism I have formed a large following around me, which gives me social prowess. But, at the same time, I am a trained fighter. I know the basics and survived a few scrapes. I'm not proud of them, but I have. I am a very capable individual who deceitfully is too lax and careless for my nature.

Why am I discussing all this? Because I look at the thin line in Dallas today. This is what hate is capable off. This is what I see: men and women losing loved ones in retaliation, blindly lashing out in a battle for justice, but what can we say is justice anymore? All sides of this conflict is blinded by grief and sadness and rage and when we forget that all lives are connected in some way we lost our humanity and in Dallas humanity is all but lost!

I do not see peace or love in sight for a long time, and at this moment everyone is at each other’s throats and I think to myself “the Gardner family policy” only leads to it’s second outcome. Dallas is a place with nothing to lose and I fear the loss of life will be great and only because of the actions of a few men. Whether they are honest mistakes, or horrible intentions, in taking those lives they affected the victims loved ones. In affecting their loved ones they will now receive retaliation and now we are in the circle of retaliation and lost and hate and, you guessed it, retaliation. With what my family taught me, it looks like it will continue until one side is reduced to nothing. Is this really the human condition? Are we to fight and destroy blindly? Why not, we have for hundreds of years.

I want peace, a long peace, decades of peace. When will we see that, I don’t think we will, ever. Too many issues and too much history with those issues, we as a nation fix one thing and a new thing comes up, we correct our mistakes only to see new flaws. No idea, individual or nation is perfect, but we can at least try, and I don’t think we do anymore or did anyways, common sense out the window for right or wrong based on belief systems whether the rights of humans as a whole.

So here I am finishing this rant with what I am seeing over the last few days “We need to stop. Punish those that need to be punished, but at this rate it is becoming a war and that makes everyone an accomplice to the death that will be followed.” With justice, a controlled and arbitrary justice we might find peace. With the evidence presented already, we know that they are guilty and we should only be mad if the system lets them walk. To fight now is to just create more hate and more death. I beseech patience and to only react if the cops responsible walk, as their is too much evidence for them to escape this conviction, but to punish other cops is unacceptable, because just like every side of a conflict there are those meaning to do real good, don’t take those cops away from us.