Hunting the Turkey

The tragic prosecution of Anthony Klaseus, who killed his own eight-year-old son, mistaking him for a turkey while on a hunt, reminded me how much distaste I have for our state’s “great” hunting tradition, the hypocrisy of “sportsmen,” and the power their interests wield.

Anthony Klaseus deserves to be prosecuted. He took his child’s life under the rubric of male bonding and family traditions. He didn’t intend to. But he loved nature, and pot, and beer, and guns.

I spent a weekend a long time ago researching a story about a family of hunters at their deer shack in northwestern Wisconsin. They were stand-up guys, responsible, affable, and completely disdainful of the louts. But they could never explain the one thing to me that I most wanted to know—why this unequal battle between them and a deer was the linchpin that kept them bonded and steeped in family traditions.

Hunting for them was an excuse to be together, to be challenged, to play. And hunters romanticize it because it is what the men pass down from generation to generation, like baseball in my family. But if I bring a rifle with a telescopic sight to the Metrodome, I’m locked up on terrorism charges.

Explain to me how thousands of guys (mostly) armed with telescopic sights, fake animal urine, camouflaged tree stands, underwater radar, and other advanced weaponry and aids, convince themselves they are engaging in an battle of wits with an animal armed with nothing but its sense of self-preservation?

I’m all in favor of men hunting each other. That’d be a fair fight. I think Gov. Ventura proposed something like that a decade or so ago.

I am stereotyping here, but within every stereotype is an ugly truth. I am suspicious of most hunters’ regard for nature beyond its ability to provide them with prey. Trust me, nature is twice as nice when you’re not worried your buddy thinks you’re a deer.

I support people’s right to hunt; and when they consume what they kill, they’re better than I, who lives off the depravity of the commercial meat industry. But let’s stop kidding ourselves about why people hunt and do away with the romantic fairy stories about hunters and hunting.

So happy fishing opener. Watch out for carp that jump and whack you in the head. I mean, people get hurt.

Scary on Seventh

It was Monday, 12:15 p.m., cloudy, in the fifties, with a threat of rain. In five minutes I saw most of what you need to know to understand why downtown Minneapolis always seems to struggle.

I passed eight people on 7th Street from Hennepin to Nicollet. The first group was three African-American men and one African-American woman. They appeared to be drunk or high, and one had a pit bull on a leash. They were laughing and swearing at one another. The dog, unmuzzled, was straining against the leash.

Then came two young white men, one of whom looked homeless. He was addled, and his companion glowered at me from under his hooded sweatshirt.

Finally I passed two white females, unfamiliar with downtown, looking for “2nd,” but not sure whether it was Street or Avenue. They looked liked they wished they were somewhere else.

The rest of Minneapolis, this busy lunch hour, was in the skyway. Rain, snow, or temperatures under sixty degrees reduce street-level pedestrian traffic to nil, while the skyways are so crowded there are jam-ups. We’ve destroyed downtown pedestrian culture and left our streets to a combination of the sad, the despicable, and the frightened. You make streets safe is by flooding them with activity. The city fathers who encouraged the skyways put downtown perpetually behind the eight-ball.

The other piece of the urban vibrancy puzzle is valuing the rights of the overtly menacing (distinguished from lawbreaking) below that of people who want to feel safe. I don’t buy the idea that this is merely about suburbanites panicking at the sight of black people and beggars. And I don’t buy the idea that appearing menacing is a cultural attribute of the hip-hop generation.

In context, those rushing through downtown with their heads down have it easy. They don’t have to live in urban neighborhoods that are zones of terror, grow up in homes with addicts for parents, or feel unsafe every minute of every day. You or I can stay in the skyways.

I listened to Midday on MPR last week; author Malcolm Gladwell seemed to imply that curing the cancer in urban black culture (inconceivable rates of addiction, criminality, and incarceration) is within the ken of the white majority through a reforming the justice system. Listen to it online and tell me if you’re convinced. To me, it’s an earnest idea that’s rooted in a liberal fantasy, sort of like the war on drugs.

Perhaps the only achievable solution for downtown is closing the skyways. Let’s try it for just a month. (I know, how will D. Brian’s survive?)

Or perhaps we’ll end up like downtown Cleveland. Gladwell says we are at the tipping point.

Out of the Crib, Into a Cruel World

My wife and I have some close and wise friends whose perspective on parenting is that you overprotect them at every possible turn and shield them from as much of the world as you can for as long as you can because what is out there is sick and crazy and malevolent.

Amy and I are not really built for that type of parenting, and our two kids’ personalities are ill-suited to that kind of insularity. They are fascinated by the outside world, crave experiences beyond their years, and exude no little amount of confidence. Usually, I am proud of those qualities. This week, they make me nervous.

I generally don’t follow crime news. My general take is crime is random, devoid of broader meaning, and following it delivers all pain with no gain. Still, the other night, unable to fall asleep, I violated my policy and read a crime story in the Metro section of the paper.

It detailed the conviction of a Blaine woman for abetting her boyfriend’s murder of his ten-year-old daughter. He fatally scalded her in a hot bathtub as punishment for putting a corn chip in her underwear, which she had started doing subsequent to sexual abuse by her mother’s boyfriend.

I was staggered by the level of casual depravity at work in the torture of this child. It’s the tried-and-true story—sick guy abuses his kid, weak-willed woman looks the other way.

Jordan Gonsioroski apparently had no one looking out for her. The women in her life sold her out for the worthless men they depended on. I’d like to throw her mother in jail for failing her so badly. I’d also like to stop her from ever reproducing again. We will put people to death in this society, we will lock them away forever, but we will not declare you unfit to parent and then make it impossible for you to do so. I know, the civil liberties implications are a nightmare. What’s your solution?

Most abusers were abused themselves and go on to repeat what they know. I spent weeks back in 1994 observing a juvenile-sexual-offenders program at the Hennepin County Home School for an article I was writing. The program was a valiant effort to turn around teenage boys who were showing tendencies, before they became monsters like Jason Gonsioroski. They were sympathetic kids from deeply troubled families at all strata of society. I wonder if the program still exists, and how many kids it's saved.

Jordan Gonsioroski’s death ended her suffering. But we need to find other, more hopeful ways to break the cycle of abuse. Until that day comes, if you suspect a child needs help, please have the courage to tell someone.

This weekend we will disassemble my daughter’s crib and put together her bed. It is a symbolic passage from baby to child, and a manifestation of independence. My little one is headstrong, willful, and completely drunk on assertiveness.

Perhaps the flipside of overprotection is that my daughter will be comfortable enough in the world and in her power that she would never be attracted to the type of person who would abuse a child. I hope for my daughter the confidence and courage to speak up, and then to walk.