by Samuel James

Southerners

I’m not going to talk about race in this month’s column.

Instead, I’d like to tell you about how a few years back I was teaching a week-long guitar workshop in Port Townsend, WA. I’d never done anything like that before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew I’d be in a remote area, far from home with about a hundred other people who I didn’t know. I was going to summer camp.

It turned out to be a complete camp experience. I embarrassed myself in front of strangers, then we became great friends and, naturally, all sang songs together around a campfire. Of course, no summer camp experience is complete without learning a valuable lesson, which I did.

It was about halfway through the week and I had just finished teaching my first class of the day. It was a little chilly that morning, so I was wearing my buffalo-plaid hoodie. One of my students, let’s call him Fred, thought that particular hoodie looked strange and asked me why I had it. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I laughed it off, saying something about being comfortable and representing my home state of Maine. Then Fred said, “I live in Maine!”

It turned out Fred was on a road trip back and forth across the country. He had some time to kill, saw an ad for this guitar camp and, on a whim, ended up in my class. It was pretty weird.

Then he asked me what part of Maine I was from. When I told him Portland, he said, “Oh. That’s not the real Maine. You’re from the south. That’s where they want to take our guns away.”

Fred wasn’t really a joking sort, so I was pretty surprised by his sudden turn to absurdist hilarity. The shock of such a turn made the joke even funnier, so I laughed and laughed and laughed! I laughed so hard there wasn’t a person around who didn’t expect me to soil myself. I laughed like I was seven years old, being tickled by my grandmama while Richard Pryor told me a joke as I watched a lawyer with a grocery bag full of rubber chickens slip on banana-peel-covered ice in front of god and his own true love.

But, the thing was, Fred wasn’t joking. Not even a little. He meant what he said. Every single word. To him, southern Maine was “the south,” a place that for many reasons is inauthentic in its Maine-ness. And one of those reasons is that the southerners have a deep desire to disarm the rest of the state.

Since then, I’ve heard a lot of Mainers simplify gun arguments around this imaginary cold war, and they all frustrate me as much as Fred did. I mean, Fred definitely couldn’t cite southern-proposed statewide disarmament legislation to back up his beliefs, and neither can anyone else, for that matter, but that didn’t really seem to be the point for him. For Fred, the entire issue of guns seemed to be a matter of principle, and that’s a problem that is all over the goddamn place here.

A few weeks ago there was a televised, local panel discussion on school shootings. During the discussion, a school resource officer (SRO) noted that the vast majority of school shootings are done by children with their parents’ guns. Somehow, this did not keep the rest of the panel from discussing — at length — age requirements for firearm purchases.

Obviously, at that point, their point was moot, but since the SRO was the only person on that panel for whom the issue was a reality, he was the only one bound to it. As a police officer in charge of school safety, he absolutely has to deal with the issue of school shootings.

For that police officer, gun violence is real. It’s purely a matter of principle to those on the panel who couldn’t wait to spit out the NRA nonsense they heard on Fox News. Just like it was a matter of principle to Cold War Fred. But that’s not the case for the millions of children who participated in the March For Our Lives protests around the country. School shootings are a reality to them.

Let’s change that.

Moms Demand Action has been fighting for change on the state level, and they’ve been winning. Go to momsdemandaction.org and see how you can help.

Samuel James is an internationally renowned bluesman and storyteller, as well as a locally known filmmaker. He can be reached at racismsportland@gmail.com.