Dangerous Days and Gung-ho Guns

Posted 30 April 2023. By Pasckie Pascua

NEW York Times: “Shooting of Teen Who Rang Doorbell at Wrong House Unsettles Kansas City.” Residents and friends of the victim were searching for answers as the 84-year-old homeowner surrendered to the authorities on two felony charges. / “New Details Emerge in Deadly Upstate Shooting of Woman in Wrong Driveway.” The man who fired on three vehicles that mistakenly drove up his driveway, killing a young woman, had a reputation as a sour character who did not like visitors.

SCARY although I am not frightened sort of. Extra caution is imperative though. We may know our neighbors but we don’t really know. You know what I mean? When I was new in Asheville, maybe year 2000, I experienced a similar horror. As you can deduce (!) I am still here stayin’ alive but I was also shot at on a driveway of somebody else’s house in a common community. 

       Me and my friend Jenni fell of a ditch, I mean the car. I am not sure if it was already cellphone days but I reckon, not yet. So I walked to the nearest house, intending to ask for help or probably use their phone to call the house (our house). Two three steps to the property, a shotgun went boom! Though I was so stunned to realize it was a firearm that was aimed at me. It was also dark. No street light porch, whatsoever.

       Jenni screamed so I ran. One more shot, I could have been hit. Thank God/dess, no second shot. The owner of the house, didn’t even know if it was she or he or they or nonbinary, simply strode back in like heck it was a damn possum! LOL! 

ON a parallel subject, let me share thoughts that I previously typed up as comment to a Facebook post. 

       

I AM a relative foreigner in America. I covered several coup d’etats in Asia as well as countryside war in the Philippines. I also survived military rule or Martial Law, 1970s-1980s. I started as a police reporter when I was 14. Etc. I saw blood death destruction as an active journalist, community organizer, and Leftist activist. 

       In those days we somehow knew or had ideas where the bomb would blow up stuff or when bullets flew. And So I slept good and enjoyed fiestas and rowdy crowds and basketball in the plaza. Asia is a crowded world, you see. But I wasn't uneasy in public places despite cops in civvies tailing us because we reported stuff or we supported activists. I even knew those cops, regardless they were on civvies as disguise. 

       But in the U.S.  it is so different. Or it evolved this way. Morbid unease. We don't know where and when the AR 15 will mow people down and who these people are. The shooters aren't war combatants or hitmen or gangland soldiers. They can be nerdy kids, store owner who smiles at neighbors,  or a quiet dude with no parking tix ever. 

       So from organizing park concerts and club gigs and many public gatherings here in America for two decadess, I quit. I don't want to usher people to danger. I don't even go out as much anymore. I am cool though. There are still a lot to enjoy in America. 

       Meanwhile, I don't own a gun ever. I am old. I'd rather stay in. Write memories, paint to stretch bones, do gardening, enjoy streaming TV with a dog and two cats. 

This is America. Complex, contradictory, but cool in so many ways. Enjoy blessings. Hope each morning that another mass shooting shudder doesn’t kick off the day.

DIVORCE, love and negotiations

Posted on Facebook, April 27, 2023. Pasckie Pascua.

AS of 2019, both marriage rates and divorce rates in the U.S. are decreasing, with the marriage rate dropping from 8.2 per 1,ooo people in 2000 to 6.1 and the divorce rate from 4.0 in 2000 to 2.7. Hmmm. The current divorce rate in the U.S. is 2.9 persons per 1,000 people. Overall, the rate of divorces in America is falling. However, divorces amongst people aged 50+ years is rising.

       Since I came from a galaxy so far away with no divorce (!) I find the U.S. data fascinating. Sure, the issue is complex. I viewed all these, divorce and separations, on a linear gaze years ago. But then it isn’t really that simple, right? As in single parenthood with 7 kids and unsettled divorce for 7 years etcetera aren’t so simple per law.

       I was thinking that the nasty societal divide ushered by politics and the pandemic-ushered funky inertia would somehow shudder the relationship quotient. Or maybe I am wrong. People are marrying less but divorcing less as well.

       Let’s look back per what I read on Smithsonian, an article entitled “Escape from the Gilded Cage” by April White, adapted or based on her book “The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.” 👩‍🦳💔👱‍♂️

SOME facts cited by April White on her book “The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.” Slowly over the decades, divorce laws in the United States followed fundamental shifts. By the 1930s, one could obtain a divorce after a six-week stay in Nevada. In the late 1940s, South Carolina, which had, for most of its existence, no provisions for divorce, changed its constitution to allow unhappy spouses to go their separate ways.

       It took until the 1960s for New York to expand its grounds for divorce beyond adultery. By then, New Yorkers had figured out other creative ways around the law. Some went to Mexican states where a divorce could be obtained in just one day. I thought New York spearheaded this area of legal splits. I am wrong.

       But indeed New York took the thingy to a more commercial level. There was even a cottage industry of actresses willing to play the role of the other woman for couples who wanted a divorce on the grounds of adultery without actually committing it.

       In late 1990s, I worked in a Queens law office. There, I realized “marriage for convenience” or pay was a lucrative entrepreneurial venture. Marry a citizen for a fee, then divorce her/him later for more fee. Business. 👩‍🦳💔👱‍♂️

INFLUENTIAL, famous people got into it since they needed divorce or they were embroiled in those marital shudders. In 1966, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller—whose wife, Mary, had divorced him in 1962 after six weeks in Reno—signed into law a bill recognizing five grounds for divorce in New York, including cruelty and abandonment.

       Then, in 1969, California governor Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced himself, signed the first no-fault divorce law, allowing spouses to separate without a finding of guilt. By 1977, all but three states had such an option.

       But of course South Dakota led this “revolution” in America. In asking for their own freedom, the “divorce colonists” in Sioux Falls were among the first rebels. Collectively, they had, quite unintentionally, set the country down a winding path toward the acceptance and accessibility of divorce.

      “They had rising ideals and a new vision for marriage, and for each of them, divorce was a declaration of independence,” writes April White in her book “The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.” 👩‍🦳💔👱‍♂️