MUST…BLOCK…OUT…BS…WITH…SOMETHING…GOOD

Murderous religious fanatics who identify with a self-declared caliphate that subsequently cheers and embraces them, slaughter 14 innocent people and pump bullets into another 21 or 22 before being righteously killed by police.  The leader of the Free World declares that it might be premature to call it a fanatic terrorist problem and declares it instead to be a gun control  “gun safety” issue requiring prohibitionist laws that only law-abiding American citizens will obey.  A newspaper once considered the august standard for impartial news in our country takes the unprecedented (in most of its readers’ lifetimes) step of printing an editorial on its front page. The editorial demands that law abiding citizens turn over their guns to the government, presumably without compensation, for the good of the order.

Aauugghh!  Bullshit overload!!

Time for something positive, the sort of thing that defensive firearms are intended to keep good people alive to enjoy. Like, oh, Christmas. 

I’m putting a Christmas tree up this weekend. One of the gifts I’d have liked to see under it for me, if I hadn’t just read it already, would be our own Jackie Clay’s third novel in her Jess Hazzard series, “Winter of the Wolves.”  It’s a particularly bad season in the northern American heartland where it’s set in a time long ago, and Jackie’s evocative prose makes  you feel as if you’re there in the howling blizzard, and helping the mare foal, and going through the myriad other torments of self-sufficient life. I haven’t actually felt writer-created hypothermia in fiction like this since I was a little kid reading John Greenleaf Whitter’s poem “Snow-Bound” inside a warm house with mom and dad and sister while looking out the window as we actually became snowbound during a northern New England blizzard.

It’s not surprising. Jackie lives where she writes about, in much the same homesteading, horse-riding, self-sustaining rural lifestyle, and is living proof that “write what you know” is a wise mantra for those who live by the pen. She also understands human nature, and this volume’s theme of redemption and judging people by what they do, not who they are or what they proclaim themselves to be, is likewise well sustained. Order in time for Christmas from Amazon.

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