We're winning

Tacitus emails to tell me about his son, grown to Honorable Manhood:

Thought you might be interested to learn that my now 18 yo celebrated the day by going out to purchase a 12 g Mossberg shotgun.  This comes as a notable surprise to his parents, but we are ok with it.  Squirrel an' possum for many Thanksgivings to come....

I remember my kids as kids - long time readers are rolling their eyes at my repeated sentimentality along these lines.  But Kalil Gibran said it truly, and well:

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

I see that in my sons - #1 Son now 19, and #2 Son turning 16 this month.  They have their own thoughts, many of which are as unexpected to me as Tacitus' son's thoughts on shotguns were to him.

But I myself recall the time not so very long ago where I found myself suddenly free, having moved from the People's Republic of Massachusetts to the United States of America.  I remember my own first exercising of that same right that Tacitus' son has just done:

But the meaning goes beyond the (quite modest) firepower of the rifle.  It's a statement of freedom, the mark of a citizen, not a subject.   We could use more citizens, not more subjects.

This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. ...

This is my rifle.  There are none like it, because it marks the transition from a subject to a free man.

No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.

- James Burgh

Tacitus' son has become a citizen, both in law and in spirit.  Welcome, citizen.  The Republic is in good hands with a generation such as that.

Tacitus, as befits a scholar of the Ancient World, writes of the many Roman gods that would be invoked at different stages of a child's development.  It's funny and touching at the same time, with the wisdom of the ages channeled through the eyes of a parent.  I catch a glimpse of how his son might have learned the manly virtues that stood the Romans in such good stead.  The ones that he just exercised, not as a child, but as a Citizen.

Well done to the young man, and to Tacitus.  Reading his post, I think again on Gibran, and Tacitus and his son, and me and my sons.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Nice bending, Tacitus.  Your arrow flies swift, and true.