Any opinion columnist, or letter writer, whose words appear in public is aware that there could be repercussions either laudatory in nature or quite the opposite with slings and arrows; such responses are met and dealt with either by response or with silence. A recent occurrence was direct result of a column I offered up regarding gun violence toward American students in recent history, and I am going to address the issue because I think it reveals something of current society.
Sometime in the past 10 days or so I was informed by the Rustler office there was mail awaiting me; this was a new thing as I have never had anything delivered to the Rustler office since beginning the column more than two years ago. So, I went in and Office Lady Julie handed me three magazines, the May and June issues of Firearms News and the June issue of Gun Digest. That was a surprise as I explained to Julie not only had I never subscribed to a gun magazine. I had never even read one; so, who paid for these subscriptions and why?
The answer to the question of who was behind the act I assumed could be found by contacting the publishers, and in that I was only half correct. The company handling subscription sales for Gun Digest informed me the account had been paid for by check but because the company that originally handled those accounts had gone under, the new company had no records. I looked up the original company, out of Palm Coast, Fla., and found they were defunct, so that path was closed.
I next got into email communication with Firearms News and they were able to tell me the party responsible for sending gun magazines in my name to my boss’s address: Red, White and Blue July 2022 was the name given. I looked it up and found that it is an organization, nationwide apparently, which concerns itself with veterans lives through sponsored physical events and diet and health information. All in all, sounds like a good deal, so why they chose to single me out is a mystery to me, but it does broach a subject we must face in society, that of online trolling and responding to what is found in the troll.
You may ask why would I care about something as harmless as a couple gun magazines; let me try to answer that and hopefully not sound like an excitable alarmist in the telling. How many have seen a media report, any media, where when after an upsetting incident a resident, or public official, says something along these lines: “You hear of things like this happening elsewhere, but you never think it is going to happen here.” While it may be advisable to never say never, I still want to say I will never utter those words.
Life’s experiences tell me “it” could always happen here, no matter what it is. This time it was a couple of magazines sent from a publisher directly to who they believed requested a subscription caused no big stir in the Rustler office; but what about the next thing or things sent? While I realize that from magazines to nefarious packages is a big jump, it is a jump I’m willing to make. So, let me see if I can’t lessen the impulse of someone to send me anything else to the wrong address by letting the local and online world know my mailing address is 410 Seventh St., King City, CA 93930. There, that is done.
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In 1905 in the small village of Anatevka in Ukraine, the people scratched out a living as they had for decades all the while looking to God to protect them from the Russian Tsar whose pogroms throughout the country were forcing Jews out of their homes and villages to exile in strange lands. It is in this small village in this remote corner of the world where renown Russian writer Sholom Aleichem tells us of the life of Tevya the Dairyman and his wife Golda, their seven daughters and the Yiddish people of Anatevka.
Tevya is a man confronted by upset and unrest in his home as his daughters seek to shed themselves of archaic traditions and in his homeland as the tsarists seek to shed themselves of the Jews. How this humble man and his family and friends handle this turmoil in their lives is sometimes humorous and sometimes heartbreaking but always satisfying. The stories of Tevya were made into the stage play “Tevya and his Daughters,” which was in turn made into the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Now, my opinion of musicals is that when written as a musical with story added to support the songs and choreography they are fine, but when musical numbers are added to an already established stage play then something must be sacrificed. If you have a two-hour show and want to keep it two hours as a musical, then story will be sacrificed to make room for lyrics and choreography. Personal opinion, surely, but if you compare Dicken’s “Oliver Twist” to “Oliver” or Cervantes’ “Don Quixote de la Mancha” to “Man of La Mancha,” you clearly see watered down storylines.
This happened when the stage play of Aleichem’s work was written, and then when it was made into a stage musical and then again when it was made into a movie musical; in each case changes were made, story parts were either added or deleted and so on until it is a manageable length for audiences. Nonetheless, “Fiddler on the Roof” is a wonderfully warmhearted show I highly recommend, and it is coming to the Stanton next spring. If you want to be part of this experience, then I suggest you do a little research on Tevya and get in touch with Sol Treasures for audition and performance information.
Take care. Peace.
