Over the years, I’m sure you’ve read Crime and Punishment and considered all the social issues related to crime and poverty. Today, as our society grapples with issues related to gun violence and our Bill of Rights, there is talk of an attempt to ban certain weapons from certain types of people. In our nation we also have other nations, nations within nations, namely the American Indians. Interestingly, sometimes all of these problems come together and make things even more complicated.
Okay, so how about an outdoor reading for you? Maybe it’ll help if I give you a little reading homework today? You see, there was a very good story titled; “Do you want me to shoot you?” by Raymond Abbott in Journal of Creative Fiction, number 9, 1998, edited by Lee Gurtkind, ISSN: 1070-0714.
This story is about two members of the clergy who had been shot, they were working with local American Indians on the reservation. The Indians were quite upset about the way they were being treated and the inequality of the courts and laws when there was fighting between whites and Indians. Two young men shot at members of the clergy, one had died. One had survived after being shot in the buttocks by the young Native American assailant with the gun as he was walking out the door after fatally wounding the other clergy member.
The survivor tells the story, and there is both a first-person narration and a second-person narrator involved with those first-person quotes, as the clergy member tells the story without emotion and with full understanding of earlier pent-up anger. , hostility and injustice of the courts and these problems of poverty on the reservation. The story takes place in Rapid City, Iowa on the Pine Ridge Reservation and is actually a bit of historical fiction.
This story really makes you think about right and wrong and how punishment is administered and questions whether prison is relevant when the shooter and his friend must spend the rest of their lives in an unfair situation treated like second class citizens. You don’t have to be a bleeding-heart leftist thinker to understand or see the situation or side with either side of the equation of equality or equal justice under the law, or what’s just and right or what it is not. Wise, emotionless, and cool-headed, Father Dillon breaks it all down into layman’s terms and leaves it up to you, the reader, to decide.
This tale is excellent and makes you think, in fact, that’s probably its intention and author Raymond Abbott definitely manages to put you front and center as if you were there to see the realities that confront us all. I hope you enjoy. Good job Raymond Abbott, excellent writing.