The Rifleman  

“Outtasight, outta mind!”

Heard that before?

Things we don’t see, hear, smell, or touch in front of us, are easily dismissed as not relevant, not worth thinking about, not worth remembering, even. Thereby, unimportant. (Even as those more thoughtful among us understand, “it’s not about us…”)

They certainly don’t have the impact on us which things which are happening NOW, in front of us, do.

And in the truth of those statements lies a lot of otherwise-avoidable human pain and suffering.

We should never forget - but we will - and we do, everyday - that morality is permanent.

Facts are permanent, as well.

So a murder a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, is morally the same as a murder today.

The murder is a fact, so it always exists, even if we forget it.

The murder is a moral crime, and the immorality of it always exists, even if we forget it.

Sure, if you’re there, when the murder takes place, and blood flies, and the death rattle echoes in your ears, you sure are shocked by it.

Far better and easier to read about a murder far away from you in time (a hundred years) or space (a thousand miles).

Because then, it’s easily read about - and forgot.

Yet, the facts and the morality are the same.

The same as if it took place right there, in front of you.

Not the same in the impact on you, ’cause of that evolutionary wiring which makes things close in time and space to us the things we look out for.

So despite the PC-weeping every year at the atom bombing of Japan three generations ago, the dastardliness of the Dec 7, 1941 attack on unprepared US sailors, soldiers and airmen at Pearl Harbor stinks morally now just as much as it did then.

Even if most Americans don’t think so. (Can you dispute the notion “a people gets the government it deserves?” [See if you can figure out why I added that seemingly off-topic comment...])

Likewise, the courage, bravery, commitment and anger shown by Americans (or soon-to-be) along a country lane between Concord and Boston back on April 19th, 1775 is just as bright a beacon for us today as it was for the founding generation.

It’s up to us to see it, is all.

We can shut our eyes tight enough not to.

The Jews say “Never forget!” about the Holocaust.

They are correct.

In fact, none of us should ever forget the Holocaust.

And it makes no difference if the Holocaust happened 50 years ago, 500 years ago, or 50 days ago.

It should never be forgot. Never outta sight, never outta mind.

About April 19th, 1775, we should also say, “Never forget!”

Because it’s the part of your heritage you should never forget.

The pain, the suffering, the courage, the blood shed, the lives lost, the houses burned - those are all moral facts which should never be forgot.

Maybe they represent a debt few of us will ever be able to pay off.

But we can try. Appleseed, you can argue, is a “debt-payment plan”.

There are other ways to pay the debt.

Recently, Appleseed instructors were tasked to give rifle marksmanship training to a unit prior to deployment overseas into a combat role. (The Army has asked us not to give the unit’s designation, destination - or even marksmanship scores!)

Over a lengthy period, at an unnamed Army post, our instructors taught two platoons (approx 80 men) a day basic Appleseed.

Each man therefore received the first day’s training of the typical two-day weekend Appleseed…

While I can’t mention specific marksmanship scores, I can say those men’s rifle skills increased, according to their officers after comparing prior scores to this (Appleseed) training, between 250% - and 300%!

Not bad, for a one-day training event, where the qualification course was fired at the end of a long, tiring day of shooting hundreds of rounds, in full military gear.

As we like to say, “Appleseed works. Every time it’s tried.”

You can view this action as something Good.

Teaching our troops the skills they need to come back alive. Improving those skills way over 100%.

And our instructors did it voluntarily, for a length of time equal to several Appleseeds.

Some of those men and women may come back because of the training they received.

Some of them who use their new marksmanship skills will now live to see their grandkids, and hopefully, tell them about Appleseed - and maybe make sure they get to one.

We don’t know, and prob won’t know.

But what we (Appleseed) did was Good, on the moral scale.

The fact of it, exists. The morality of it, exists. And will exist, for all time.

Our instructors ranged in age from young enough to be on active duty (a few were on active duty!) to those past retirement age.

One was the famous Reluctant Housewife and Grandmother who was drug by her husband to an Appleseed, protesting all the way - and wound up as an RWVA Appleseed Instructor, teaching boys bound for overseas how to make their enemies “pay the price.”

Grandmothers, able to outshoot trained military personnel? Yep. Grandmothers, teaching that skill to young men and women of the armed forces? Yep.

Did our Grandmother, filled with dread whilst en route to that first Appleseed, forsee she’d soon be making a concrete contribution to the nation’s security? Did she foresee that she’d be training our men and women in skills they’d soon be putting to use on a real battlefield?

I daresay she didn’t.

It’s a typical Appleseed story.

Life, it seems, does not have to be a rut.

Life can be unusual, interesting, challenging, fulfilling - if you Appleseed.

And so a lowly housewife, a civilian, a grandmother, becomes an instrument by which our enemies can count up their pain and loss…

Amazing!

At least one troop comment overheard was “I have a new-found appreciation for Americans in this country” - because some volunteer civilians gave up their time and traveled hundreds of miles, some of them thousands, to help out with this training.

Outtasight!

Come, join in this rapidly-expanding program.

Find out why it’s expanding so rapidly. Why so many of your fellow Americans are electing to become part of it.

It’s easy. Simply go to www.rwva.org, click on the “Appleseed” button in the top left, and click on “schedule” to find one near you (you may have to drive an hour or two, because even with a goal of 800 Appleseeds in 2010, there’ll be places you’ll have to drive several hours - but beats early in the program, when some people drove days…).

Then read “what to bring” and “how to prepare” without fail - people continually bemoan the fact they neglected to “do their homework” before coming to an Appleseed.

Next, click on the ‘register’ button next to the AS you want to sign up for. Women and kids 20 and under are free, as are military - active, reserve, and guard.

Next, write out a list of all your friends, family/relatives, neighbors, co-workers - everyone you know - and talk about the program with them. Your goal is to get one or more to come with you, so you can share the experience (and so, when you get home, you’re not the “only rifleman on the block” ).

You’ll meet rejection, so don’t get discouraged. Few want to get out of the deck chairs to bail out the sinking ship.

Instead, be smart. Sly, even.

Your neighbor an old guy, not too active? Does he have grandkids? They shoot free! (Duh!)

Don’t forget your spouse, your neighbor’s spouse - everyone’s spouse.

Some of the most effective people in this program are women (and some of us in the program despair if the men of this country will ever wake up - and put our faith in the women as our last, best hope… ). [The 'face' is not about the "last, best hope" being "women", but about the seeming worthlessness of lazy, ignorant-and-determined-to-stay-that-way men, even in face of what is rapidly becoming an obvious fact - that the USS America is in sinking condition.]

What you will be doing in all this is something important: “getting the word out” about Appleseed.

We NEED this program to succeed. YOU need it to succeed.

When there’s a program geared to “saving a country”, WE ALL need it to succeed.

Nice thing is, we can do it.

If we want to…

Outtasight!

[WARNING: Unless you are an Appleseed volunteer, some of this may be incomprehensible to you.]

Surely, you know already, being an Appleseed volunteer is about doing things.

About working.

Not the typical internet “who can be the biggest talker” or “who can win the post count contest.”

“Getting the job done, safetly and effectively” should be a mantra for all Appleseed volunteers.

Becoming an instructor is only the first step.

Sure, being an instructor is a Big Deal.

For starters, it means you know how to shoot a rifle - since you are rifleman-qualified.

500 yards, which would be nearly incomprehensible for most shooters and rifle owners, and absolutely miraculous to non-gunowners, is for you the mere routine - even if it will always remain challenging. (Why? Because firing the shot is the least of the three challenges facing a rifleman. But you know the other two, right?)

But that’s for starters.

Under the “learn to shoot today; teach to shoot tomorrow” Appleseed imperative, you are doing the most important task in this country today: waking up your fellow Americans into becoming what Americans should be about.

But, being an instructor is not a full time job.

In fact, it takes up, for most instructors, no more than one weekend a month.

And there’s 27 other days in that month.

And a nation to save.

Uh-oh, what do we do with all that free time?

Most of us volunteers will be so concerned about our Mission we will want to put in some hours during those 27 other days, doing the things we need to do to handle the rapid expansion of our program and see that we are being effective as we can in attaining our Mission.

Now, I wish I could say being an Appleseed volunteer was all wine and roses.

But, in truth, it is not.

There are aggravations, there are frictions, there are many things to make you unhappy - discouragements being a major one.

Trying to ‘get the word out’ is both discouraging and frustrating, as you find the vast majority of your fellow Americans are not into being woken up - in fact, are resistant to waking up. They simply don’t want to.

You find you quickly have to ratchet your expectations down, not a notch, but a couple of orders of magnitude.

From getting all or most in your family to an AS, you find you’re lucky to get one - and that, after ‘working’ on him or her for a while.

From imagining a neighborhood caravan headed for the next AS, courtesy of your efforts, you quickly lower your hopes to getting one or two to come - and like as not, they won’t be coming to the same AS!

Co-workers? Gotta be careful and low-key - can’t be TOO persistent - or your reputation will turn to that of a “kook” or “fanatical”. Slow and easy, steady as she goes, is the answer.

And you’ll learn to be sly about it. You’ll learn a direct approach may not be as good as an indirect approach. So you don’t ask a guy to come directly. You may first find out if he has kids and grandkids, and stress the educational (in terms of firearms safety and the history which Appleseed teaches) aspect of getting them to come - and getting him to come, in the process.

Sometimes, to get into the yard, you don’t go thru the front gate, as it’s easier to go around back, and climb over the fence…

Indeed, from visualizing dozens of friends, neighbors, co-workers, family and relatives coming to an Appleseed from your efforts, you may have to rachet down to getting ONE PERSON A YEAR into Appleseed. Yes, it’s that bad in modern America!

But do not discourage over that: ONE a year means every year you double this program, and if every person you get into AS will also recruit “one a year”, this program will expand with phenomenal speed.

In addition, as an AS volunteer, in the face of these discouragements, you are fortunate to have certain Appleseed precepts to fall back on, and to strengthen you in your tasks.

One is “Persist!” But you learned that, on the road to becoming a Rifleman.

It’s possible, at your first Appleseed, you heard this:

“I want to congratulate you on your decision to learn to shoot rifle.

“But I also want you to understand that you’ve grabbed something of a tarbaby.

“That is, something you can’t let go of.

“In other words, once you start on the journey to becoming a rifleman, once you take that first step, you can’t quit. You have to continue - thru the aggravation, the pain, the discouragement - everything!

“Because if you stop, if you quit, what does that say about you?

“That you are a quitter - right?

“Now, where in the definition of ‘American’ do you find the word, ‘quitter’?

Ouch! That’s a tough approach to take, even if the same speaker will take some of the sting out by telling you that, if you persist until you become a Rifleman, you’ll later come to realize that the process which seems so daunting at present will not only seem not so daunting in retrospect, but actually - fun!!!

Another set-in-stone saying you’ll be able to rely on is ‘Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome’ - the motto of the RWVA Engineers, whose mission is to travel to strange places and put on a good AS, despite any and all obstacles, whether weather-related or range-related.

You’ll find some of the legends relating to that ethos echoing down thru the program. Evansville in ‘06, where because of threatening weather, the night before the AS the RWVA Engineers put up 90 feet of firing line shelter out of metal pipes and tarps.

Or Phoenix in ‘07, where the wind was exploding target frames and hurling the bits at the shooters on the firing lines - where a 6″ X 6″ 2-foot long piece of wood was seen rolling down the concrete firing line - courtesy of that same wind. All other events on the range were cancelled; the public part of the range was closed - but we secured permission to cut the frames down, remount them with bracing ropes, and continue the AS.

“Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome!”

Now, why do you do all this?

Why go thru all the pain, all the aggravation, all the discouragement?

Because there’s a Mission involved.

Something as simple as survival.

For some of us, it’s personal survival.

For most of us, it’s more likely aimed at the survival of our kids and grandkids.

For many of us, it’s a feeling we should never let this country drift from its founding principles which relate to liberty and equality.

For more of us, it’s a steel determination to pay back some of the debt we owe the founders by not letting their sacrifices end up in vain.

The Mission.

It comes first.

It should be more important than any of us.

More important than temporary discouragements, temporary aggravations, temporary pain.

In fact, none of us faces the level of suffering the founders voluntarily undertook in order to create what all of us should see as the most valuable things in our lives - not flat-screen TVs, not music, not the greenest yard in the neighborhood, or the newest car - but liberty and equality before the law, pure and simple.

For some of us in Appleseed, when the going gets tough, comparing what we face today to what they faced puts a calming perspective on us before we start to weep and wail over the frustration, etc.

The historic fact about Americans, we soon come to conclude, is that they don’t weep and wail - they get things done. They persist.

When enemy planes sink our fleet at Pearl Harbor, we not only build a new and mightier fleet, we build a weapon which will make the enemy surrender, unconditionally.

You don’t mess with Americans.

At least, you didn’t used to.

Now, with our politicians adopting the failed policies of Neville Chamberlain, the likelihood of “messing with Americans” is prob increased a bit.

But that’s talking about politics, which in Appleseed is like complaining about the weather - not much you can do about it - it may be good today, but will be bad tomorrow - like election outcomes.

Appleseed, you soon come to learn, is about changing the climate. We do that by waking up the American people to their history and heritage, so they understand what they need to understand, so they once again have standards to serve as anchors, and prevent drift away from our founding principles.

It’s a big Mission.

One that prob has never been undertaken, before, in this country.

Not with such a precise focus on the founders, and the founding principles.

Not stripped of conspiracy theories (there are none, in Appleseed - what you see, is what you get - a simple education of Americans to the first principles behind the founding of their country).

Yet we can do it.

We don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, to do it.

Not as Americans, we don’t.

And if enough of decide we want to do, it shall be done.

If enough of us continue - persist! - despite the obstacles of apathy, laziness, and ignorance which lie before us, each a mountain piled up by preceding generations - we can do it.

Being an Appleseed volunteer is not easy.

It flies in the face of what it is, to be, in 21st-century America.

Because it takes intelligence, to realize the importance of the Mission. Intelligence, in fact, to even be able to see and understand the necessity of the Mission.

And it takes commitment. The determination to persist thru both thick and thin. To stay the course.

To understand the Mission is more important than our personal ego, or our personal comfort.

Intelligence? Commitment?

They’re becoming increasingly rare birds in modern America.

In fact, they are one aspect of the need for Appleseed, and the Mission.

Ignorant people who put themselves and their comfort before everything else are doomed not to last long on this planet. Too many thin and hungry humans out there…

We have a saying in Appleseed, one instructors hear very early in their training: Check your ego at the door!

Sure, everyone nods - but us AS veterans know nodding is not the same as “checking”.

People have to learn the hard way what “checking your ego at the door” means. Some don’t make the cut, prefering to leave the program.

Those who make the grade are the better for it (in fact, us AS vets will tell you right up front: AS is a program about many things - and one of the important ones is that it’s about self-improvement - about making you a better, more effective, more mature person).

Go thru the Appleseed smelter, and you emerge, on the other side, solid steel. Something much better than when you went in, as pot-metal.

Appleseed is clearly not for everyone in America.

Just as the founders believed, that people back in 1775 were not unanimously for liberty - in fact, according to Sam Adams, not even a majority was for liberty! - modern 21st-century Americans, many of them, are prob never going to wake up to AS and its message.

But we don’t have to have every American, shameful as it seems, to sign on to our country’s foundational principles.

We don’t even need a majority.

We need a strong, dedicated, awake, steely-eyed, committed, liberty-loving, founder-appreciating energetic minority which will send the message that what the founders fought so hard for will never, as in NEVER, be allowed to die in this country.

That’s all it takes.

That, and you coming to an Appleseed, and seeing if this program is for you.

While you’re at it, see if you can bring a friend, relative, co-worker, neighbor…

See if you can bring more than one…

(Pssst! I haven’t mentioned, have I, that participation in Appleseed - in saving a country deserving of salvation - is deeply satisfying in and of itself. But you have to persist, thru all the BS, all the discouragement - freedom ain’t free!