Writing

A Christmas Letter

December 15, 2019

Hi everyone. If you’re watching this because I asked you to, thank you. It means you probably know me from some movies and TV shows, but if someone forwarded this to you, and you don't know who I am, well, I’m in some movies and TV shows. So, that’s right, it’s another actor, who has something to say about something on the Internet. Shocking, I know. But don’t worry, I am not here to talk about myself or any upcoming gig I have. I’m not going to complain about politics from the comfort of my own home.

I’m also not here on behalf of any group, political or otherwise. I am not going to ask you to donate to anything, or to sign a petition. I have no academic credentials to support what I am about to speak about. For the purpose of this video, I am just another person floating through space with the rest of you on this rock.

And before I get into what the video is, please know I’m aware that I am only an entertainer. In the grand scheme of things, a court jester. And if I were you I’d be suspect of my intentions as well.

Lastly, I do not make policies around what I’m about to talk about. And truthfully, I am glad I don’t have that responsibility. It’s a relief to be a clown.

I am making this to talk to you about these. This is mine. It is registered in my name in the state of California.

I assume there will be some gun owners out there who will be happy to see that I am coming out around this issue, while simultaneously some of my friends who don't support gun ownership will feel disappointed, but I want to tell you not to worry because I am going to let down both sides, because, at the end of this video I will be destroying all of my guns.

But before I explain why I am doing this, I want to tell you what this video is not. It’s not meant to cause debate around the second amendment. There are many more educated people than I am about constitutional law. This is also not about school shootings. It’s also not meant to virtue signal about what a great person I am for doing this, as it could’ve been just as easy to have them destroyed without calling attention to myself.

I just felt it was important to explain to gun owners the reasoning behind my actions, not because I look down on them or have an expectation that they do the same, but because I respect them. I respect their positions because I was once compelled to own weapons for what I assume are the same reasons they do.

I also I understand that by broadcasting this to the world, I could, and probably should, get labeled a “hypocrite.” As an actor I have played characters in movies and TV shows that glorify and sanitize violence, especially roles in which my character held a firearm. I have made a decent living doing this, and by making this video I understand that I might now limit what jobs I can take going forward.

So for the sake of clarity, and in an attempt to take up as little as your time as possible, I have distilled my initial reasons down into the three main points, and why I now consider them no longer personally valid. Again, I have no expectation for gun owners to come to the same conclusions.

The first was the protection of private property. Although this was the least important reason to me, I still used it as a rationale. I bought guns so I could protect my things from people who might want to steal them from me. But based on some things that have happened to me recently, I don’t really think that my personal belongings are all that important to me anymore. That’s not to say I can live completely free of all material items; it is just that those items aren’t worth owning a gun over.

I realized this last year when I was in Chicago with my wife, cleaning out my mother-in-law’s home after she had recently died from cancer. She and my wife were incredibly close, and as the result of some very tragic circumstances, and until her death, were the only two remaining members of their immediate family. This being the case, my wife and I ended up doing this task of breaking down her home. Maggie was a modest person who didn’t have a lot of possessions, but what she did own was of decent quality. So, by doing this labor of love, I ended up going through all of the belongings that one accumulates during the course of their life. What I ended up understanding was that the stuff that was worth the most in terms of dollars, had become the least important. This was also the childhood home of my wife. And as we were going through all of her mom’s things, I realized that the items that were the most important to her would be insignificant to anyone else: a ski pass to Steamboat Springs. A mix tape from high school. A handful of seashells. These things had meaning for her because they were imprinted with experiences that they had shared together. And in those imprints is where their memories now live.

Their mutual, deeply-felt love for each other is resurrected inside my wife now, each time she sees or holds – or even just remembers – the random junk that anyone else in the world (to include me!) would have thrown out. The eight-inch aluminum Volkswagen sign and a pair of Prada reading glasses weren’t things that anyone would steal!

And when Maggie died, there was no U-Haul that followed her to the funeral home. She took none of her things with her to wherever she was headed next. She had only borrowed them for a short time while she was here anyway. So when we arrived back to our own home in California, with my truck carrying only a few boxes of the most important items from my wife’s childhood, we both became acutely aware of all of the “junk” we had accumulated in our house, but ours was different from my wife’s mother’s: we realized that the value we had placed on what we thought was important was financial alone, and It didn’t really mean that much to us anymore because none of it could replace the people we had lost or the time that had already passed. We could never get *those things* back.

This just made me realize that the big-ticket items I possess, things that anyone would actually want to steal from my house aren’t worth shooting a human being over: a flat screen TV? a nice watch? It doesn’t make sense to me now. I don’t actually really care about these things. I don’t love them enough to want to injure or kill someone else. I’m not saying that anyone is free to just come into my house and take whatever they want, or if they did, that there shouldn’t be consequences for it. Also, if I actually shot another human being for stealing my TV? I’d have a way bigger problem on my hands- which is getting caught up in the legal system, which brings me to the next reason I bought a gun.

And that was owning a weapon to defend myself from the oppression of governments. I’m aware that I risk getting dragged into a political argument here, and I want to avoid it as much as I can, but I did believe this was a good reason to own one, and I truly understand that this can be a reason why others would choose gun ownership as well.

I also understand that one individual owning a handgun is no match for an army, but by exercising my right own one, I believed was participating in a healthy democracy, or at least so I thought. What I reasoned was my “right” to own a gun ended up being an argument I made to myself based on a very shaky premise. These days, I’m not sure it’s a right as much as it is a kind of bait-and-switch, for me at least.

Now I don't want to give you a long-winded, boring anecdote on how I arrived at this conclusion either, but a little backstory is important.

I have struggled with addiction issues most of my life. I’ve been very candid about this in the media, and the reason I am bringing this up is to give you some insight into how my brain works. It doesn’t have an “off” switch, which means that when I find something that excites me, I can’t stop doing it. When I am into something, I am REALLY into it, so much so that everything else goes out the window.

And since I’ve done away with most of my other vices, mostly to avoid prison, or death, or a divorce, I’m always looking for new ones, and a couple of years ago, it was the news.

Around Christmas of 2016 I became obsessed with the news. I would wake up every day just wanting to consume the next bit of information I could. I would read about everything. Or anything. Didn't matter what it was or who was writing it. I read it all, all sides -- even the conspiracy theories. (Those are my favorite!) It was initially exciting trying to piece together an alternate take on what was happening on the world stage, as our political climate grew more heated every day.

I would vacillate between spewing full-blown rants at my friends and family because I knew the “truth” (or what I thought was the truth at the time), to being overly quiet and afraid to say anything to anyone who was ranting about their version of what they saw as the truth while I silently judged them and believed they were the crazy ones.

This became my new drug, and very much at the expense of my family’s and close friends’ patience. They would silently nod their head and smile, as I would rattle off my diatribes. I didn’t notice their eye-rolling because I was too busy staring at my phone and yelling. Sometimes the rants were so intense that they caused irreparable damage to relationships with some of my friends.

This went on for a number of months, and by the summer of 2017, a very strange thing happened. I had somehow actually exhausted myself on the 24-hour news cycle. I had OD’d. The stories I read and saw at this point could neither cause fear nor excitement in me. This was strange at first because I wanted to get my fix of anger and terror. However, this reaction caused me to recognize an important distinction: that what I was reacting to on the screen of my phone or computer, was not accurately reflecting what I was experiencing in my day-to-day life. There was so much chaos occurring on these tiny bright rectangles, but when I’d look up from one, the sun was shining and the birds were singing. I understand bad things happen in the world, but the gap between the reality of my phone, and the reality of my actual experience in the world, was widening exponentially. It seemed to me that everything I was seeing on those screens was trying to convince me that there was a civil war on the horizon, and that the country was at a boiling point. So I did what any unemployed actor would do -- I set out to see where this chaos was happening myself.

So in July of that summer, I packed up my truck and drove across country alone (well not totally alone, my dog came with me) to see exactly where all this civil unrest was occurring. But that’s not at all what I found!

What I did find were people who were a lot like me. In the Navajo nation, I met a family of Native Americans who were kind, and at the same time, wary of me. That made sense given their history with people who look like I do, but there was no hostility or violence there, or even a bad word shared between us. In Oklahoma City I found a woman who didn’t care who was president or what their political party was. She was just frightened of having the bank take her home and didn't know how she’d repay her student loans, and that’s how she ended up taking a second job. in Akron, I found a waitress at a diner who tried to hide from me that she had been crying after she walked away from taking my order. When I pressed her on what was bothering her, she told me that her grandmother was sick and she was just trying to get through her shift so she could go to the hospital to see her before she passed away. I didn’t know what else to do, aside from give her a hug and leave her a decent tip. Somewhere near the Pennsylvania border, I found a man with terrible diabetes whose son was about to go to rehab from the opioid crisis that has devastated the rust belt in recent years. But there was no war. There was no chaos. And these were just a handful of the people I met on this trip who all shared similar experiences.

So by the time I got to the Atlantic, the ocean where I had so many great memories as a kid swimming in, I began to feel stupid and ashamed. I wanted to cry but I didn’t know for what, or for whom.

I felt stupid because the one thing that all these people had in common with one another – and with me -- is that they were all scared. Scared of being broke. Scared of the government. Scared of people that lived far away from them. The same fears I have felt. I felt stupid because I had purchased a weapon because what I read on the Internet had convinced me to be afraid of these people and whatever “side” of the government they were on, in the same way they were afraid of me. I had this nauseating feeling that we had all been horribly duped.

By making the choice to own something that was designed to take the life of another human being, the life of one of my neighbors, I had proven I couldn't be responsible for taking care of them. And so this government, the same government that had convinced me I should arm myself to protect myself from them, was more than happy to take the responsibility from me. The social contract was that if I couldn’t protect the people I lived in a community with, then they had the right to protect those same people from me. I felt stupid because I realized this same government wasn’t afraid of me owning guns, it wanted me to have them.

And I felt ashamed because I had no one to blame but myself. By my own free will I went and purchased these weapons because of what I had read and seen on the internet and television, and not because of what I had experienced. And as much as I was furious at having been tricked, wanting to hold them accountable for this decision I had made, no one forced me to into buying a gun.

I felt ashamed for having been so gullible that I started to wonder just how long this scam had been pulled, and not just on me, but on all of us. The manufacturers of this weapon are also the same manufacturers of the weapons used in every war in the 20th Century that was fought by Americans, used by people just like those whom I had met on my travels. Those manufacturers will just as soon profit from the sale of their guns to us, as they would to the government I am supposedly defending myself against.

These are the same arms companies that supplied my friend (and let’s just call him Staff Sergeant for now) with his so-called assault rifle as he invaded Baghdad in 2003 when the United States declared war on Iraq. He is a decorated war hero and fierce marine who fought for the honor of his country because he saw the twin towers fall on September 11th. But to me, he was just one of the funniest, smartest, and most charismatic dudes I have ever known. Today, he can barely hold a job in the rural hometown he grew up in, and bounces around living between his relative’s homes. The violence he saw, but moreover I believe the violence he committed against others, has left him unable to function in what we would call “the real world” and he is now just another statistic in a long line of veterans who picked up a weapon in the name of “defending our freedom” only to not be able to reintegrate into the very society he was defending, and that’s not his fault as much as it is ours. But mostly these days, I just miss my friend and the laughs we used to have.

These are the same arms companies that supplied my father with his so-called assault rifle in 1967 when he was told he was defending the United States from the communist threat of the North Vietnamese. When I was a kid, he once told me about time when he had killed a Viet Cong guerrilla fighter, and after seeing his corpse, he realized that this young man was about the same age as he, my father, was, and that he too probably had a family he missed and longed to go home to, and that he didn’t want to be at war with my father any more than my father wanted to be at war with him. The memory he spoke about, my dad couldn’t have been older than 20 at that time. These were children that were killing one another. Soon after this incident my father was shot in the leg during a firefight and sent back to the United States. He served his country dutifully and honorably, and I don’t judge him for participating in a war that he had no business being in, as he was just doing what he, as a child, thought his country needed. He was a good father to me, but the conflict he participated in, he also returned home with, and that pain he sustained in Southeast Asia still exists and is now the chasm that is between us as father and son to this day. His time spent in those jungles has haunted him for his entire life, as well as mine, as the specter of his post-traumatic stress injuries. This made my upbringing complicated, to say the least. But I can say that now, at 40 years old, being more than twice the age of my father was when he enlisted, that if I could I would go back in time; I would tell him this, that it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault that his government as well as those arms companies used his free will against him to choose going to war for them, for the expansion of profit.

So all of this is to say that at last I finally understand, that by owning a weapon, I am not protecting myself from the tyranny of the state, I am participating in it. And even if the means by which that state convinced me to buy my weapons was to appeal covertly to my lower self, to my fears and prejudices, it was always my choice to buy them. That being the case, I now know that I do get a say in how we treat one another in society, so now I no longer consent to owning a gun.

Lastly the reason I owned a weapon was also the most personal.

I am going to speak candidly about my private life. I don’t enjoy doing so. Even as a somewhat public figure, I should have a reasonable expectation that strangers will know things about my life that I didn’t tell them; however, the ones about whom I’m about to speak didn’t get a choice in what I do for a living.

I have a newborn son. My first kid. His name is Jack. He smiles at me with so much love in his heart that some days I don’t believe I actually deserve it, especially given how selfish I have been in my younger days. I have wife. Her name is Jamie. She has stood by me and seen me at my absolute lowest and still managed to accept me in the midst of my worst. I love them on a level I didn’t believe was possible when I was younger. There was a period in my life where I didn’t think I would live past the age of 30, so even being responsible for the welfare of anyone else, is a terrifying responsibility for me.

Sometimes I hear about tragedies so horrifying that I want to place them in a bunker that’s 50 miles beneath the earth so that nothing bad could ever happen to them, because if it did, I am not actually sure how I would survive.

So I have stayed up many long nights imagining worst-case scenarios involving them. Scenarios where I have to defend their lives by using this. I have imagined my hand around the grip, and I have felt my finger on the trigger. In my mind I have raised this weapon up 1000 times to point it at a would-be intruder. But here is the truth -- I couldn't pull that trigger. I could not take the life of another person. No matter what. Even in the worst of the worst-case scenarios.

Now I don’t know what this says about me. I don't know if this makes me a weak man, a coward, or simply someone whose spiritual path has led me to a place that I can no longer ignore. I just know that another human being’s life is not mine to take. I know that in my heart. With no exceptions.

So if someone were to ask me, “So what do you do if you’re ever in that situation? Do you just let this perpetrator threaten the life of your family or the things you hold most dear?”

I think my answer is this: that I hope I have the strength and courage to put myself between my family and this perpetrator. That I would be brave enough to incur the cost of their suffering with my own life. I don't know if I have the courage to do that, and I hope I do, but the real answer is I just don't know, and I pray I never have to.

But, I do know this. I know that if I did take the life of another human being, that I would never be able to recover from doing so. I assume that in the moment I would feel a rush of justice being served, but in the long run I am absolutely certain that feeling would be short-lived. I know this because while I have been the object of violence, I have also subjected others to violence, both strangers, and people I’ve loved. And while I still struggle to make sense out of why that violence was done to me, it’s the violence that I have perpetrated against others that haunts me more. It’s the shame of knowing better, and fearing I don’t deserve forgiveness for the things I've done, and maybe that I will never receive it either. But in the moment, I always felt justified in doing what I did. I always felt that those violent actions were warranted. In those moments I saw myself as the victim and would retaliate. And all at once, by picking up the mantle of victimhood and looking for someone to act that out on, even if I did believe they deserved it, I had become the evil in the world I so desperately wanted to be rid of.

But what if I hold onto this gun, just in case? Just in case the worst might happen to me or my family? I realized by doing that, then all I have done is reserved my right to be the future victim, and therefore a future perpetrator.

Because identifying as one will always lead to the other, and the only way out of this endless cycle is to not play the game. No matter what. There can be no caveats. No buts. Even in the worst situation I can imagine.

Therefore I can never take up this role again. I never get to play the role of the victim.

And while this applies to me individually, it also applies to me in the context of a larger group as well. Because when I start to feel this way, resentful and bitter and angry, I begin to attract other people who feel the same sense of victimhood. And that collective thirst for justice only leads to us as a group corroborating the shared need to exact revenge, and we will all placate one another’s bad decisions and thirst for violence as a way of letting off collective steam. But what I have just described is just a polite definition of a mob.

And the mob always looks for a scapegoat, and the mob always finds one: the town witch, the people across the tracks, the other country, the tribe unlike us, the source of all of our problems. And as a mob, they always kill it. But the scapegoat is always innocent.

I understand this seems like an impossible standard to hold myself to. To never get to see myself as this way again, no matter what the circumstances are. It feels almost insurmountable, and truthfully I am positive I will fail at this, but I have to try. This is the bar that needs to be strived for as a human being on earth, and I can no longer pretend not to see it. I’m no longer afforded the luxury of living my life any differently, because I have to allow myself to dream of a world of peace, for my wife, and for my son. This dream has no chance of becoming reality unless I do something about it. I must become the change I seek.

And this is to my son --

Goosie, my beautiful son, just remember that if you live by the sword you will die by it. And take it from stupid old Dad’s mistakes -- and he’s made a lot of them -- the sword is never worth dying for, ever. But maybe peace is. It’s just that not enough of us try to take that road because it seems too hard, but no matter what, in the end, it’s better, and I know you can do it.

Merry Christmas, kid. I love you.

Addendum Please understand that if you are a hunter who uses a rifle to hunt and kill your food for yourself or your family, I respect your right to own a gun. While I am a vegetarian, I have also killed and cleaned an animal for food. I have more respect for people who hunt than for those who eat meat who have never killed an animal themselves. Most people who eat meat have no relationship to their food, or an understanding that it was once a living thing. That said, I prefer bow hunting (more because of the skill it takes) for game. This is a longer debate that I didn’t think was important enough to express in the video, but it was nonetheless an important point to address.

Please feel free to copy and redistribute.