Glenn Beck - The Overton Window

“Yes?”

“Hit me with a little Thomas Paine.”

She took his hand, and spoke quietly as they walked.

“ ‘These are the times that try men’s souls,’” Molly said. “‘The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

“ ‘What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.’”

Back in Molly’s section of the loft she gave Noah his iced tea and took a seat on the edge of her hammock. He sat on a nearby divan made from crates, a simple frame, and random cushions. The tea turned out to be as sweet as she’d warned it would be, but it was good.

“That looked like a small arsenal Hollis had back there,” Noah said. “Are all those guns legal?”

“Two of them are registered. The rest are just passing through. He’s on his way to a gun show upstate.”

“So the answer’s no, they’re not legal.”

“Do you know what it took to make those two guns legal in this city?”

“I can imagine.”

“It took over a year, and the guy who owns them had to get fingerprinted, interviewed, and charged about a thousand dollars to exercise a constitutional right.”

“Welcome to New York. There’s a lot you’ve got to live with when you live here.”

“Wait, didn’t you say you were pre-law in college? I would have thought they’d have spent a few minutes on the Second Amendment.”

“Yeah, they did,” Noah said. “The experts differ quite a bit on its interpretation.”

She spoke the words thoughtfully. “‘The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’-that seems pretty clear to me.”

“You left out the part that causes all the arguments.”

“The word militia meant something different back then, Noah. Ben Franklin started the first one here. The militia was every citizen who was ready and able to protect their community, whatever the threat. It was as natural as having a lock on your front door.

“Today the police are there to protect society, but they’re not obligated to protect you and me as individuals. The Supreme Court’s ruled on that quite a few times. And they certainly won’t protect us from the government, God forbid it would ever come to that. So the way I read it, the Second Amendment simply says we have the right to be ready to defend ourselves and our neighbors if we have to.”

“Speaking of the way you read it,” he said, “why don’t you tell me about your bookshelf there.”

She looked over at it briefly. “What about it?”

“I was noticing some of the titles. That’s quite a subversive library.”

“People use some of those books to smear us, and some of them were written by our enemies. I read everything so I’ll know what I’m up against, and how to talk about them. You don’t see any harm in that, do you?”

“Who’s this Ragnar Benson lunatic?”

She smiled. “He’s not a lunatic. That’s a pen name, by the way; hardly anyone knows who he really is. He writes about a lot of useful things, though.”

“Like how to make a grenade launcher in your rumpus room?”

“That one was from his mercenary days. He’s mellowed out some since then. Now he’s more about independence, and readiness, and self-sufficiency, you know? The joys of living off the grid.”

“It almost sounds like you know this guy.”

She considered him for a moment and then leaned a little closer. “Can you keep a secret?”

“This is probably the wrong day to ask me that.”

“It’s Hollis’s uncle,” Molly whispered. “And guess who took up the family business and wrote a few of those books himself.”

“Hollis?” He pointed over his shoulder with a thumb. “My Hollis?”

She nodded, smiling a little. “You shouldn’t judge a person by appearances, you know. He’s a very smart man.”

“Yeah, so was the Unabomber. Top of his class, I hear.”

“You make little jokes when you’re nervous,” Molly said. “That’s kinda cute.”

“Thanks.”

“Now finish your tea or I’ll think you don’t like it.”

He did, in one long drink, and Molly patted a place beside her on the hammock with one hand.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve lived twenty-eight years without trying to get into one of those. You sit over here with me.”

“Come on, it’s easy, chicken.”

“It’ll flip over.”

“No, it won’t.” She held out her hands to him, beckoning. “I just want to forget about everything else for a little while, okay? Come here, now. Don’t make me ask you again.”

It would have been hard to say no to that, and he didn’t try. With her guidance he sat next to her on the precarious edge of the hammock.

“Now we just hold on,” Molly said. “Let your feet come off the floor and lie down, and try not to roll off the other side.”

He followed her lead as she leaned back, and from there it was a touch-and-go fun-house ride for quite a few wobbly seconds. Amid the swinging and shifting and overbalancing and a great deal of welcome laughter, things gradually settled down into a fragile stability. In the end they found themselves pleasantly entwined with one another, held close in the pocket of the hammock in a comfortable, gentle sway.

There was no ceiling to the enclosure of her room, and high overhead among the distant steel beams someone had arrayed several dim strings of white Christmas lights in a pattern reminiscent of a starry evening sky.

“Hey, Molly,” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“What do you say we just stay here like this, for a really long time.”

She held him a little closer. “I wish we could.”

He’d noticed her silver bracelet before but now it was close enough to see the marks of its worn engraving. “What does this say?”

She brought her wrist closer to his eyes. “It’s been through a lot, and I’m afraid it’s getting a little hard to read.”

Noah held her hand and found the right distance and the proper angle in the dim light to allow him to make out the faded lettering. When he was sure of what they said he read the words aloud.

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

“That’s right,” Molly said.

“Whose quote is that? I’ve heard it before.”

“Thomas Paine.”

He laid his head back down next to hers. “But how do you think you can do that, Molly? I’m not saying you can’t, but I don’t see how.”

“There’s more,” she said. With her other hand she carefully twisted the bracelet so the inner face of it turned out, and there was another inscription on that side.

Faith Hope Charity

“That’s “nice?”

Nice.”

“I guess I don’t really understand,” Noah said. “I mean, I understand those words, but that’s not really a battle plan, is it? Do you know what you’re up against?”

“Yes,” Molly said. “But I doubt that our enemies do.”

“So tell me.”

“Okay,” Molly said. “Pop quiz: Who fired the first shot in the American Revolution?”

“That’s a trick question. Nobody knows who fired the first shot.”

“Is that your final answer?”

“Yep.”

She worked herself up onto an elbow so she could look at him. “It wasn’t fired from a gun. The first shot was a sermon, delivered by Jonathan Mayhew, years before Lexington and Concord. It wasn’t a politician who first said ‘no taxation without representation.’ It was a preacher.”