Hookless
A Nemesis piece by Isaac Tait
Once a month or so the Queer and Affirming Writers Collective members are given a writers prompt and one week to complete the writing assignment. For June our prompt was: Write 1200 words about your arch nemesis. It could be an actual nemesis you had/have or one you would create based on who you are. What are they like? What do they do for a living? And most importantly, HOW are they a nemesis to you? Feel free to make it a narrative piece. Nonfiction is fine too.
What follows is Isaac Tait’s piece, which he wrote in response to our prompt.
Hookless
For National Gun Violence Awareness Day—observed each year on the first Friday in June—I did something I’ve never done before: I went fishing without a hook.
I remember first hearing about this Buddhist concept, of hookless fishing, about ten years ago while living in Japan. I promptly dismissed the idea as insanity. However, each time I hooked a fish and I watched it fight for its life I was struck with a pang of guilt. Then the idea of hookless fishing would come flooding back. This year, with images of violence across our country flooding every media surface I touched, the thought of perpetrating further harm drove me to give the hookless fishing thing a try. So, on a gloriously sunny spring day in early June I meticulously removed each of the hooks from my lures. Then I walked into the mountains to try and find some solace from the nemeses overwhelming my soul.
As a common sense gun law activist, the statistics wrought by my first nemesis - gun violence, are seared into my mind.
Every day in the United States 125 people die from gun violence.1
There are more guns in the United States than people or 1.2 guns for every person.2
Americans make up just 5% of the world’s population. However, we possess over half of the world’s civilian owned firearms (the next highest country in the civilian firearm ownership metric is Yemen). 3
Guns are the number one killer of children in America.
Every day, in the US, thirteen veterans end their life with a firearm.
These snapshots of the condition of our country are horrifying; and they are what drive me to educate, to lobby, to write, and to speak out.
Sometimes though, it feels like I’m screaming into the void.
Sara Ahmed highlighted this phenomena when she wrote ‘we become a problem when we describe a problem.’ 4 When you question systems of oppression, hate, and greed it becomes hard not to question everything else. ‘...you might end up in a state of wonder and disbelief: how can they not see it, what is right in front of us?’ 5
Adding to this sense of bewilderment is a litany of defeats levied, in the first half of 2025, against the common sense gun law agenda. For example:
The Supreme Court ruling which blocked Mexico’s lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers, who are key suppliers of the weapons driving cartel violence across the border.
Or, the recent law which made it legal to convert weapons of war (AR-15s and similar weapons designed to kill as many human beings as possible in as short a time as possible) into fully automatic machine guns with a forced reset trigger. 6
Why does one side of our government seek to end gun violence while the other side is only intent on fanning the flames? While this civilian arms race in our country has many drivers - I would argue a major contributor to this epidemic of violence, is - evangelical christianity 7 (which just happens to be my second nemesis).
I de-converted from christianity over two years ago because I could no longer be associated with so many people ignoring the second greatest commandment (and the litany of hypocrisy and textual manipulations dispersed throughout the bible).
In a recent New York Times Opinion piece the author pondered how christianity has become more and more calloused, cruel, and debased. A large part of this massive shift is “..the evangelical turn against empathy. There are now christian writers and theologians who are mounting a frontal attack against the very value that allows us to understand our neighbors, that places us in their shoes and asks what we would want and need if we were in their place.” 8
It’s gotten so rotten in the church the issue of stopping immigration (even legal immigration) has become the lightning rod galvanizing the ‘christian’ right. “The Republican Christian right made a hard turn against immigration and, in its most extreme political faction, is turning against empathy itself.” 9
Book titles such as ‘Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion’ or ‘The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits’ are evidence of this deplorable shift within the church.
These days, it feels like pernicious evil, driven by the church and its followers, unfolds at an almost constant rate.
‘If you can’t change the MAGA culture, they’re redefining the MAGA culture to try to assimilate it within christianity or to assimilate christianity into the MAGA culture… ‘How do we make Trump good?’ Well, you can’t make Trump good, so how do you change our definition of what is good to meet Trump?’ 10
Standing up for the marginalized, for the poor, the downtrodden, the voiceless was one thing which fired me up during my days in the christian camp. Now, with tens of millions of ‘christians’ forgoing their decency and morality to fall in lock step with MAGA, the crimes against what makes us human - namely compassion and love - are piling up every day.
‘Caring for the suffering of others should become as important as caring for [our] own suffering.’ 11 Instead we live in an age of rage bait, online bullying and trolling, the decimation of our Constitution, and human rights violation after violation from sea to shining sea.
So, what can I do in the midst of such prevalent, celebrated, and unadulterated evil? An idea suggested in Tibetan Buddhism is to be grateful.
Tibetan Buddhists put forth the idea that our enemies, those we would consider our nemeses, can provide us with a unique opportunity - a chance for profound personal growth and spiritual development.
This idea, this ethos if you will, of approaching one’s nemeses with an overtone of gratefulness opens up a Pandora's box of ideas to mull over.
What is love? Is it the desire to cultivate opportunities of happiness for someone? Or is it something else?
Could exploring this odd placement of gratitude develop patience and tolerance?
How do you live in a country filled with people who hate you? Who wants to legislate away your right to exist, to be safe, to thrive?
How does one navigate through life with so much ill-will levied at you? How do you exist in a society filled to the brim with citizens armed with weapons of war intent on committing acts of violence at the slightest provocation?
Our country is drowning in fear, anger, and greed. So, how do you prevent the insanity from warping you, and maybe even eventually destroying, your humanity?
When I see beings of wicked nature, oppressed by violent negative karma and suffering,
As if I had found a precious treasure,
I will cherish them. - Geshe Langri Tangpa
As I stood, knee-deep in a frigid mountain stream, casting a hookless lure into a pool fringed with ferns and laced with moss covered logs, I realized I could be the lure - present without expectation, expressing compassion without an agenda.
There was something poetically beautiful about casting with no intent to catch, no harm to inflict, no struggle to provoke. As the mountain stream carried away the walls I’d constructed to protect myself, the war raging in my soul came into sharp focus. On one side, the grief of living in a country that since its inception, has been defined by violence, greed, and hate.1213 On the other, a desire for compassion, peace, and love to reign supreme.
Then in a flash it occurred to me - I was my own greatest nemesis. I am compelled to speak out against the atrocities I see because it gives the violence a voice and thereby brings attention to it. However, I also need to protect my joy and inner peace from being consumed by the struggle.
Because in the end, what I’ve been grasping at—craving even—is a world free from anger, hate, and greed. A world which has never been, and perhaps never will be.
Everytown for Gun Safety. (n.d.). Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teens. Everytown Research & Policy. https://everytownresearch.org/graph/firearms-are-the-leading-cause-of-death-for-american-children-and-teens
Megan Kang. ‘Why America fell for guns’ Aeon, 11 Apr. 2024, https://aeon.co/essays/america-fell-for-guns-recently-and-for-reasons-you-will-not-guess
Ibid.,
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 39.
Ibid., 40.
Chip Brownlee. ‘Musket vs. AR-15: Judges Are Throwing Out Gun Restrictions Because of Antiquated Laws From America’s Founding’, The Trace, 4 June 2025, https://www.thetrace.org/2025/06/gun-laws-history-supreme-court-bruen
Tess Owen. ‘We Spent a Wild Weekend with the Gun-Worshipping Moonie Church That’s Trying to Go MAGA’, Vice, 21 Oct. 2019, https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-spent-a-wild-weekend-with-the-gun-worshipping-moonie-church-thats-trying-to-go-maga
David French. ‘Selfishness is not a virtue’, New York Times, 5 June 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/opinion/ernst-apology-christianity-evangelicals.html
David French. ‘Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy’, New York Times, 13 Feb. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/opinion/trump-usaid-evangelicals.html
Owen, T. ‘We spent a wild weekend with the gun-worshipping Moonie church that’s trying to go MAGA’. VICE News, February 26, 2019 https://www.vice.com/en/article/59xeyb/we-spent-a-wild-weekend-with-the-gun-worshipping-moonie-church-thats-trying-to-go-maga
Gil Fronsdale. ‘The Bodhisattva and the Arhat: Walking Together Hand-in-Hand’, Insight Meditation Center, Fall 2011 https://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/the-bodhisattva-and-the-arhat-walking-together-hand-in-hand/
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.
Beal, Timothy. When Time Is Short: Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene. Boston: Beacon Press, 2022.