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Current mood:  pissed off
I suppose I should start with an introduction. My ambivalence toward compromise rose from my charred remains when I was in the eighth grade. I had this issue, more like a problem, with clipping my nails in front of people on the bus. Yes, it is gross, and yes, I have stopped, and no, I don't wish to talk about that. I will say this: one day a girl on the bus approached me and said, "If you don't stop that, I will kill you. Literally." My only reply was this: "Do it, bitch." She never bugged me again.
I have learned that a threat means nothing without appealing to the fear of the person you're threatening. Having no children of my own, having an emotional connection matrix that is useless (for the purpose of me seeing another person's point of view), having no real sense of obligation to make people comfortable, and having no conscience with which to feel bad about any of it, I suppose threats really don't mean much to me. Having said all that, I must tell all my readership this: I'm on a mission from God, one which specifically has me helping smaller, weaker people pushing their fears aside and standing tall, living a life of freedom, of justice. And I laugh at all those signs I saw at all those schools I attended, the ones that say "safe zone" on them. You can't make children unafraid of the future until you make them strong enough to stand up for themselves.
"Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God." The fifth chapter of the Apostle Paul's letter to the Ephesian church includes this simple phrase, with a complicated set of instructions that is, in every fashion, easier said than done. I have never really recognized the authority of anybody in my life (my obedience to God has been, at many moments, shaky), but I try. One way I do this is to tell my friends that this is my mission: to help make "collective victim identity" a thing of the past, beginning with ending the fearmongering that makes it possible, as well as the fear to which it appeals. One can hardly forget Paul's words to Timothy about the Lord's opinion of a spirit of fear (ref. 2 Timothy 1:7).
And in a bit of history that just a little more modern (none of my grandparents were alive in 1923), a thing I thought I'd post here. I don't normally put links in my blog (aside from word definitions, quote sources and political parties), but here's one for the ages to come, from the ages past:
http://californiaccw.org/files/sf-chronicle-article.htm
Read it, grasshopper. You'll see the reference later. And now, the lesson...
We can all thank Jim Crow for holding down the black man (and, later, the Hispanic, the Asian, and anybody else that isn't white), but don't everyone thank him all at once--everyone should get a turn to bitchslap the bastards that made our fine American heritage one of slavery, injustice, and torture. History will never forget (and never let me forget) that some of the worst injustices among peoples occur when you disarm and forcibly relocate any people for any reason. Most drug laws that now exist (marijuana, cocaine, heroin) can find their roots in the desire to usurp the rights of the people to use recreational drugs for the purpose of easing their perception of their lot in life (after all, perception equals reality), and the racism found in these laws is incongruent with any actual threat to public safety, though the legislators passing these laws are just picking on people who are not like them. Marijuana was criminalized in the 1930's so that Mexicans would either have to go back to Mexico to smoke pot, lest they find themselves in jail (one guy was given 25 years for possessing a single roach). Cocaine, which was used recreationally by a lot of people (who drinks Coca-Cola?), was criminalized for the purpose of beating down the poor people, who freebased it into crack. And because decent-paying jobs didn't normally get offered to black people, the poor people in question were predominantly black.
Now, I'm all for "just say no," but putting people behind bars for using, having, selling drugs? These substances, by themselves, create no possible danger to public safety. In fact, their status as "controlled substances" has given rise to black markets, multiple generations of prison culture, and other criminal activities which fund these acts and lead to corruption among elected officials and officers of the public trust.
Jim Crow is also responsible for large-scale disarmament of black people, particularly when Klansmen were in the practice of lynching blacks and burning crosses on their lawns. This is an important thing to recognize, as blacks largely vote for Democrats, whose liberal policies have led to unprecedented infringement upon the rights of gun purchasers, gun owners and gun users; perhaps it will be regarded as an historical irony that a large number of blacks in America made their political bed with politicians who simultaneously abused their ancestors and usurp their collective civil right to defend themselves individually.
Jim Crow held the black man's head underwater, leaving him uneducated to raise it, unarmed to stop it, and unaware that it was wrong. And just when you thought it was just the black man, the Hispanic man, and the Asian man who bore the yoke of gun-control oppression, you now have the Mental Defective.
I guess I was pushed around in school. I don't remember, I was stoned most of the time. But a lot of boys have ADD these days, and girls will be girls, with the growing up, growing out, and "mean girl thing" making their lives miserable during their most formative years, leading to years of therapy, possible hospitalization and observation, and everyone's favorite pastime: MEDICATION! Thanks to the slave-masters in Congress (really, Ron Paul was the only dissenter), persons designated mentally defective will be prohibited from owning guns. It's seconds away from being codified into public and federal law, and it must not happen. If it does happen, it must be fought with every resource available to every free thinking person; otherwise, someday the act of thinking freely will get you locked up and medicated, meaning unarmed, meaning SLAVE. Just so my meaning isn't lost on you, free-thinkers will become slaves unless they fight. I have a problem with living on my knees, so there it is.
I was making idle chatter with a friend tonight who kept interrupting me, insisting that we should agree to disagree, and that her "smile and nod" routine was her final comment. But before she shut me up, I started telling her this thing my old man used to tell me. Back in the 1930's, Adolf Hitler's government of Germany went about the process of sterilizing persons that would, by today's standards, be labeled "mentally defective." As forward-thinking free people, we would call that practice barbaric (it is). But Dad went on to tell me that in the 1920's, the federal government went about the process of sterilizing persons labeled mentally defective. That's right, the American government sterilized Americans. Against their will. If "Pillow Angel" didn't make you ill, this might.
[But I'm willing to bet you'd see how a hysterectomy for a girl who can't stand up for herself is okay. Hell, they oughtta just amputate her legs, since she won't be walking anywhere, right? I'm willing to bet you'd see how disarming "retards" is okay. They're just gonna kill indiscriminately and not care, right? It's in their nature! They're fucked in the head! Let's hope they kill themselves before they kill anybody else, right?!?!]
Soapbox vacated. Start writing your hate mail now. In the words of former President John Adams, "Consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust, as offensive in the sight of God as it is derogatory from our own honor or interest of happiness." Said Aesop, "Better to starve free than be a fat slave." And in the words of Robert Heinlein, "When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives."
Or, in the words of "Serenity" character Malcolm Reynolds, "There's a lot of fine ways to die. I ain't waiting for the Alliance to choose mine."
5:38 AM
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