Kill Whitey

After the Sandy Hook massacre I had to remove myself from all media for well over a month. The gun-loving crowd's mania that firearms trump the lives of innocents was just too much for me to handle. Well, zip-a-dee-fucking-doo-da; the old saying is, "when it rains, it pours." Here in America the saying should be, "when it rains, it's actually somebody pissing on you."

Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder. With mass-murder as a garnish. That pretty much sums up the entirety of our country in two sentences. We're more concerned with Gomer being able to have a dozen pistols than we are about Little Suzy being able to have one meal a day.
Our country is so mired in hatred and ideological trench warfare that we're paralyzed from being able to do genuine good for anyone. In the sixteen years since Great Britain passed their laws banning all civilian firearms, gun-related deaths have numbered in only the double-digits annually, sometimes cresting one hundred on a particularly bad year. Conversely, the average death toll from firearms in the good ol' US-of-A is somewhere between ten- and fifteen-thousand.

Our nation is divided right down the middle and never the twain shall meet. On the one side we have the ideological patriarchy: cannibalistic monsters who think they're the only ones deserving of a free meal and who are sociopathic enough to wish death on others just so that they don't have to pay a cent more in taxes. This includes gun enthusiasts, corporate vultures, hyper-aggressive rednecks, and gender-"rights" extremists from both Mars and Venus. In case you hadn't noticed, the vast majority of those folks fall into the Republican party's wheelhouse, except for women's-rights extremists, who wouldn't get along at all with the "barefoot and pregnant" goal that Republicans have for women; still, anyone who's willing to sacrifice other innocent human beings in order to push their own agenda fall into this category, so that includes modern pseudo-feminists. This also includes PETA, because fuck anyone who claims to want to protect animals but whose activism results in a nearly 100% kill rate of animals "rescued" and brought to their shelters.
On the other side we have the ideological pussiarchy: a bunch of mostly well-intentioned people who want equality and safety for all but are too incompetent, naïve or pacifistic to actually affect positive change. This mostly includes Democrats, the majority of college educators, charity workers and activists. Basically anybody who thinks that they can win people over and affect change with a well-reasoned argument without a good heap of fire-and-brimstone or pathos winds up in this category.

A lot of you might be wondering where the hell I'm going with this. The answer is, I'm not really going anywhere. Reason being, if you can't see my point already then I'm never going to convince you. We as a country have no chance to survive this century if we can't find some way to move past this polarization; unfortunately, we pretty much have no common ground any longer. Even the dead bodies of children can't bridge the gap, because apparently the life of a fetus is sacred but once it's been popped out the little fucker can go die in a ditch.

As far as I can see, there are only three potential outcomes that could prevent the US from falling the fuck apart.
The first is that the aggression and hatred grows to be too much. Ignorance and oppression from right-wingers eventually reaches the overflow point and the sensible human beings in this nation stage a mass-disembarkment from a failed experiment. This would likely result in the fearmongers remaining either falling on themselves in an orgy of conspiracy-driven madness or, more likely, attacking every nation on Earth at once in an attempt to force their ideology onto the world. This would leave millions if not billions dead and the US annihilated.

The second, and sadly the least likely, is the exact opposite: somehow the mass paranoia causes the maniacs to snap and stage a nationwide exodus to somewhere else, where their hatred will fester freely. This would likely result in a new aggressive nation infested by rednecks, but who cares about that? The real problem would be that suddenly Liberals would lose their own common ground. Without a threat to unify the differing points of view, strife would continue on. The only silver lining is that, without the rampant paranoia and hatred brought on by the Far-Right, perhaps the more minor difference could be overcome.

The third possibility is of a second Civil War: militant Right-wing madmen raiding their neighbors' homes and slaughtering them for thinking freely, corporate demagogues hiring private-security firms to act as their own armies against the National Guard, and the end result a scorched husk of a former nation. Whoever the victor, the US would limp along as a shadow of its prior greatness, falling into a third-world state similar to Haiti.

I understand that all of this is quite grim and nothing like the snarky nature of my other posts. I agree but, sadly, I see nothing humorous about the current events within this country. I can see only smoke from blazing charnels on the horizon as we hurtle toward an inevitable negative outcome. It would take a miracle to change things for the better, and I've noticed a distinct lack of those in my years on this earth.
Perhaps we as a people can affect change by standing up and making our voices heard. Perhaps we'll only be barking in the dark as the walls close in around us. But we have the obligation to try, if not for our fellow humans than for ourselves, for our survival instinct.
Freedom is not free. This is true but the price of freedom is not, as many would claim, the corpses of our children or the sacrifice of our safety. The price of freedom is that we must all stand together, forego our petty differences and work toward a better community for ourselves and future generations.

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Forget the Amendments and what you think they mean. Those were added on. This right here, the preamble, the very first words of the Constitution, this is what matters. The unification and protection of our nation and our people supersedes any petty grudges or ideological demands. This isn't a contest to be won by forcing half our people to concede; this is a duty that we owe to ourselves, our neighbors and even our hated rivals.

Goodnight, and stay safe.

Monsters

Our military does not deserve the money we pour into it. Not only do we spend more on our military than all other nations combined, we need only look at the sheer number of rapes and unbelievably atrocious murders at a military base such as Fort Bragg to see the true face of our military. For those readers who want an article to directly reference, I aim to please even in such a dark matter: http://tinyurl.com/huffpostmsa

There are two issues, in my eyes, that have contributed to the utterly unconscionable and seemingly endless rise in sexual assault, rape and murder against women in the military. The first is that the military is entirely voluntary, and I addressed most of that problem in a prior blog post. What I did not address was that after 9/11 military leaders saw fit to slacken the recruitment requirements, permitting convicted felons - even rapists and murderers - to serve in the military. That slackening has never been undone. However, even non-criminals who volunteer in the military tend to be emotionally immature, prone to violence and of the alpha-male mentality. In the outright feral conditions of military service and drill indoctrination intended to strip individuality and morality from the soldiers, this makes it only too easy for such abominations to simply stop giving a fuck about human decency and see their female squadmates as nothing but a vagina with legs. They then decide to just take what they want, calculating and waiting until their target is isolated and unarmed. These acts of rape are often some of the most premeditated and would make criminal psychologists blush at the monstrous coldheartedness of the perpetrators.

Worse still, the military covers up these acts and tries to silence women who have been victimized. In my opinion, this makes the United States military even worse than the Catholic church in coverups: they expect these women to fight and die for their country but won't even provide the barest hint of justice against those monsters who attack them.

The second issues is cultural: by and large volunteers for military service tend to skew Conservative in their political beliefs. This makes sense as generally the first response of Conservative constituents to anything negative is to call for its destruction, so the chance to go into another country, destroy things and kill people who look different is a hard opportunity to deny.

The issue with Conservative philosophy, however, is that by and large right-wing ideology views every race and gender other than white males as slaves or possessions who've managed to wrangle freedom from the government. Of course, full right-wing ideology also sees anyone without billions of dollars as an uppity serf, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, while it's utterly disgusting it's not at all surprising that people in the military with that mindset would be all too eager to sexually assault the women in their platoons, especially since they know that they'll usually be completely protected or let off with just a slap on the wrist.

Military service is a rapist's paradise, a Sandusky-level pick of the litter that lets a monster watch his intended victim, learn her patterns, then attack and get off scott-free even if he's identified. In stark contrast, women who call attention to this disease are usually stripped of rank and may even be dishonorably discharged for their righteous dissent.

When the victims are punished for their suffering and the attackers are praised for their actions behind closed doors, the experiment has failed so spectacularly that words do not exist to express the sheer amount of disgust this elicits. Now, more than ever, I say that we must bring our troops home not for their own good but so that we can dismantle this necrotized chain of command and obliterate the evil that festers therein.

We may sleep soundly because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf, but who stands on the behalf of the rough women who are victimized by the very system that protects others?