Stone Of Despair (Damn, What's Next?? Five.)

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

...

Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on a race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength of the world. That is the American way. ~Ronald Reagan

I saw this last night.

Jack Posobiec posted on Twitter that "The Civil Rights Act was the Treaty of Versailles for White people."

I'm a White People, and I'm sorry, but no. That's bullshit.

Perhaps more to the point, I spent most of my life as a conservative. Conservatism as I was taught it, is based on revealed Truth and the wisdom of one's ancestors.

On that note the Civil Rights Act became Law in 1964.

(In other words, our ancestors thought this was a good idea. If the words of people like MLK don't speak to Revealed Truth as the Christian tradition defines such...what do they speak to??)

I was born in 1973 and not only has the Civil Rights Act never hurt me one bit, I never knew life without it, and it's generally been the expectation that I was raised with that all people should have Civil Rights, and that concerning any who do not...that mistake should be corrected at the earliest possible juncture. All people have a right to decent treatment! 

Mind you, I started out as a Republican, but I've been a lifelong believer in...at a minimum...equality of opportunity, if not more. Everybody needs to at least get a shot at having a decent life regardless of any of their personal variables. Will some people take that shot and blow it, absolutely. That doesn't mean they shouldn't get the chance, especially based on some stupid made-up reason like the color of their skin or where they were born. America isn't supposed to be about all that. 

I'm a veteran, I served with a lot of people...both People of Color and White...who had overcome shitty circumstances or were there because they needed to and that was the only way they could get the money to go to college. I'm not saying it's right, it's simply the Truth. That is the way it is. And, fuck, there was a time when "Conservatives" thought that the G.I. Bill was some kind of radical thing. (And while I'm at it, I'm tired of current Republicans thinking that "Everybody should get to eat" is some kind of radical belief, also, especially when they invariably look like they've never missed a meal.)

Jack Posobiec was born in 1984, I looked. The Civil Rights Act had been a thing for 20 years before he was. He's never known life without it, either. And dude was born in Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, in fact. He's not from the South where Lost Cause bullshit being part of the routine might give him the excuse, or from some bullshit rural place where he only saw White people, not that that's much of an excuse either. There's no excuse for this horseshit, and he has none. 

He's just a racist little shit. 

And this motherfucker was a Navy Reserve intelligence officer for a few years, before he fucked up his own career and lost his security clearance over his shitty political beliefs and resulting foreign contacts. Think about that, for a second. Racism is literally against the law in the military. As an Airman I saw people lose their careers over that shit! Is it there? Absolutely, but get caught at it enough times and it will be made very clear to you that you're in the wrong business.

 Of course, the overwhelming majority of these idiotic far-right motherfuckers that want things like a Civil War are in the wrong business if it ever happens. If you don't know dick about safe food preparation, much less military logistics, or even simply the logistics of keeping a large group of people fed. Like, armies haven't been able to really "Live off the land" pretty much forever, the vast majority of medieval soldiers lived either by foraging or stealing food from local people, which also tended to make those people hate the State. If you just cannot get this, you're not going to fight some glorious campaign. You will most likely end up with some really bad combination of shitting your guts out and starving to death (these are not things that are mutually exclusive, either.) 

And that's well before you consider how and where most of America's wars have been fought, pretty much for all of living memory. I saw people be incapacitated by disease from drinking local, untreated water in places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and heard many stories of the same kind of thing happening in Afghanistan or Iraq. Now, you wanna try dealing with that without proper logistics??

And the vast majority of people I spoke to who had this happen were Air Force Security Forces, US Army or Marine infantry (or other people filling that role) potential issues only scale up as things get more complex.

Just for one, Nazi Germany's logistics and war production could never keep up with the needs of its armies...indeed German industry was not placed on a wartime footing until 1943...so in WWII the Germans were always basically pillaging anywhere they conquered, and often stuck using antiquated and heterogenous weapons as a result of this, toward the end, this really began to bite. The Atlantic Wall fortifications, for example, were armed with more French naval guns than German. Keeping all that shit straight even in terms of delivering the right caliber ammo to the right batteries must have been a logistical nightmare. (And then factor in that the Axis Powers always had limited fuel supplies.)

Meanwhile, American wartime industry produced more C-47 Skytrains or P-51 Mustangs in terms of individual types than countries like France or Italy produced aircraft, period. 

The reason we could just flood the zone with M-4 Sherman tanks as a "counter" to better German tanks like the Tiger was we had the numbers in terms of people and production, and the ability logistically to deliver all that into the battlespace. We won because the Germans did not have that ability. Same with far-less glamorous or seemingly important equipment like rifles or trucks. Wanna take a stab at who did a lot of the grunt work of military logistics, be it loading the convoy ships or driving the trucks in-theatre? 

Like I said the other day.

And these fucking people run into the same problem in terms of running a society. They only care about themselves, most often on an individual basis, and where they're capable of collective action it's entirely tainted by their individual selfishness, so right out the gate there's a limit to what they can accomplish...and that's before they start purity-testing, proof-texting and blathering on about how one must have the proper "Spirit" to do...I don't know, whatever. 

There's a certain sub-section of humanity that never got over mythology, and never bothered to investigate how the history of this and that even worked out. As a case in point, the whole idea of people "Pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" doesn't work very well if you don't have boots to start with.

More to the point, "Conservatives" as they are now rabidly refuse to understand that, and do it with malice aforethought simply because cruelty is the whole point to them. It's more important to them that poor kids be hungry and feel shame for being poor than it is that they learn anything else.

And in the end it's cheaper, easier and more conducive to kids getting an education to just feed them, without all the bullshit.

Isn't that what schools are supposed to be for, giving kids a proper education so that they can go out into the world and succeed, or at least be able to support themselves, without reliance on the State?? Shouldn't that be a conservative point of view?? It was when I was a kid.

It's kind of interesting, how right-wingers hate poor people so much...yet their policies create the greatest numbers of poor people and it's Red States that have the highest amounts of welfare and the worst educational outcomes and various social metrics. These fucking people cannot stop contradicting themselves. It's almost like they don't give a shit about anybody else, like they want to have some kind of "Underclass" to shit on, and like the whole of their political program ends up shaped around this end, all the more because they will not even acknowledge it. 

But this shit rules their thought processes until it just slips out and they embarrass themselves and their Party by praising some asshole like Strom Thurmond at an event and then get ran out of their Office and the Party as a result...oh, wait, never mind. That's so "Traditional" conservative and Republicans don't do that anymore.

And then we wonder why America struggles to maintain its alleged place in the world? 

Start breaking it all down, and there's parts of America that are worse off than some Third World countries!

Not that such even matters to these sons of bitches, they hate America now, mostly because Americans are getting tired of their shitty beliefs. And Republicans have done all this shit because they're trying to prevent "Those People" from succeeding, never mind that they sacrifice most of their own in the process, and it very often fails anyway.

(Or that one hell of a lot of Republican voters are fine with this, so long as they think somebody else is worse off. Sorry, but relative status only goes so far when you have nothing. Shit don't come in degrees, it's all shit.)

The only people who profit from the politics of resentment are the people stirring it up. The only person prospering from the Prosperity Gospel is the slick liar standing in the pulpit selling that crap.

And these motherfuckers would rather sell America and the West to Vladimir Putin than lose that grift. They'd rather be slaves than be free in a country where people that they don't "like" are also free.

They'd rather hew a Stone of Despair (for themselves) out of the Mountain of Hope than the opposite, because somehow they think that's hurting other people.

At the end of the day, you either believe in civilization or you don't, and they don't.

So you're gonna have to.

Do you get it now?

Four

Слава Україна!

Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the House of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors...

You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug) -- while praying to the same God -- with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the "white" Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana. We were truly all the same (brothers) -- because their belief in one God had removed the "white" from their minds, the 'white' from their behavior, and the 'white' from their attitude. I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man -- and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their "differences" in color.

With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called "Christian" white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem. Perhaps it could be in time to save America from imminent disaster -- the same destruction brought upon Germany by racism that eventually destroyed the Germans themselves.

They asked me what about the Hajj had impressed me the most. . . . I said, "The brotherhood! The people of all races, color, from all over the world coming together as one! It has proved to me the power of the One God. . . . All ate as one, and slept as one. Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere accented the Oneness of Man under One God. 

~Malcolm X, Letter following the Hajj.

Also, This.

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press