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If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan
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"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride."
~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press
On Saturday night, I woke up and got ready for work, to find that there'd been a racist mass shooting in Jacksonville, FL. Some racist loser ass-bag who lived with his parents had painted Swastikas on his weapons and went to the city to shoot Black people...motherfucker literally left a manifesto to that effect.
He killed three innocent African Americans at a Dollar Tree before committing suicide.
For the love of God, I'm telling you...if We The People want to keep our Second Amendment rights...or even want to want to do so...or have any rights worth mentioning because none of the theoretical rights granted in the Constitution matter a damn if you're dead. We are going to have to step up, control ourselves and govern ourselves...and stop this shit...cause if the government or somebody has to do it for us that'll almost certainly mean the party's over.
And right now, there's an entire generation of young people already sick and tired of getting shot at. They're already voting accordingly...and I may be a gun owner, a veteran, and otherwise a person whose life guns have been a significant part of, but goddamn it I can't blame them.
As of awhile ago, I've met kids who've survived multiple shootings.
You want to make somebody anti-gun, that's the way.
Especially considering that if the Right gets its Civil War...when the time comes for the War Dance, and it will...these kids will also be in the position of being the ones who have to put down said insurrection.
And that's not a proposition calculated to increase one's love of any personal "right" to own ridiculous amounts of firepower. War is a horror, I've never known anybody who's been in a battlespace who's really wanted to be in another one.
Black folks, LGBT people, other People of Color, students, teachers...are already looking at these fucking people and wondering "Why the hell do they hate us so much" and "Why does these people's claimed 'Right' to own military-type weapons so often seem to be treated as a permission-slip for violence against us??"
At Walmart last week, across the street from where I work, a friend's brother had a gun pulled on him while he was at work.
The police were called, the person who did it ejected from the store and banned and the cops walked him out, but nothing more was apparently done.
When I was a kid and first learning this stuff, as a hunter, as an Airman in the United States Air Force, and since...I've always had and I was always taught strict rules for weapons handling and use. A firearm is not an expression of one's anger or ego, a totem against some "Evil" or a toy. It's weapon. Its purpose is to kill things.
And quite honestly I think one hell of a lot of people have forgotten...if they ever knew in the first place...that these things are serious matters. Like, whatever even happened to "Thou Shalt Not Kill?"
Do churches even teach the Ten Commandments anymore??
'Cause it sure looks like all this "Christian Nation" stuff has nothing to do with Christ or Christianity but is instead code for a whole bunch of shit both Christ and any observant Christians would, in any kind of normal sense, want nothing to do with!
In point of fact, Ukrainian Evangelical Christians, Jews and Muslims are some of the people fighting hardest for their freedom, and for their nation's right to exist. I've met Baltic State and Ukrainian Evangelicals, I know why that is.
They're fighting against Putin's New Soviet Union not because it's "Christian" but because it isn't.
They know that the original Soviet Union persecuted their ancestors and a new one would certainly do it to them, too.
This isn't an abstraction, a baseless fear or an idea. The kids from former Soviet states that I met both when I was in the Air Force and when I was in college told me the stories that their parents told them.
And it's like now that they've had a taste of Trump, the American far-right wants to punish those people for the fact that they or their parents turned toward Democracy and the West and wanted freedom.
It's almost like these fucking people here in America think "Christianity" conservatism or white Americanism or something something Gazpacho must be about discriminating against, murdering, othering or persecuting somebody...otherwise, they think, what's the point??
No, wait, it is that. It's exactly that.
Otherwise...they don't want it. It doesn't matter what "It" is. If their obsession with relative status doesn't result in someone's death...then these assholes don't feel like they're a person.
And these fucking people think Putin and Russia are going to give them that world where their personhood is literally based on the persecution of some Other, for no reason, or just because they feel like it.
The Cruelty really is the goddamn point for these goons, all the better if some motherfucker wraps it up in religiosity so they can feel holy and special while hurting people for no reason.
I don't want to live in Bloodbath Nation, do you??
Eight
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...
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 to gether 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.
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 to gether 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.
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