Dead Nations (War Dance, Three.)

Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other.

That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. 

In America, "white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. 

~Malcolm X, letter written following the Hajj.

I saw this last night, while I was at work.

The owner of a clothing store in California was murdered because some violent homophobic asshole didn't like the Pride flag she had flying on the front of the store.

And the killer cannot even be held accountable, because he fled the scene, pursued by Sheriff's deputies, and was killed in the ensuing shootout. So he's dead, too.

What a hell of a thing to die for, eh?

I've never been in the position of hating anybody so much that I was willing to get shot to death by the cops over it. 

Now look here, and note I say this as a gun owner myself, I'm also a former conservative and a United States Air Force veteran; If you...and it doesn't matter who and what you are...want to keep your freedom, let alone your Second Amendment rights...the most important thing we can do is break the back of bigotry in this country. I mean, seriously, who the fuck benefits from homophobia, misogyny, racism, etc. ?? 

I'm rather sure it isn't you, or me.

Because I'm here to tell you, right now, that the behavior of the MAGA's, left unchecked, will absolutely lead to everything you can think of from government censorship to social credit systems to the Whupping Man like they have in Singapore. 

State Power will eventually get as tired of the death, destruction, and various disruptions caused by this shit as everyone else.

And...please do not misunderstand me, here. I'm going to point this out as simply as I can...State Power has missiles, you don't.

That's why America was set up so that We, The People...could and would govern ourselves in some kind of reasonable fashion, with something other than Force as the typical medium of State Power. For most of us, the most common contact with the State is the mailman. People in Afghanistan would...and did...kill for that shit! It's just there, civilization lost and a lot of those people are Americans or Europeans, Iranians or Pakistanis now.

This is why America was set up with something other than the will of some bloodline of idiots and sociopaths or some coterie serving as a multigenerational source of dictators or some council of religious freaks as its Operating System. In a Democracy, We are the State. Particularly in the American form of Democracy...the buck stops with us, The People.

People are tired of the killing, and eventually, the force of law will be turned against not only the act of killing...but against the widespread access to weapons that makes it possible. 

Trust me, by either carrot or stick, by hook or by crook...if it comes to that, if We The People cannot or will not get a grip...most of the public will be disarmed and you will have to show you have a need for it in order to have a weapon at all. For example, even claiming Self-Defense will mean you have to show that you are under some actual threat that has a reasonable chance of avoiding law enforcement.

And as somebody who's done both...hunting and sport-shooting are on the decline. So a lot of valid reasons go away right there. Gun sales are driven now by insecure white dudes who want their range-toys and substitutes for male inadequacy.

See, that's what the "Well-Regulated" part of the Second Amendment even means. Constitutionally, the government, the "Left" whatever you want to call it...even the Right if they get the power they want...will use that argument.

If we refuse to govern ourselves, to make the compromises and live-and-let-live choices that civilization requires...eventually somebody will do it for us and/or to us.

And...when individual rights get crossways of State Power, bad things tend to happen, we know this. 

But when society gets tired enough of this shit, a lot of gun nuts are going to find out the hard way that "Come and Take Them" and "You can pry it from my cold, dead hands" will mean exactly that. It'll only take a few such cases...and a lot of these shit-talking doofuses will meekly hand over their penis extenders and range toys when faced with the force of law and real firepower, because they are cowards.

Oh...and while I'm at it...you don't actually trust "Conservatives," especially rich social "Conservatives" with individual rights, including firearms ownership, do you??

Don't you think, if current Republicans and their wealthy donors ever got the power they wanted and got rid of all the Blacks and the gays and the Latinos and chained women in the kitchen and eliminated social safety nets and workers rights...well, who the fuck does that leave them as a slave workforce, my White dudes??

You.

These fucking people are trying to use racism and shit as a prybar to rip apart civilization.

These motherfuckers wanna party like it's 1499, yo.

And they already see a lot of us as peasants fit only for manual labor...in the absolute best of cases.

If you think these motherfuckers like Elon Musk that are now encouraging all this antisocial behavior, bigotry and violence are going to either let you even cosplay as the Lord of the manor or have a means to defend yourselves from them or that they'll tolerate continued antisocial behavior from you (that might be directed at them) after you've beaten civilization to a bloody pulp on their behalf, my bros you have another thing coming.

And their contempt for you, for us, for the People...is endless.

For awhile...they might tolerate the Proles murdering each other in the streets so long as we show a decorous face to Authority...but that'll only last as long as it takes for one business-owner too many to get shot by some rando who didn't like their political choices or for the wrong person's kid to get shot in a crossfire.

And if you think somebody like Elon...who's all too happy to play gimp for people like Mohammad Bin Salman, Prince of Bone-Saw-dy Arabia...would respect your Eighth Amendment right not to have to suffer Cruel and Unusual Punishment, if given the power not to??

You're dumber than I thought.

Freedom isn't free.

And if you want to keep it that means fighting against bigotry of all kinds, against hate, against homophobia and racism, and against Unfettered Power that whispers to you like a devil, telling you it'll let you have a little, let you stick it to them Racial-Expletive-Deleted-s if only you let it have its fun, even at your expense.

And don't believe any kind of "Those People" crap...because to the wealthy we're all Those People.

That means fighting for civilization and democracy and the rights of nations and peoples to remain free...for themselves and their cultures and languages to exist, or for fighting for things like unionization and worker's rights.

I get tired of comfortable Americans, both far-Left and far-Right, trying to say the Ukrainians don't have a right to defend themselves, or that we should not support them...because the avowed goal of people like Vladimir Putin is and always was to do to America and the rest of Europe exactly what he tried to do to the Ukrainians...and now Putin and his various cocksuckers are just mad that the Ukrainians fought back. 

I don't care whether it's Cornell West or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Y'all support Putin?? Fuck you.

I get tired of comfortable, white, supposedly "Conservative" or "Religious" Americans hating on Black people or LGBT people or whatever, simply because some rich motherfucker like Donald Trump, or some preacher or whatever, told them they could. Is not the entire basis of Christianity "Love Thy Neighbor as thyself?" 

You cannot "Love the Lord Thy God With All Thy Heart, All Thy Soul And All Thy Might" if you fail to obey even His most basic commands!

And "You are flawed too, No one is perfect!" (So let's all be bad!) ain't the flex you think it is.

I don't get why people buy that shit for the same reason I don't get the whole idea of "Everyone is corrupt and evil, vote Republican!"

If you don't have dreams, expectation of something better, some kind of hope for the future, what's even the goddamned point?? Sooner or later, the "Thrill" of antisocial behavior, of bigotry, of conflict and winning some argument that exists only in your own head wears thin and needs to be replaced with stronger drugs.

Civilization, freedom, humanity, all come with not only rights but responsibilities to maintain those rights and restrictions on the expression of them simply because that's what it takes to maintain 'Good Order and Discipline." Decency and tolerance aren't things that just magically happen by themselves, nor do they evolve if...say, everyone were to somehow get the Jesus in just the right way, either.

All this stuff takes real work, active citizenship, to maintain it.

The Right's expansive idea of personal "Freedom" whether it's saying that Donald Trump's organizing of the January 6th insurrection was "Free Speech" or some fool trying to say that the guy who shot that lady in California had the "Religious Liberty" to be violently opposed to LGBT people, or to act on that violence...is not designed to create liberty but to constrain it. 

Dead Men tell no tales, Dead Men have no rights.

It's hard to be free or to enjoy your Constitutional Rights or equality when you're dead, for example. And remember, these are the same people who tried to use COVID-19 running rampant as a biological weapon to kill off people they didn't like.

We all have to give a little, to get a Society.

And all these goddamned fanatics, they don't want to do that. For them to be happy, we'd have to be Dead Nation.

The only rights they want you to have are the Right To Be Dead, or to be Exactly like them.

Because they think they'll get all the rest in some zero-sum game. They don't even realize they're playing against each other, too, not just you and me.

How even these people think a whole nation of miserable sons of bitches would survive, I don't know.

Well there's more of us than there are of them, and all we have to do is stop acting the fool. Stop putting up with this shit. Stop tolerating motherfuckers who turn to fascism because they think it's funny, or who want to kill their neighbors.

There is going to be a test later, and the longer we fuck around with this shit, the worse it's gonna be.

Two

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

Слава Україна!

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride."

~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press