Intestinal Fortitude*

The Slacktivist is all fired up and posted three posts in a day. I think. I usually only check over there twice a week, so imagine my shock at the Pharyngulesque posting schedule. I was caught by this comment from Robert, one of the Slacktivist's libertaritrolls, in response to a post that makes the point that calls for armed insurrection from people living in a more or less functioning democracy are nothing more than childish wish fulfillment of the Wolveriiiiiines! variety:

The thing is... once upon a time... people regularly died just getting from A to B.

"[Move to the New World? It'll take months to get there? I might die? Ok.. sure, let's go.]"

So things like armed revolution were more within their comfort zone.

So now what you see is things like people that would never of taken the Pilgrim Journey in the first place... rationalizing their complete lack of intestinal fortitude... by down-playing the realities that this nations foundations are drastically being altered.

As our liberties are being consumed they continue to point avenues of legislation and lobby as viable methods for true change.

That's like pointing to buttons on a dashboard; while on the other side the wires are being cut; simultaneously laughing at the people that are saying we should pry the panel off and get set to rewire the lines that were cut.

This isn't fiction.
There are volumes of example of constitutional "rights" being ignored by the powers that be.

I'm not saying we need true change.
I'm approaching the place where they doesn't really matter to me.

I'm simply saying that a vast number of people are simply deluding their selves about what is actually happening; because they simply don't have the guts their ancestors did to face the situation as they did.

Look, there is a huge difference between "We're being ruled by some people thousands of miles away we have no say over" and "my party didn't win the election". No, really, there is. Get over it.

Yes, life was cheap in the late 1700s. This does not make people of the 1700s braver than us, it just means that without antibiotics, without vaccines, without safety equipment and doctors, people died. A lot. And young. Suggesting armed warfare to people in 1775 was suggesting just another form of death to people who had been living on borrowed time since the age of 5.

What our Wolveriiiiines! fans seem to ignore, what Robert ignores, is that war was different in 1775 than it is today. Canons were a big deal in 1775. Reloading a rifle took minutes and you had to reload after every shot. And those rifles weren't particularly accurate to begin with. That's not today's war. Today's war is automatic rifles that can be reloaded in seconds, after spewing out dozens of bullets in seconds. Today's war is Predator Drones and smart bombs and the dead lying everywhere and nowhere to run.

I wear a necklace made of bullets left over from a civil war. A 17 year old girl in Liberia, who grew up in a refugee camp, makes these necklaces out of bullet casings because they are easy to find. Bullets, like refugees, are everywhere in Liberia. So are orphans and widows, the maimed and the dead.

People in Liberia divide time into two: Before the War and After the War. An entire generation of children have no idea what it is to live in a world not defined by bullets and death and refugees and loss and pain.

Robert, and the rest of his Wolveriiiiines! crew want that. They want that for the children of America. Why? Because fuck universal healthcare, that's why. Because taxing the rich just a little bit more is totally worth making sure our children are more familiar with bullets than schoolbooks and toys.

There are problems with America. I've talked about them before and I will talk about them again. You know what won't solve those problems? Bullets. Killing our neighbors will not put food on anyone's tables, it won't provide children with better educations, it won't get medicine to the sick. I don't think those are really the problems Robert has with America, but unless his problem is that there just aren't enough dead people, aren't enough burning buildings, aren't enough refugees and widows and orphans, bullets won't solve his problems, either.

*I hate the phrase "intestinal fortitude". You know what takes intestinal fortitude? Eating at that taco place in South Side. Any other use of the phrase is a multisyllabic scatalogical reference that is not nearly so clever as some people think.