Thursday, January 13, 2011

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.

8 comments:

  1. Folks in the Wolveriiiiiines! camp remind me of the Fire-eaters who were very pro-secession around the time of the Civil War.

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  2. Ah, yes, the time-honored call of the True Patriot And Hero: "Let's you and him fight!"

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  3. I also love the way those three posts were structured.

    First post: there are people who claim to believe that their government is nothing better than Nazi Germany. Yet they do nothing about it, which is an indefensible response. Could we possibly take this to mean that they don't believe what they claime?

    Second post: there are people who fetishize being Wolveriiiines! This is a completely unnecessary attitude in a functioning nation founded on the principles of democracy.

    Third post: a bunch of people seem to think that the first two posts indicate a form of cognitive dissonance. To them I say, "STFU. You don't understand words."

    Yet he said it so very politely. In the way he does things.

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  4. A wonderful piece, PF. Thanks for writing it.

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  5. You know, I have the feeling that if the Slacktivist and His Holiness the Dalai Lama were ever to touch, there would be peace on Earth and every child would receive a sparkle pony, free of charge. A quadruple rainbow would light the sky, guns would shoot flowers from that point on and Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and every freeper ever would collapse into an unstable black hole and disappear forever.

    How do we set this up?

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  6. I've said it before and I'll say it again... when and if "The Revolution" ever breaks out I'll be the first in line to volunteer to fight the "revolutionaries". I will do this for two very good reasons:

    1. Despite all the melodrama, current circumstances are a million miles away from justifying the wholesale slaughter of one's countrymen
    and 2. The revolutionaries have semi-auto AR-15s, a few sets of nominal body armor and all the training they could pick up shooting by themselves in the backwoods, the U.S. Government has hundreds of thousands of troops trained by people who've seen real combat if they haven't seen real combat themselves, full-auto AR-15s, machine guns, bazookas, bombers, tanks, nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers, and other such overwhelming forces. It doesn't exactly take a genius to realize who's gonna win the fight...

    so fuck the revolution, and fuck everyone who's apparently decided that it'd be easier to murder everyone than get off their ass and run for a local political office.

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  7. Yeah, I'm not seeing the freepers lasting very long against those guys that hold up camel spiders for fun souvenir pictures.

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  8. WHY DID YOU DO THAT, PF?! WHY?!?!!! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?!

    *shudder*

    As to the actual post, as Marzie said, very thought-provoking. Spot-on, too.

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Comments are for you guys, not for me. Say what you will. Don't feel compelled to stay on topic, I enjoy it when comments enter Tangentville or veer off into Non Sequitur Town. Just keep it polite, okay?

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