In case you hadn't heard, a bomb has gone off in Moscow's Domedovo airport, killing at least 35 people and injuring hundreds. I was wondering what to post about for this week, and the world did not fail to disappoint. Some days, I really, really wonder why I even get out of bed.
Seriously, what is wrong with people? I don't understand. I don't understand people's desire to harm each other. To kill. To oppress. To fuck each other over. I do. Not. Understand.
I mean, I understand that there's all kinds of factors that can motivate people to do almost anything, and when your day to day life is about nothing more than survival, as it is for billions of people on our planet, everything else becomes secondary to your situation. I get that. I get that there are all kinds of reasons groups of people hate each other -- politics, religion, history.... Most of the time it's history, people fucking each other over for generation after generation after generation. In a lot of places, most people don't even remember what the original offenses were, it's just always been this way. Even if people can recount what Those Others Did, it's frequently hard to see how those Original Offenses still matter, beyond the self-sustaining engine of hate that has continued ever since.
And believe me, I get hate. I have people I hate. People I think are vile, irredeemable pieces of human filth. Some of them I hate even though I don't know them, haven't ever met them, and they've never done anything to me personally -- they've just publicly demonstrated themselves to be vile people. Some of them, it is personal. People who've hurt me deeply, personally and profoundly. People I used to consider close friends.
And I still don't understand this impulse to harm and murder, lie and betray. It just doesn't make a lick of sense to me.
That hate I hold toward other people harms only myself ultimately. Certainly the hate I hold for people I once called friends is primarily directed inward, wondering what is was about me that made people I cared about, and who claimed to care about me be so nasty and vile to me. The only person who suffers for that is me. I work to let it go, and that's very hard.
But harming someone else?
It's almost easier to wrap my head around Jared Lee Loughner, his brain is demonstrably broken. But there are perfectly "sane" people who are more than willing to harm others without much hesitation or remorse, and that's what I just don't get.
Somebody? Anybody? Thoughts?
Monday, January 24, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Purpose, direction, and a new post.
So now I have this blog thing, which means I should probably write in it as often as I can. My promise to myself is to post at least once a week here. For the roughly sixty of you who read the last entry, you'll notice that I didn't quite make it this week, considering last week's posts were put up in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, and here it is Tuesday afternoon or later (depending on where or when you're reading this). I will point out that I did actually make a second post last week, because only about four of you noticed that. To summarize, the second post was a brief comment of disgust at the vile Westboro Baptist "people," followed by an adorable video of bunnies in cups.
Which brings me to my first set of promises about this blog (for those of you following) -- Top of the list is that I will do my best to post here at least once a week. But second is that I will never link directly to any WBC owned site. I appreciate you all too much to expose you to directly to such filth (and I'll be damned if I drive any traffic their way). And my third promise to you, my tiny readership, is that I will never discuss Westboro Baptist here without also including some kind of adorableness involving kittens or bunnies or puppies. I realize that at least one among you is like Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and stands opposed to all things bunny, so since the intent is to counter vileness with cuteness, I'll mix it up from time to time.
In keeping with that third promise (and since I brought up the WBC just now), here's an obscenely cute kitten:
With that out of the way, let's get back to the subject of the purpose and direction of this blog. As evidenced by last week's post, I certainly have political opinions. I've been wanting to start a blog for some time now, and my reaction to the events in Tuscon seemed as good an excuse as any to start. But now that I have, I'm reluctant to make this an explicitly political blog. While I do have very strong opinions about our country, our government and what's going on in the world today, I think not only would I burn out pretty quickly trying to be all political, all the time, I think you all would burn out pretty quickly too. Not to mention, the Internet is already awash in exclusively political blogs of all stripes and colors. It's going to be hard enough to be heard among the maddening crowd, without joining the looniest voices out there.
My intent for myself with this blog is simply to force myself to write more often. Not that there's any shortage of random people prattling on about whatever out here either, but if the Internet isn't about giving any old moron with an ISP or a cell phone a mouthpiece to spew whatever inane babble breezes through their noggin, then what exactly is it for? I mean, aside from porn.
And hey! Look at that! I'm a moron with an ISP and a cell phone.
Which is all a rather rambling, long winded and pointless (in other words, typical me) lead up to the purpose and direction of this post. One of the other projects I'm involved with, in order to encourage myself to write more, is a semi-regular Writing Party hosted by my good friend and fellow writer, Fionnegan Murphy. The idea is that, at the start of the party, a set of randomly generated criteria are provided for those who are participating. Once determined, the writers have two hours to produce something using those criteria.
He's hosted three so far, and this one was the first one I participated in, though due to a scheduling conflict, I had to telecommute, as it were. Well the entries for this round have been posted (see the link above), and they are excellent. We're supposed to put them up anonymously, and people can vote for their favorites in the comments. I actually screwed something up in my submission, and have sent Fionn a corrected manuscript, but I don't know yet if he'll be swapping that out.
Regardless, please go read the submission and vote. I was so engaged by what the party criteria inspired, I will be expanding considerably on my entry. I'll post an update of that here as soon as I finish a full draft and once the submissions have had time to be judged.
Also, please feel free yourselves to comment here, or on any other (I know, there's all of three right now) threads here on the blog. It's not just about me blabbing on about whatever, I want to hear you people blab too. In the comments, below.
Which brings me to my first set of promises about this blog (for those of you following) -- Top of the list is that I will do my best to post here at least once a week. But second is that I will never link directly to any WBC owned site. I appreciate you all too much to expose you to directly to such filth (and I'll be damned if I drive any traffic their way). And my third promise to you, my tiny readership, is that I will never discuss Westboro Baptist here without also including some kind of adorableness involving kittens or bunnies or puppies. I realize that at least one among you is like Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and stands opposed to all things bunny, so since the intent is to counter vileness with cuteness, I'll mix it up from time to time.
In keeping with that third promise (and since I brought up the WBC just now), here's an obscenely cute kitten:
With that out of the way, let's get back to the subject of the purpose and direction of this blog. As evidenced by last week's post, I certainly have political opinions. I've been wanting to start a blog for some time now, and my reaction to the events in Tuscon seemed as good an excuse as any to start. But now that I have, I'm reluctant to make this an explicitly political blog. While I do have very strong opinions about our country, our government and what's going on in the world today, I think not only would I burn out pretty quickly trying to be all political, all the time, I think you all would burn out pretty quickly too. Not to mention, the Internet is already awash in exclusively political blogs of all stripes and colors. It's going to be hard enough to be heard among the maddening crowd, without joining the looniest voices out there.
My intent for myself with this blog is simply to force myself to write more often. Not that there's any shortage of random people prattling on about whatever out here either, but if the Internet isn't about giving any old moron with an ISP or a cell phone a mouthpiece to spew whatever inane babble breezes through their noggin, then what exactly is it for? I mean, aside from porn.
And hey! Look at that! I'm a moron with an ISP and a cell phone.
Which is all a rather rambling, long winded and pointless (in other words, typical me) lead up to the purpose and direction of this post. One of the other projects I'm involved with, in order to encourage myself to write more, is a semi-regular Writing Party hosted by my good friend and fellow writer, Fionnegan Murphy. The idea is that, at the start of the party, a set of randomly generated criteria are provided for those who are participating. Once determined, the writers have two hours to produce something using those criteria.
He's hosted three so far, and this one was the first one I participated in, though due to a scheduling conflict, I had to telecommute, as it were. Well the entries for this round have been posted (see the link above), and they are excellent. We're supposed to put them up anonymously, and people can vote for their favorites in the comments. I actually screwed something up in my submission, and have sent Fionn a corrected manuscript, but I don't know yet if he'll be swapping that out.
Regardless, please go read the submission and vote. I was so engaged by what the party criteria inspired, I will be expanding considerably on my entry. I'll post an update of that here as soon as I finish a full draft and once the submissions have had time to be judged.
Also, please feel free yourselves to comment here, or on any other (I know, there's all of three right now) threads here on the blog. It's not just about me blabbing on about whatever, I want to hear you people blab too. In the comments, below.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Ugh....
These people really are the most vile people on the planet.
Here, have some bunnies:
Here, have some bunnies:
Two Bunnies in Cups - watch more funny videos
Monday, January 10, 2011
Inaugural Post: What we're not talking about
Hello, and welcome. Please pardon the mess while I set up the new blog, but the events that occurred in Arizona this weekend moved me to finally join the the Internet noise machine and try to be heard above the din.
What is now known is that a man named Jared Lee Loughner attended a public event being held by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D. AZ). He then allegedly pulled out a Glock semi-automatic pistol that he had previously purchased legally and opened fire, killing Justice John Roll (63), Christina Taylor Green (9, born 9/11/01), Gifford's community outreach director Gabe Zimmerman (30), Phyllis Schneck (79), Dorothy Morris (76), and Dorwin Stoddard (76), whose last act was to shield his wife from the hail of gunfire. The gunman also critically wounded Rep. Giffords, her chief of staff Ron Barber, aide Pam Simon, Stoddard's wife and ten other people, before being subdued by four bystanders, at least one of whom, a 74 year old retired army colonel, was also among the wounded.
Almost immediately, the noise machine went into its now natural state - overdrive. Many (but nowhere near all) on the left have leapt up to fling the blame at the feet of the vitriolic, eliminationist rhetoric coming out of the mainstreamed extreme right. Meanwhile, those same vitriolic voices so accused have predictably washed their hands of any personal responsibility (irony!) for their routinely violent language[1]. Some, at least, have thankfully tried to point out that Loughner's politics are irrelevant. Even if he was not mentally unbalanced, which he clearly was, it doesn't matter if he considered himself D or R. Gunfire is an unacceptable form of communication.
And while little information has come out about the gunman, it is clear that his actions were the product of a very dysfunctional brain. Nothing more, nothing less. Posts and videos attributed to him are paranoid and incoherent, and it is difficult to parse anything from them, let alone a political leaning.
But even that seems to me to be ignoring a larger point that so far I have only seen Harry Shearer touch on - that we used to have a public mental health care system in this country, flawed as it may have been. As Shearer notes, the system had its problems. Those problems were used to lead the charge to shut the system down. The argument was made that they should be replaced by local, community mental health centers that would "provide better care." Well, the system was shut down, but the community centers never materialized.
Of course, they never materialized because those kinds of systems are difficult to maintain and fund in a decentralized fashion. One of the things our Federal government is supposed to do is fund and maintain the large, centralized systems required to operate things the public needs, but that private industry cannot, will not, or should not be operating in a for profit manner.
It seems to me we are faced with a choice in this country. Yes there is much to be said for "rugged individualism," for pulling one's self up by the bootstraps. But there is also something to be said for looking out for one another. And while we can and should do that on an individual basis, to really be effective in a meaningful way, much of this "looking out for each other" needs to be managed at a federal level. Which in turn means it needs to be paid for. I know taxes are a burden, and money is tight, but for my own part I do not begrudge the money I am forcibly parted with to care for other people who are strangers to me. Some of them might be trying to unfairly game the system, but most are not. I do not begrudge this because there may come a day when I need to avail myself of those same services.
Those taxes I pay also go for things I'm not terribly happy to be paying for, but that comes with the territory. I fear that in our current political climate, we will have to go back to old and poor people dying in the streets in droves before we remember why we decided we needed better social support systems.
Benjamin Franklin once said "We must, indeed, hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately." He spoke those words to the Second Continental Congress, to urge the bickering body to put their grievances aside and unite behind a desperate, controversial and contentious act -- declaring that we were no longer going to answer to the mightiest monarch on the planet, but that we would make our own way. Then, as now, many disagreed vehemently about who we were as a nation. But Franklin's point is as valid now as it was then -- if we let our differences divide us, if we refuse to come together collectively for each others' sakes, our doom is certain. Without question.
There is no way to know if having a public mental health system would have prevented Mr. Loughner's tragic act of violence. And we have no way to guarantee that some of the same problems that plagued the old system wouldn't still exist in any new public mental health system. And, of course, we can't really have a public mental health system in this country without having a public health system.
But I refuse to accept that those problems mean the whole issue is intractable. That government is incompetent and cannot be trusted to provide public services. Certainly private business is no less corrupt, incompetent and incapable of providing a public service - they are by definition at odds to such a thing. The whole point about public services is that they need to be public. Many of them are difficult to make a profit on, and generally when a profit can be made in such circumstances, it is of a predatory nature or of questionable ethics. I'll take some government over none, and certainly over unfettered, unregulated free-for-all-enterprise.
We're clearly having some serious problems getting along with each other and trying to do things together. But if we don't start looking out for each other, if we continue down this "every man for himself" path we seem to have set ourselves upon, most assuredly we will all hang separately.
h/t to Brooke for the post title
[1] UPDATE: When I started writing this blog post this morning, Fox News' front page seemed to have thrown down the gauntlet about their right to be unrepentantly appalling, and the whole splash page took a hyper-defensive tone. Now the entire tenor of their coverage has toned down considerably. Even Glenn Beck has released an "open letter" that seems quite reasonable.
What is now known is that a man named Jared Lee Loughner attended a public event being held by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D. AZ). He then allegedly pulled out a Glock semi-automatic pistol that he had previously purchased legally and opened fire, killing Justice John Roll (63), Christina Taylor Green (9, born 9/11/01), Gifford's community outreach director Gabe Zimmerman (30), Phyllis Schneck (79), Dorothy Morris (76), and Dorwin Stoddard (76), whose last act was to shield his wife from the hail of gunfire. The gunman also critically wounded Rep. Giffords, her chief of staff Ron Barber, aide Pam Simon, Stoddard's wife and ten other people, before being subdued by four bystanders, at least one of whom, a 74 year old retired army colonel, was also among the wounded.
Almost immediately, the noise machine went into its now natural state - overdrive. Many (but nowhere near all) on the left have leapt up to fling the blame at the feet of the vitriolic, eliminationist rhetoric coming out of the mainstreamed extreme right. Meanwhile, those same vitriolic voices so accused have predictably washed their hands of any personal responsibility (irony!) for their routinely violent language[1]. Some, at least, have thankfully tried to point out that Loughner's politics are irrelevant. Even if he was not mentally unbalanced, which he clearly was, it doesn't matter if he considered himself D or R. Gunfire is an unacceptable form of communication.
And while little information has come out about the gunman, it is clear that his actions were the product of a very dysfunctional brain. Nothing more, nothing less. Posts and videos attributed to him are paranoid and incoherent, and it is difficult to parse anything from them, let alone a political leaning.
But even that seems to me to be ignoring a larger point that so far I have only seen Harry Shearer touch on - that we used to have a public mental health care system in this country, flawed as it may have been. As Shearer notes, the system had its problems. Those problems were used to lead the charge to shut the system down. The argument was made that they should be replaced by local, community mental health centers that would "provide better care." Well, the system was shut down, but the community centers never materialized.
Of course, they never materialized because those kinds of systems are difficult to maintain and fund in a decentralized fashion. One of the things our Federal government is supposed to do is fund and maintain the large, centralized systems required to operate things the public needs, but that private industry cannot, will not, or should not be operating in a for profit manner.
It seems to me we are faced with a choice in this country. Yes there is much to be said for "rugged individualism," for pulling one's self up by the bootstraps. But there is also something to be said for looking out for one another. And while we can and should do that on an individual basis, to really be effective in a meaningful way, much of this "looking out for each other" needs to be managed at a federal level. Which in turn means it needs to be paid for. I know taxes are a burden, and money is tight, but for my own part I do not begrudge the money I am forcibly parted with to care for other people who are strangers to me. Some of them might be trying to unfairly game the system, but most are not. I do not begrudge this because there may come a day when I need to avail myself of those same services.
Those taxes I pay also go for things I'm not terribly happy to be paying for, but that comes with the territory. I fear that in our current political climate, we will have to go back to old and poor people dying in the streets in droves before we remember why we decided we needed better social support systems.
Benjamin Franklin once said "We must, indeed, hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately." He spoke those words to the Second Continental Congress, to urge the bickering body to put their grievances aside and unite behind a desperate, controversial and contentious act -- declaring that we were no longer going to answer to the mightiest monarch on the planet, but that we would make our own way. Then, as now, many disagreed vehemently about who we were as a nation. But Franklin's point is as valid now as it was then -- if we let our differences divide us, if we refuse to come together collectively for each others' sakes, our doom is certain. Without question.
There is no way to know if having a public mental health system would have prevented Mr. Loughner's tragic act of violence. And we have no way to guarantee that some of the same problems that plagued the old system wouldn't still exist in any new public mental health system. And, of course, we can't really have a public mental health system in this country without having a public health system.
But I refuse to accept that those problems mean the whole issue is intractable. That government is incompetent and cannot be trusted to provide public services. Certainly private business is no less corrupt, incompetent and incapable of providing a public service - they are by definition at odds to such a thing. The whole point about public services is that they need to be public. Many of them are difficult to make a profit on, and generally when a profit can be made in such circumstances, it is of a predatory nature or of questionable ethics. I'll take some government over none, and certainly over unfettered, unregulated free-for-all-enterprise.
We're clearly having some serious problems getting along with each other and trying to do things together. But if we don't start looking out for each other, if we continue down this "every man for himself" path we seem to have set ourselves upon, most assuredly we will all hang separately.
h/t to Brooke for the post title
[1] UPDATE: When I started writing this blog post this morning, Fox News' front page seemed to have thrown down the gauntlet about their right to be unrepentantly appalling, and the whole splash page took a hyper-defensive tone. Now the entire tenor of their coverage has toned down considerably. Even Glenn Beck has released an "open letter" that seems quite reasonable.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)