Overwhelming Weirdness

On June 30th of this year, yet another tragedy of American gun culture occurred.  Allow me to set the stage and relay the story as best I can without turning it into the fisherman’s yarn so many are want to create.

Tomorio Walton, a drug addict from Tennessee, absconded from his parole with just a month left to go.  Why he did so, the world will never know.  His faulty reasoning, driven by his quest for another ‘fix,’ is much like another great question our time; “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?”  The world may never know.

However, we do know this: He ended up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  He also ended up in the company of one Mr. Skyy Barrs.  Mr. Barrs understood Mr. Walton’s plight quite well and, as so many with drug connections do, offered Mr. Walton a way out of his predicament.  It goes a little something like this:

“Sure, dude, I can get you hooked up.  But you’re going to do something for me first.  You’re going to rob some mother fuckers for me, and if you get your ass caught, that’s on you.  You do the crime and the time.  I’m the man with your fix, and you’re nothing but a street slave bitch.  Now get your fuckin’ ass out there and earn your keep, bitch!”

Mr. Walton’s drug problem had already given him a long history with law enforcement in Tennessee, and so he understood Mr. Barrs’ offer for help depicted above for what it was; a business arrangement.  The actual language annunciated may differ from the ‘suit and tie’ white men of the corporate board rooms of this world, but that’s the only difference.  One party is always the ‘man with the fix,’ the other party is the ‘street slave bitch.’

Mr. Barrs drove Mr. Walton to a local Motel 6, gave him a gun, and told him to get out there and earn his keep.  Like any dutiful independent contractor, Mr. Walton obeyed.  He hung out in the parking lot waiting for a good mark and eventually thought he saw one in Ms. Lynn Russell.  He approached her and asked for a cigarette in order to case her out a bit.  She said she didn’t have one and returned to her room where her husband, Mr. Chuck De Caro, awaited.  Mr. Walton waited some more.  He waited and sweat, and then he waited and sweat some more.  “God, if I can only get one more bump, I’ll quit the shit.  Help me, God.  Please, just help me get high one more time.”

Then, as if all of his prayers were answered, Ms. Russell emerged again and Mr. Walton acted.  He jumped Ms. Russell.  He grabbed her and pushed her back into the room, whereupon he brandished his weapon and demanded their ‘valuables.’

At this point, the only thing I know comes from the fish story apparently told by Mr. De Caro to a friend of his.  This friend related the story to me and then, no more than 24 hours later, I heard him relate the story to someone else.  Within that span, the fish story had grown some more.  This is what I was told:

Mr. Walton forced his way into the room and demanded all of their money and valuables.  Ms. Russell…

Wait, I have to go back a bit and give you one critical piece of information.  Both Mr. De Caro and Ms. Russell are licensed ‘conceal carry’ gun owners.  “Them folks is just waiting’ fer the wild west to come knocking’ at their door.”  Well, it did.

So back to the story.  In a feigned effort to exhibit compliance with Mr. Walton’s demand, Ms. Russell retrieved her purse, opened it to make certain her gun was in it, and handed it to her husband.  She reportedly said to him “There’s something in there you may want.”

Apparently, she was correct.  Mr. De Caro looked in, grabbed the gun, pointed it at Mr. Walton, and the wild west came crashing into the Motel 6 with several loud bangs.  Mr. De Caro and Mr. Walton exchanged gunfire for less than four seconds.  Mr. De Caro was hit three times, but luckily, his injuries did not end in his death.  He was rushed to a local hospital, underwent surgery, and is expected to make a full recovery.  I believe he was released on or about July 15th.

Mr. Walton was not so lucky.  He too was hit several times.  He stumbled back out of the hotel room [through the swinging doors of the saloon] and died in a pool of his own blood in the parking lot [in the dusty streets of this wild west town].  He was rushed to the morgue.

Shhhhhhhhhhh.  Allow the silence at the end of that last paragraph to have its fifteen seconds of fame.

What are we left with here?  What is the sum total of this tragic event?

Mr. Walton was no angel, this is evident.  Mr. Walton’s need for drugs lead him into confrontations with the law several times; from his first theft charges in 2007 to his last burglary charge in 2014.  That’s what drug addiction does; it destroys what is otherwise a good life, and leaves the addict pleading for the ‘mercy of the court.’  The courts of law may extend some and often do, but the court of human disdain which emanates from consumerist gun culture has none, and so the addict goes on in an ever-downward spiral until either God leads them to a group of people filled with compassion and a willingness to help in any way they can, or………..or the enemy leads them to a Motel 6.

Tomorio Walton was committing a felony crime on June 30th, but he did not deserve to be executed in that hotel room.  This is why I placed the word ‘valuables’ in quotation marks above, for it stands as a stark delineation of what we hold as valuable.  Were their cash on-hand and diamond rings worth more than Tomorio Walton’s life?  I argue ‘no,’ but Ms. Russell and the proponents of gun culture in this country apparently argue ‘yes.’

Ms. Russell is quoted in a story after the gunfight at the OK Corral as saying “The second amendment saved my life.”  Nothing could be further from the truth, Ms. Russell.  In fact, the maniacal interpretation of the second amendment which is popular with the right wing in this country (‘bear arms’ means carry them with you always) resulted in your husband nearly being killed, and another man actually being killed.

Both Mr. De Caro and Ms. Russell have enough worldly experience to know that Mr. Walton had no intention of killing them or even harming them.  He entered their room with a preponderance of force in order to insure compliance with his demand for money and ‘valuables.’  They both knew this, but spun the yarn of guns saving their lives in order to justify their killing of another junkie in need of a fix.  Tragic on both ends if you ask me.

Jesus teaches us that the only way we can bring about the ascension of man to be closer to God is to react to this world in the ways opposite of what the world teaches us.  This, of course, is not easy.  Jesus’ sermon contains enemy love, compassion for the trials of your brother, and forgiveness of sins as a way of life, and if you do not attempt to practice these things as a way of life, you certainly won’t exhibit them in a momentary flash in which you find yourself looking down the barrel of a gun.

It is not easy, and I cannot say with absolute certainty that I could follow his lead in such a moment.  I hope that I could…and would.

Still, we each have the chance to choose that better way, and Mr. De Caro and Ms. Russell had the chance to either reduce the cycle of violence in their midst or escalate it in the name of their diamond rings.  They chose to escalate it, and now another man is dead at the flashing of guns in America.

Tomorio Walton’s death is a tragedy all around.  It was the end of a troubled life that could have someday become a shining light of victory over the evil of this world.  It was the death of another man who was loved by friends and family members more than the proponents of gun culture could ever care to know.  Also, now we have another man who must go to bed every night haunted by the memory of the night he killed another man.  God did not make us for that.  He made us to lift each other, not kill each other.

Lastly, I have to take a look at the balance sheet of winners and losers here.  Who won in this tragic sequence of events?  Satan won.  He and his demon servants licked their chops as everything fell into place: The acquisition of gun carry permits, the drug addiction of Mr. Walton, his flight from Tennessee, his acquaintance with Mr. Barrs, the drive to the Motel 6, Tomorio’s taking of the gun from him.  When the guns began blazing, they jumped for joy.  When Tomorio’s life expired they gave each other high fives and chest bumps.

God, at the other end of the balance sheet, wept.

Peace and Love to all,

Niemand

You can only live with the pain of concealment so long before you have to stand up in front of your family, your friends, your enemies, and God, and state what you are.  If you do not, you will go to your death bed a miserable human being who was always able, but never willing, to reach their full potential.  God wants each of us, as his beloved children, to reach our full potential, so, for His sake if nothing else, we must blossom and love ourselves in the open.

And so, I have decided that I cannot live in the shadows any longer.  I am ‘coming out of the closet’ right here, right now.  Ready?  Okay, here it goes…

I am a Socialist!  There, I said it!  It’s done.

Whew, I feel better, and it really wasn’t that difficult.  Looking back on it, I’m wondering ‘what was the big deal?’

Now that I’m out, I understand that my parents, and maybe some of you reading this piece right now, would prefer that I came out as a gay man.  Being gay, after all, is more ‘socially’ acceptable than being a socialist.

Please do not mistake my meaning here.  I know very well that our brothers and sisters in the LGBT community are subjected to discrimination every day that I, as a white male heterosexual socialist follower of Jesus, will never know as long as the tea party is kept in check (although today the supreme court struck a wonderful blow to the bigotry our LGBT friends have had to face in marriage equality).

What I am saying, is that if you’re at a party and someone mentions me and you say “Did you know he’s gay?” the person to whom you are speaking will brush it off as “Oh, well, that’s cool,” and then perhaps continue with a wink, a nudge, and a chuckle; “I mean who isn’t when you get down to it, right?”

However, if you say “Did you know he’s a socialist?”  They will look around for me with disdain and start thinking all sorts of weird James Bond shit.  They’ll think things like, “I’ll root out that red mole bastard and turn his ass over to the Un-American Activities Committee myself.  I’ll be a damned hero!”

You’ll keep talking to them, but they’ll have checked out.  Their eyes will gloss over and they’ll start swimming in an imaginary, fantastical future in which the next republican president will give them a medal and a ticker tape parade…just for turning me in!  Unfortunately for your friend (and fortunately for the rest of us), the next republican president is about 18 years out at least, so…good luck to them.

Back down to earth.

I’m going to pause for just a minute and allow some of you reading this who are still trying to cope with the horrible news of my political orientation to tell me what I believe and list off the Stalinist ideas for which I stand.  You can yell it if you like, I’ll just sit back and take it.  However, when you’re done telling me what I believe, I’m going to turn the table upside down and tell you what I believe, and list many of the social and political ideals for which I stand.  That, after all, seems right, doesn’t it?

Okay, ready?  Go!

……………………………………………………

Wow, it felt good to get that anger off your chest didn’t it?  Now that you’ve ranted about what I believe, let me tell you what I believe:

I believe all people should be treated as equals before the law.  That means, among other things, that members of the gay community can marry and enjoy all of the benefits that emanate therefrom.  That means that people of color should not be subjected to any sort of racial discrimination; individual, institutional, or otherwise.  It also means that women should be treated as equals in this world and not subjected to gender discrimination; individual, institutional, or otherwise.

News flash for white men: You sound more than just a little childish when you cry you are being oppressed by other people when they gain the rights which you have enjoyed as privilege for centuries.

I believe health care and education are a human right and should be universally provided to the nation. From this, I believe that the strength of a nation flows from these twin fountains of human progress.  These two aspects of human right and need are the areas in which we should spend the vast majority of our tax dollars.  The benefits to our country and, indeed, the entire world can hardly be either quantified or qualified, for people who are healthy and educated are tax revenue creators.  People who are continually sick and uneducated are tax revenue consumers.  You do the math.

Likewise,

I believe that any country that spends as much money on the weapons of death as the United States of America does will find death to be its reward.  Military spending as bloated and out of proportion to other expenditures of government as we have causes several things to happen, two of which are; First, the state, in order to justify such expenditures must continually create enemies and threats to the safety of the nation.  Second, the economy of any country that spends as much of its money on weapons as does the United States will eventually collapse from the weight of this hatred.

Therefore

I believe it to be falsehood that the strength of a nation is in any way tied to the state’s ability to bring a preponderance of firepower to any situation.  This is a reflection of the power of the state, not the nation.  In fact, these two entities are always opposed to each other and a rise in the power of one necessitates a decline in the power of the other.  A powerful nation is one that is healthy and well educated.  A powerful state requires a nation of people who are sick and uneducated; this is the most assured means of continuous and expanding control.

I believe that diplomacy always trumps force.  Diplomacy is the best reflection of how healthy, educated adults solve their differences.  They approach each other with the foreknowledge that each side sees any conflict from their own perspective and that the truth lies lies somewhere in between.  From this, a solution workable and acceptable to all sides is then achieved.  Nobody dies, and control of the situation is always shared and maintained.  Force is the best reflection of how third grade boys settle differences after school, or on the playground at recess.

I believe that it is not a fundamental right to carry firearms with you at all times.  Of course, this argument falls apart if you are Conan the Barbarian and live in a world illustrated by Frank Frazetta.  We do not live in such a world, and therefore, I do not believe the the right to keep arms as expressed in the Constitution of the United States of America extends to bearing them with you at all times.  This only makes the world a more dangerous place.

News flash for white men: Guns do not keep a people free.  It is the will to be free that keeps a person or people free.  It is voting your conscience that keeps you free.  Guns have nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with death.

I believe every abortion is a tragedy.  I also believe that it is a woman’s right to choose that option if her conscience allows it.  I also believe that the most effective means by which to prevent abortion is accurate and comprehensive sex education in our schools, as well as easy and universal access to contraception.

For all but a minuscule percentage of the population, sexual activity is an inevitability; therefore, our young people must be taught the potential results of, and the responsibilities regarding sexual activity.  We cannot leave this to mom and dad; in 99% of all families they won’t do it right, and we’ll end up with more unwanted pregnancies, more abortions, and teenaged mothers abandoned and/or beaten by teenaged dads.

I believe that a republic functioning by the democratic process is the best form of government.  I also believe that the United States of America no longer fits that description (if it ever did, which is in doubt).  The United States of America is now a corporate oligarchy.

As part of this, I believe that the greatest threat to what is left of what may have been our political heritage is the tea party and their allies in the fundamentalist christian right wing.  It is an alliance of evil and we see the results of what their intentions for this country are every day in their legislated war against women, minorities, the poor, and the planet; all of which are the very people and things Jesus commanded us to protect.  I used to think the tea party and the ‘christian right’ wanted to take this country back in time to the 1950s.  I was wrong and I apologize.  I now understand that they want to take this country back in time to the 1850s.

I believe that voting and the ability to affect the political system under which one lives is a human right.  From this I believe that no person legally allowed to vote should be denied the right to do so.  The draconian voter ID laws the far right in this country are enacting are nothing more than an attempt to deny the poor their human and constitutional right to vote.  They have falsely created ‘voter fraud’ problems in order to disenfranchise an entire class of people.

I believe that Hitler and Stalin were both totalitarian assholes.  These people and others like them were crazy, power-hungry shit heads.  They were not socialists.

I believe Thomas Jefferson was a total bad ass.  Aside from owning slaves.

I believe Pope Francis I is a total bad ass.  Almost makes me wish I was catholic.

I belive in and support the union movement.  The right of the workers to organize in order to secure for themselves and their families a fair wage, retirement benefits, health benefits, and job security against the brutality of the ‘at will’ employment culture is just that; a right.

However, the membership of such organizations must be ever aware of the potential for corruption in the leadership, and not allow it.  They must also understand that moderation in their demands on employers creates a lasting and truly productive union movement.

I believe that both the republican and democratic parties have an interest in the creation of a permanent under-class in this country.

I believe in the redistribution of wealth.  I believe in this not to the point that comrade Marx might find justifiable; making everyone equal in the eyes of their bank accounts, but rather to the extent that we can make equality and opportunity truly available to all people in this country.  I believe the words once spoken by supreme court justice Louis Brandeis: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have its wealth concentrated in the hands of the very few, but we cannot have both.”  I’ll take the democracy, please.

Lastly, I cannot conclude this piece without a word or two…hundred on taxation.

I believe in a progressive tax system, meaning the the richest pay the most and the poorest pay the least.  I also believe that in terms of the total amount of revenue taken in by the government, this country may be just about well financed.  There are loopholes for the wealthy that must be closed, loopholes for the poor that must be expanded, and gigantic corporations must have their loopholes completely shut down.

It is a falsehood to create a correlation between the personal taxes on the wealthy and job creation.  If a person owns a business, give their business the tax incentives necessary to create more jobs and generate more wealth.  To cut the personal taxes on the individual merely concentrates wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, helping to create the corporate oligarchy under which we now live.

The ‘flat tax’ proponents offer nothing more that an attempt to shift the revenue burden from the wealthy to the ever shrinking middle-class and the poor. This is also done by shifting revenue acquisition to licensing and fees.  The poor cannot afford this, the wealthy can, and so it is done.

I believe America can be a great country someday.

I believe in what Jesus taught.  Both the state and the church should take responsibility for caring for the widows, orphans, and the least of these in general.  After all, as we do to them, so we have done to Him.

I believe that the institutional christian church has lost its way and has become concerned almost solely with that which only Satan can give it; political power and influence.  It has forgotten the design for living Jesus outlined for us in the ‘sermon on the mount.’  If the institutional evangelical christian church in America is still part of the body of Christ, it’s the asshole.

I believe lots of other things too..but I’m going to leave it at that for now.

Peace and Love to all,

Niemand

I’m not changing any damned names, because privacy doesn’t matter any more as far as this piece is concerned.  Besides, Alex Gibbs deserves to have the world know him.  This anonymous man who took his own life just over 24 hours ago deserves to have people know who he was.

Alex didn’t have a chance in this world.  From the time he was four years old until he was fifteen, he was shuffled, alone, between twenty-three different foster homes.  TWENTY-THREE DIFFERENT FOSTER HOMES!

This constant moving between adults who would bring him into their home, smile at him and say “We love you, Alex.  Welcome to our family,” and then several months later ship him off to someone else who would tell him the same lie with the same false smile destroyed him.  It destroyed what God wants for each of us: to simply be loved and be able to love: to be able to connect.

Alex’s ability to love and connect with others was destroyed, and as this destruction set in and became more and more a major part of him, he became mentally ill.  Try to imagine yourself in those little shoes of the childhood Alex had to endure.  As you can imagine, Alex’s mental illness often expressed itself as anger, and I don’t blame him.  Who can blame the child who lives in a world of false and temporary love from being angry?  Who can blame him for lashing out at a world that seems so unfair?  You think the world’s unfair, Alex?  No shit!

Alex lived in twenty-three different foster homes.  I’m sure that many of these were, indeed, loving environments.  The families seeking to give what they could to children who have so little.  Unfortunately, I am just as sure that many of these homes were nightmarish hell-holes in which Alex was physically beaten and abused in every manner imaginable; verbally, emotionally, spiritually, and yes, sexually.  You think the world’s unfair, Alex?  No shit!

When he was fifteen he was adopted by one of his foster parents.  Alex entered this home angry, abused, cast aside and shipped out so many times he probably didn’t care anymore.  Adopted?  So what.  These people would just get rid of him soon enough.  Were they qualified to adopt a child with the afflictions Alex carried inside of him?  I don’t know the answer to that, but I suspect that they weren’t.

Not long after he was adopted, Alex molested his twelve-year old sister.  To their credit, this family, who had compassion for Alex because of his history, did what the law required them to do (inform the police), but they also hired an attorney to defend Alex as he entered the vengeance system (We no longer have a ‘legal system’ in this country.  We now have what has degenerated into a zero-tolerance, zero-compassion ‘vengeance system.’).

The attorney collected his healthy fee, and smiled as Alex was shipped off into the “juvenile justice system.”  He would spend the remaining time until he was eighteen in juvenile detention, whereupon, he would be spat out into the world as an adult: battered, bruised, uneducated, mentally ill, scared to death, and of course, now a registered sex offender.  You think the world’s unfair Alex?  No shit!

Alex drifted, homeless as you might imagine, but eventually God led him to Joe’s Addiction.  Over almost half a year, Alex drifted in and out of Community with us, until finally settling in and believing, as best he could, I hope, that we loved him.  We did.  We did as best we could.  Alex had issues and we knew it.  Hell, who doesn’t.

In talking to my best friend about this I said “God knew this day would come.  He knew that Alex would find himself at the crossroads of life and death and hope he would choose life.  He led Alex to Joe’s for this very purpose, to show him that there is always hope, and there are people who truly love you for whoever you are…there’s a family for you.  But Alex couldn’t see it.  Alex couldn’t grab onto that hope.  All he could see was hopeless darkness.  So much so that he didn’t even know it was a tunnel with light at the end.  He just thought it was the universe as it’s supposed to be.  The kingdom was at hand, and he couldn’t see it enough to reach out and take hold of it.

So, early on morning of June 5th, 2015, Alex was found hanging from a tree in the forest in which he lived.

I’m lucky.  Aside from the occasional ‘hi’ and ‘how are you,’ the last thing I said to Alex was “We love you.”  Although this was preceded by a talk about the shop rules and not going off on the barista if they ask you to turn your phone down.  Still, the talk was with compassion and respect, and concluded with “we love you.”

We love you Alex, and I’m so sorry for all you had to endure at the hands of America.

So, here’s the part that pisses me off.  Josh Duggar will go on.  He’ll have jobs, homes, all the trappings of this evil world, and Alex is gone.  Josh Duggar will never live in a tent hidden in a forest and, more than likely, he will never have to hive with the scarlet letters “S.O.” branded on his forehead.  I don’t know what to say beyond that other than “You think the world is unfair, Alex? No shit!”

Alex, we will miss you.  In the end, God made sure you had what you needed; people who loved you.  Rest in peace in the Father’s loving arms, my friend.

Love and peace to all,

Niemand

I cannot go any longer without writing a small piece on the ‘scandal,’ as it were, surrounding Josh Duggar.  I don’t know how organized I can keep this piece, since the information, opinions, experiences, anger, sadness, etcetera are swimming around in my head like little fish in an aquarium.

I’m writing this because there are several things that trouble me.  What I want to mention first is the rush to characterize Mr. Duggar as a ‘predator,’ or a ‘pedophile.’  He may be one of those, or both, but I would have to see the results of extensive psychological testing directed at making such a determination before I can then make any claim one way or another.  I will return to this subject later in this piece.

Believe it or not, the fact that Mr. Duggar molested several little girls does not, although it points in that direction, immediately qualify him as either.  This would be true if he were an adult, but it is especially true given the fact that he was was fourteen and fifteen years old at the time of the offenses.  I was once fourteen (and fifteen for that matter) and I can tell you now that my hormones were beginning to undergo many changes as I stood at the gates of those delirious years known commonly as puberty.  I am certain that every adult reading this piece experienced the same.

I am not condoning Mr. Duggar’s actions, or giving him some sort of ‘pass’ because of his age, but when I look at the patriarchal cultural environment in which he was raised; an environment in which men feel they have the right to exercise unquestionable and absolute authority over women, I am saddened more than outraged.  I look at this fourteen year old boy entering puberty and how he was taught, by observation if nothing else, to consider girls (and females as a whole) as ‘things’ that are there to satisfy his wants and I am saddened.  I am definitely saddened for his victims, but I also feel sadness for him.

Our healthy and undeniable sense of right and wrong are born into us.  God gives us this gift; this imprinted, internalized knowledge of how we are to look upon and treat others.  We know what this looks like even as adults tainted by the world in which we live.  It looks like the look in a child’s eyes of immediate acceptance of others even in all of our imperfections; expressed in the unwavering look of “Hey, how are you? You want to be friends!?”  It is the look of the love God wants us all to live and share.

My wife and I once bought a t-shirt for our daughter when she was in either kindergarten or the first grade that had a picture on the front of a white and black child embracing each other and smiling.  It also had the sentence “Nobody is born a bigot” below the picture.  Truer words were never spoken.

We, then, as adults, have the opportunity to either help our children fulfill the promise of that gift, or twist it into some grotesque, self-serving image of what it should be; of what it once was.  When we twist this gift of God into a curse of human passions, our children become the Quasimodo-like foot soldiers of the imperial free-market theocracy we seem destined to leave as our legacy.  We end up with war, economic exploitation, sexual exploitation, slavery, and a list of evils too lengthy to even begin to catalog.  We end up with a minimized image of God that supports all of these and is, since we have then succeeded in re-creating Him in our image, as seduced by them as we are.

The adults in the lives of Josh Duggar and his victims did just this.  They twisted the beautiful sense of right and wrong God births into us into something completely unrecognizable; something truly ugly.  They removed all True ‘right’ from the moral equation, retained only the ‘wrong,’ and then pressed this into their children as what is ‘right.’  They then reenforced this evil manipulation of God’s desire for us by characterizing at as His will; as ‘Biblical.’  That, my friends, is the overwhelming weirdness of this tragedy.  Sadly, they weren’t the first to do this and they won’t be the last.

In the patriarchal freak show they created, once Mr. Duggar’s crimes became known, the concern was for him, not his victims.  Who cared for the victims?  No one within their ‘faith.’  They were taught, through a truly ugly manipulation of the Godly act of forgiveness, to get over it.  When I think about what these girls have had to go through; not only as victims of the immediate act of Mr. Duggar’s molestation, but especially the manner in which their pain, confusion, and needs were marginalized afterwards, by their family no less, my sadness begins to turn to anger.

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I do need to return to Mr. Duggar for bit.  Although I am troubled by the fact that he grew up in an environment that would seem to, if not actually condone his actions, at least make certain that he was not held accountable for them, I am more troubled by the fact that he had multiple victims.

Mr. Duggar needs to be examined, over a lengthy period of time, by a professional psychologist or psychiatrist regarding his sexually deviant behavior to determine the extent to which he may be at risk for committing any such acts in the future.  He may pose no risk to anyone.  This may have been a pubescent hunger fueled by his environment.   Then again, he may pose a great risk; he may be walking around cloaking his deviant desires beneath a shroud of avoidance of shame and guilt that is certain to fail at some point in the future.  If he poses such a risk, he must either voluntarily, or be compelled if necessary, to find a way to minimize this risk; not within the male-domination common practice of his family’s theology, but within the larger world.  After all, it is within this larger world that he exists.

I sincerely hope that Mr. Duggar is not a sexual predator (in which case all women are at risk to be sexually assaulted by him), or a pedophile (in which case all children, especially girls, given his history, are at risk to be sexually assaulted by him).  These are psychological conditions I wouldn’t wish on anybody, if for no other reason than the harm done to others as a result of their expression when left untreated.

*****************

Lastly, in terms of what actually occurred, although I have not the requisite information to accurately characterize him as either a sexual predator or a pedophile, I do condemn Mr. Duggar for what he did.  Mr. Duggar knew right from wrong, for although the adults in his life twisted the ‘knowledge of right and wrong’ gift God gives us, we all know that His gift always survives within us in its true essence.  God is too powerful and loving for us to ever completely destroy His work.  Mr. Duggar made choices, and those choices were his and his alone.  Those choices were counter to what he knew was right and hurt these girls and others.

As I stated earlier in this piece, all adults reading this have passed through the crucible of puberty.  These years contain the genetic/hormonal changes that take us, in a purely physical manner, from childhood to adulthood.  We exist in this strange transitional state in which the curiosities of childhood meet the desires of adulthood.  The body is changing so quickly that our psychological and emotional selves cannot keep pace.  When this happens we end up with…teenagers.  Yes, that’s right, the dreaded scourge of all parental tranquility; the teenager.

However, the vast majority of pubescent teenagers are able to process the curiosity/desire matrix through a filter that will lead them to not molest children, but rather stumble through these years of discovery and confusion with someone their own age who is experiencing the same physical and psychological pushes and pulls.  Mr. Duggar either did/does not possess this filter, or saw it as not part of the ‘biblical’ traditions to which his parents taught him he was entitled.  Both of these are dangerous, but the latter is by far the most dangerous.

Parents create the environments in which their children learn how to live within the larger world.  Two major environments are the degrees to which children grow in love and understanding, or shame and guilt.  Depending on the balance of the ‘love and understanding’ or ‘shame and guilt’ home environment created by the parents, we end up with several different outcomes to this teenaged, pubescent stumbling:

In a home environment based upon love and understanding we have initially uncomfortable conversations between parents and children about the dangers and responsibilities of approaching physical adulthood and the eventual inevitability of becoming sexually active.  The results of the conversations fostered by this ‘love and understanding’ environment are teenaged boys who respect themselves and girls, and girls who respect themselves and boys.  Neither are generally promiscuous and both know about birth control.

The result of a ‘shame and guilt’ home environment are no such conversations.  Rather, society ends up with teenage boys who look down on girls and girls who end up pregnant at the abortion clinic their parents are trying to shut down.

Peace and Love to all,

Niemand

Names have been changed to protect privacy…

I once called my friend and personal Jimminy Cricket, Jacqueline, while working at Joe’s Addiction and said to her simply; “There is no end to them.”  She knew exactly what I meant and replied; “No, Chris, there isn’t.”

“Them” is the afflicted of this world; the widows and orphans our society creates at a faster pace than we can ever hope to help them.  “Them” are like the people of the eastern world our country kills in our name.  For every person they claim to be my enemy they kill, two more of these “enemies” are created.

As an aside, let me state the following from a political perspective: I firmly believe that the state, especially in a republic which purports to function on a broad set of democratic principles, does not possess the right to tell any citizen who their enemy is.  Each citizen possesses, as a natural right endowed by their Creator, the right to decide who their enemy is.  I do not consider the muslims of this world to be my enemies, and so the United States government does not possess the right to tell me they are.

The world of humans as resources that exist for the sole purpose of maintaining shareholder value creates the afflicted faster that we can help them.  Therefore, the statement is true; there is, indeed, no end to them.  The only person that could have solved the problem of the widows, orphans, afflicted, and outcasts of this world was the Christ, and He remains the only one who can do it.  We can only beg His assistance as we try to do as He would have us do; watch over those we can, and serve those we can.

On May 5th of this year, I was driving south on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. in Oklahoma City and was sitting at a red light at the I-40 Junction when I glanced to my right and saw an orphan.  He was a man of undeterminable age from where I sat, but I perceived him to be in his late twenties.  He wore a dirty, dark t-shirt, and modern rain resistant pants that looked to be either dark blue or black.

The man was unwashed and dirty from head to toe.  He was walking south toward the same junction at which I sat and walked as if he were either mentally ill or recovering from a high of some sort.  It was the plodding walk of a man both largely unaware of, and decidedly unconcerned about his surroundings.  I know he was dirty from head to toe because his head, from his hair to his skin, was covered in old dirt and he wore no shoes.  His feet were filthy, and the bottoms of his feet epitomized of his overall appearance.

I sat there, watching him, thinking “What could I possibly do for this man?  I have four dollars in my wallet, and if I give that to him, I am certain he will spend it on his next adventurous journey to the outskirts of Galaxy X.  There’s nothing I can do for him.”  The light turned green, and I proceeded onto I-40 westbound.  I was home in less than ten minutes.

I had to work as the barista at Joe’s that night and spent an uneventful evening there.  It wasn’t completely uneventful, I showed the first three hour-long episodes of “The World at War;”  the greatest documentary on World War II ever made, and plan to show 2 episodes every Tuesday until I have shown all twenty-six of them.

I had a few household items to buy that night and had to stop at the grocery store on the way home.  Since Wal-Mart is putting all other grocers out of business, I stopped at their closest super center.  I hated it, but that’s another post.

I had three items on my list: peanut butter, bar soap, and chew sticks for Princess.  The soap and the chew sticks were on the side of the store I entered, and so I went for those first.  I initially was going for the chew sticks, but it occurred to me that the soap was on the way, and if I happened to see it, I would stop and pick it up first.  Therefore, as I walked briskly toward the aisle with the chew sticks, I lightly glanced down a few aisles I thought might contain the soap.  I didn’t see it.

I did, however, see a woman with long red hair.  She was attractive; not drop dead gorgeous by current imperial standards, but as I saw her momentarily as I walked by I thought to myself “Wow, she’s pretty.”…and that’s all I will say about that.  Our eyes did meet and there was that moment of recognition as I walked by.  I proceeded to the pet care aisles.

Within a couple of minutes she came around the corner and approached me.  I said hello and asked what I could do for her.  She smiled, returned my greeting and held out a clear plastic anti-theft container which contained a smaller box.  She proceeded to tell me that the box contained diabetic test strips that her 8-year old son needed for his diabetes.  They have insurance which covers a majority of the cost, but it restricts her and her children to one box per month.  The dog got to the box that she had just purchased for the month of May.

I asked her what I could do.  She said she would never ask, but if I had a couple of dollars to help her buy this box, she would appreciate it.  I said that wasn’t necessary, that I would purchase the box for her.  She replied that I couldn’t do that because that box of 50 strips cost $68.00.  My mouth dropped open.  I asked her what she planned to do and she replied that she was going to ask every patron in the store for a couple of dollars and if that worked, she’d have enough.

I settled the issue by giving her the $4.00 I had in my wallet and telling her this: “I have a little bit of shopping to do, and when I am finished, I’m going to find you wherever you are in this store.  If you don’t have all the money together that you need, I’m going to buy the strips.” Her mouth dropped open.

I shopped and then found her.  She had collected a total of $6.00 with my $4.00.  I didn’t even have to ask.  I approached her, removed the container from her hand and said “Let’s get your son his strips, and I’m going to tell you a story.”

As we approached the lengthy check out line, I told her of the man I saw earlier who I did not know how to help.  I also told her that I was unsure whether I really didn’t know how I could help him at that moment, or if I was just making an excuse to myself not to help him.  I also told her: “And then you approach me with a need I can fill, and I am given another opportunity to serve.  I am not passing on this one.”

I thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t and we had a pleasant conversation while in line. When we were finished, she told me she would pay my generosity forward at the first opportunity.  I told her I knew she would, finally introduced myself, and left.

Now today, May 13th, I am on my way to Joe’s for my 5 to 10 shift and I pass a woman in the rain walking west on SE 59th Street.  She was sort of staggering toward the railroad bridge.  She looked like ‘Cousin It’ with out a brush.  Her head was down and her long, tangled locks hung all about her, covering her face.  Something struck me and I turned around and parked in a parking lot ahead of her.  When I emerged from my car with my umbrella she was now in the street, heading toward the painted median for the railroad bridge.  I approached her and when I was close enough to her I called out if she was okay.  She looked up and was crying.  She was in bad shape and said “No, can you help me?”

It was now 4:50 and I told her that I had to be somewhere at 5:00, but if she needed to get to somewhere close, I could take her.  She told me a street just over a mile away, and so we made our way back to my car where I texted the barista at Joe’s that I would be a couple of minutes late and I took her home.

Once she was in the passenger seat looking forward, her hair fell back and I could see that she was beaten up pretty badly.  Not as bad as I’ve seen in this life God has made for me, but it was evident she had been punched about the head and face several times.

Her story was this: She works (or ‘worked’ at this point, I suppose) as a dancer at one of the sex clubs in Valley Brook, called Fancy’s.  She may have worked at one of the other clubs as well recently, because according to her, the manager of another club named Brenda came in and went after her.  A fight ensued and she was beaten up.  Someone called the police…the Valley Brook police…and they came in and once they had them apart, told her that they would not press charges against her because she didn’t have a prior felony.  She tried to tell them that she was the one who was attacked, but it didn’t matter.  They and the club manager kicked her out on the street…in the rain.

Throughout the ride to her house, she continued sobbing uncontrollably asking how something like that could happen. I told her 2 things quite plainly.  First, that the people who employ her at clubs like that see her as nothing more than a commodity that they sell (or ‘lease’ is a more accurate term) until they see her as used up, and then wad her up like a piece of paper and through her away like a piece of trash.

Second, that she has to remember that this occurred in Valley Brook, and the people who own and manage those clubs are protected by Valley Brook.  She is not.

I cannot testify to the veracity of her story, but that is immaterial.  What matters is this: Here we are, and there is no end to them.  Once again, this world creates the afflicted faster than any of us can help them.  Sometimes the help they need is, in their eyes, pretty substantial; like a single mother begging for money to buy a $68.00 box of test strips for an 8-year old son with juvenile diabetes.  Sometimes it’s just a ride home out of the rain for a woman who has been abused beyond what I can imagine ever tolerating on my own person.

Whatever the level or size of their affliction, we are called to watch over them.  They are there, and if we truly profess our devotion to Jesus by our deeds toward these people and not by religious quotes on Facebook, then they will find us.  He will make sure of it.  When they walk through the door, or approach us in the store, or stagger down the street, remember that any one of them could be the Christ, returned to reconcile us the the Father; so watch over them.

Lastly, there is a strange beauty in all of this.  The beauty is that Jesus knew when He called us to follow him and laid out our job description, that inherent in the life of serving Him through serving the afflicted was job security like nothing else on this planet.

Peace and love to all,

Niemand

Indiana has crossed a line that more and more “Red States” are approaching: legalizing discrimination.  This is not just against groups that have suffered discrimination in the past and are not now protected by federal law, such as people with a felony conviction, but against anyone, regardless of their status.

It’s now becoming more and more clear that the legislative and executive branch majorities in “red states” aren’t red as in the blood of patriots who fought for our independence from the British crown, they’re red as in Josef Stalin’s political legacy.

If I lived in Indiana, you left-handers (or “witches” as we used to call you) would be in for it!  I don’t care what I was selling, you wouldn’t buy any of it.  Heck, you could just conjure it out of air and dirt anyway.

When the tea-party wing of the republican party first started to make its rise in the public eye, many people welcomed a few aspects of their message.  They seemed to be normal, middle class people with a concern for waste within the government.  Their initial message was easy to like: “I work hard for the money I send you each April 15th, so you need to make certain you use every dollar as efficiently as possible.”  That’s an attractive message.

However, these people soon revealed who they really are, and this is now revealed by the rise into the spotlight of their social agenda.  Who are they?  They are the evil satan worshippers of the christian political right.  They are the perverted purveyors of a twisted “money and power” based paganism which they try and pass off as Christianity.  They are the slime that has hijacked Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace and defender of the least of us, and turned His name into a God of War and defender of the privileged in their arcane “Sunday best” rituals.

They are the infantry in the war against the poor, the commandos in the war against social welfare, of a safety net for the very poor, of health care for all people.  They are the stupid.  They are the ones who have been duped into fighting the wars for the very rich.

They are showing themselves to be idiotic white people who long for the good old days of lynchings, women staying in their place, and no token minorities in any positions of even moderate power.  The days when affirmative action and “people” who weren’t “free, white, and 21” could only dream of voting.  These horrors, like space flight, were but shadows in a distant future that was not inevitable and could be avoided with the proper application of violence and white resolve.

Well, maybe the space flight analogy isn’t a good one.  I mean, we all know that’s hoax anyway.  People leaving earth’s atmosphere; talk about witchcraft!

They are more insidious and evil than the Nazi followers of Adolf Hitler could have ever been.  Hitler and his minions, at least, were up front about their hatred.  They told the Jews and others “We don’t like you and we don’t want you here.  Leave now.  If you don’t, we’re going to first take away from you anything even close to resembling civil rights, then if you still don’t leave, we’re going to strip your humanity from you, and hell, if you’re still here after that, we’re going to kill you.”  They didn’t try to mask hatred behind childish, cowardly claims that their ‘religious liberty’ was being pounded into the ground.  Religious liberty is the freedom to love everyone unconditionally, not hate and discriminate.

My message to you: If you’re going to hate, hate and be proud of it.  Don’t slink around in the dark, like a spider.

This is one reason why we should allow this law to play itself out; to allow the social agenda of the tea party to be bought into the light of day.  God can see it in the darkness, but we cannot.  We can only see it if it is allowed to become visible in all of its evil glory.  Only if it is comes into full view, can the Homo Sapiens of the planet see it for what it is and rise against it.

If we allow this law to bloom into its full effect, businesses that are housed in Indiana will feel the effects of the social agenda of the people they foolishly placed into positions of coercive power.

Let the marketplace decide!  Perhaps as a supplement to this bill, all businesses in Indiana must be required to post clearly on their door whether or not they support discrimination based on…well…whatever you want to base it on.  In this case, I guess it would be hatred masked as religious liberty.

To be honest, any “religious liberty” that would allow a person, or worse, direct a person to discriminate against another is not religion based upon a God of love.  It is religion based upon human hatred.  But then again, what “religion” is not based upon human hatred?  This is one reason Jesus came to break the power of religion.

If every business in Indiana had to state clearly whether or not they supported this new legalized discrimination, all citizens of Indiana and the other 49 states would know what businesses to boycott and which business to which they should offer their money and loyalty.  One way or another, the marketplace would decide whether or not this law should stand.  The tea party has to stand behind that.

This is why we should allow this law to go into full effect.  The governor of Indiana may be trying to exercise damage control, but the people of the christian far right and their bastard children of the tea party who wrote the bill are pushing back.  They’re standing by the legalized discrimination and hatred this bill represents.  Hitler would be proud of them.

The rest of us, not so much.

Peace and love to all,

Niemand

I am a member (and leader, I suppose) of a small community of the King centered around Joe’s Addiction coffee shop in Oklahoma City.  The shop is actually in a small town called Valley Brook, a “Lesotho style” incorporated town within the surrounding environs of Oklahoma City.  Valley Brook exists for one reason and one reason only; to nurture and propel the businesses that thrive on the sexual exploitation of women as far into perpetuity as they can.

But that’s another post; back to Joe’s…

One of the most popular pass-times there is to play a card game called skip-bo.  Pretty much everybody plays and since it’s a low-stress game, or intended to be anyway, it offers an opportunity to sit around, engage in light competition, and great conversation over, you guessed it, a crazy good cup of coffee.

Because of the pervasiveness of the game within the community, we have long sought to have a fun tournament at the coffee shop.  However, the questions of exactly how to organize the tournament and determine who advances, etcetera went unanswered until recently.  On an anonymous day in February, 2015, I and two other members of our community sat down and laid out a workable plan on how to organize and run a skip-bo tournament.  Thus was born “Skip-Bo Super Bowl 1.”

Those of us who sat down and organized the tournament also looked at the costs that would be associated with it.  They were, to be honest, quite staggering in relation to the financial resources of this community.  We thought we would have, maybe, 20 people sign up, and if that were the case, we would need 40 decks of skip-bo cards.  At approximately $8.00 each online (which is the cheapest option), that meant that we would already be spending more money on cards alone than the money we expected to bring in from people signing up to play.  It would take more money than we initially anticipated to pull this thing off.  On top of that, we wanted a nice prize for the people who came in 1st and 2nd.  Local thrift shops have used trophies, and we could get two of those fairly inexpensively and that would be fine.

We decided that in order to help offset the fiscal outlay we would experience, we would charge everybody a $5.00 entry fee.  Whoops.

We have a fairly large number of homeless people in our community at Joe’s, but even so, we were certain that even the most destitute of them could come up with a way to earn $5.00 if they really wanted to play in the tournament.

What happened instead was that one of the people who is currently “couch surfing” for a place to sleep each night threatened to report us to local government officials for running a gambling operation.  Another local resident, who is much more peripheral to the core community at Joe’s, threatened to do essentially the same thing, only her threat was to go to one of the local pimps who holds sway over the local town council and report us for running said gambling operation.

I had a conversation with the owner of the shop and we decided that we would scrap the $5.00 entry fee, and that the Valley Brook Vineyard Church, with whom we are associated, would pick up whatever costs were involved.  I therefore reprinted all of the advertising flyers to say that the tournament was free, put them up, and returned the money already collected to its rightful owners.

Was I pissed off when I heard about those threats?  You’re damned right I was; especially at the couch surfer whom we have fed and cared for years now; offering him refuge from the world outside, supplying him with free tents, several bicycles, free food when we can come up with it, and free coffee on a daily basis.  I have even invited him to stay the night in my home during severely cold winter weather.

Though the initial level of anger I experienced subsided fairly quickly, I was still determined to talk to him about his threat the next time I saw him.  I wanted to tell him how disappointed I was in him that he would threaten us with such action simply because, as I saw it, he didn’t want to get up off of his ass and earn $5.00 to help out.

Yesterday afternoon changed all of that.  I had a “textversation” with another of the people with whom I sat down and organized the tournament.  He was incredibly angry and even though these threats against the shop were almost a week old, his anger was growing and not subsiding.

It didn’t take long for me to see my own anger in his and seek repentance.

I began to counsel him that his anger was misplaced and that the people who made the threats of reporting our “gambling operation” were already experiencing the fruits of their actions.  It was not up to us to make things harder on them.  Their actions are now well known throughout the community and neither of them have been to the coffee shop since Monday, March 16th.  I think this is especially hard on the couch surfer.  The local resident only comes to the shop every so often.

The person to whom I was speaking about all of this, and whose anger began to worry me told me flat out “…Joe’s will never reach it’s full potential until it rids itself of these parasites.”  At this point I began to really feel guilty about my own anger and scheduled lack of forgiveness.  I replied thusly: “A parasite is an animal that feeds off of the life force of another, but Joe’s is not about biology.  It’s about forgiveness and acceptance for all.  We all need it and [name deleted] will need it from you and me.  It won’t be easy, but it will be necessary.  Not for how being forgiven will change him…it may not change him…but it will change us, and that’s the important thing here.”

At that point he was having none of my Jesus logic, but, having seen the error of my own anger, I persisted.  Sure enough, it didn’t take long for him to begin to soften his attitude, and though he never admitted his intent to forgive or love those he saw as his enemies, I could sense something greater: Just as I had seen my own faults in his anger, he began to see his faults in theirs.

Therein lies the lesson.  When we take the time to see our own faults in the imperfections of others, we learn forgiveness, enemy love, and, perhaps, we inch just a little bit closer to coming before God as the children we are.  It is in caring for and forgiving people we see has having wronged us that we grow closer to God, and it is only in these things that a place like Joe’s (like us) actually reaches its full potential.

Peace,

Niemand

Sometimes you start writing something, and in the middle of the damn thing you realize that you were wrong.  That happened to me here, and it’s not so much that I was wrong, but that I was approaching the subject from the wrong perspective.  I’ll let you know with a [*] when I realized my error.

Would somebody please tell me exactly when, if the date can be pinpointed, we lost the right of dissent in this country?  Through all of the warmongering vomit spewing out of the mouths of American patriots about how this is ‘the greatest country in the world’ I’ve had to endure in 55 years of life in the empire, the one thing that made me think that this was, actually, a pretty remarkable place, was the fact that as American citizens, we have the right, not only to possess dissenting opinions, but to also express them without fear of reprisal from the government or, hopefully, the hillbillies down the street.

Unfortunately, the ‘death of dissent’ date is hidden in the annals, or rather the asses, of America’s corporate power elite, and their marionettes; the insane fringe right of the tea party that now directs the war against the poor in vast swaths of the American social landscape (sort of like those ISIL guys).  In fact, the more I think about it, the more I see the similarities between the tea party, the christian right, and ISIL…wow, now there’s an unholy trinity for you.

Soon, it will be like the the ‘death of the Jesus way’ in Christianity.  That was date on which being a Christian changed from being someone who sought to emulate the way Jesus lived his life and practice the things he taught, to getting your ass saved, then figuring out the absolute minimum you had to do in order to sneak that so-called “saved” ass of yours into heaven when you die.

This ass saving, of course, must now begin with the recitation of that idiotic prayer some baptist shit-head invented about (in your best hillbilly voice, now) “Jesus, I ask you into my heart.”  Excuse me while I go puke.  I’ve never said that prayer, and I never will.  It’s sort of like corndogs to me now; I’ve never had one of those nasty things and I never will.  Nobody knows the exact date Christianity devoled into the ass saving club; its perpetrators have hidden it from us forever.

The days of the right of dissent in America are gone, and it is with great regret that I write this post.  That’s quite a claim, so before I move on, allow me to clarify exactly what I mean by that.  We have the right to dissent against a limited number of individual policies pursued by our government, but the right to dissent against the jingoistic hyper-patriotism that has become the hallmark of American gun culture is gone.  If you do this loudly and publicly, then you will suffer retribution, both from the government and individuals.  At this point, dissent is no longer a right, it’s a risk.

Last week, this country arrested three men who were “suspected” of leaving the country in order to fight for the Islamic State.  Really?  Let me try to wrap my brain around that for a moment.  The government arrested three men, not even American citizens, who were suspected of traveling to fight for ISIL.

I have several questions.  First, since when can you arrest someone on suspicion of planning to do something, that is not a crime, at some unknown day in the future?  Don’t worry, I understand the charge of ‘conspiracy,’ but this does not meet even the most basic criteria for that.  Even if these men were planning to become ISIL fighters, so what?  We are not engaged in a war with them.  Sure, ISIL’s tactics are considered barbaric by even the most nominal western standards, but their status as enemies of America are based upon a long stretch of any sort of justifiable policy.  They are enemies of America merely because our government says they are so.  Certainly, they have gruesomely murdered a few Americans along with others, but that should make them enemies of these people’s families, not the American empire as a whole.

The government of a republic which claims to operate under the democratic system doe not have the right to tell me who is and who is not my enemy.  That is something that I alone can decide.  If I want to believe and say that ISIL is totally badass, that’s my right!  If I want to say this country’s free market theocracy is the most disgusting sack of shit human culture has ever produced, that’s my right!

ISIL will have its day in the sun, there is no stopping that, but are we to lose our souls in pursuit of them?  Arresting these men was exactly that: sacrificing our souls to say were are fighting a perceived enemy.  This isn’t the first time we’ve done this, either.  People should remember that we have sacrificed our souls for all sorts of things: Denying minorities of all races, creeds, and female gender the same status under the constitution that white males have enjoyed since its ratification.

Americans need to also remember several other things:

1. The first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, commonly referred to as the ‘bill of rights,’ are legal expressions of those ‘unalienable rights’ of which Thomas Jefferson spoke so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence.  These rights, being unalienable, are not based upon a person’s citizenship.  They are not presented as gifts to people of certain nationalities, but are to all people “endowed by their creator.”

2. As recently as World War II there were organized groups in the United States who declared their support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.  They were largely ignored, but they had the right of dissent.  Oh, yeah, I almost forgot; they were white males. [*]

So there you have it; the point at which I realized my error.  The issue is not that we do not have the right to dissent, but that dissent against white, corporate, right wing America is outside the rules.

Dissent by people of color against white corporate America is what has been lost.  Dissent against hyper-patrotism has been lost.  Dissent against what we consider our right to  violate any state’s territorial integrity for our own purposes has been lost.

Our soul as the United States of America has been lost, and we are now the most dangerous rogue state on the planet.

I dissent!

Peace,

Niemand

Damn!  That last post on drone warfare was heavy!  Sorry, but I just had to get all of that off my chest.  Anyway, I want to lighten the mood here for a bit, so I’m going to attach a piece I wrote, hell, almost eight years ago.  It’s called “A Fairy Tale.”  It’s pretty short and I hope you enjoy it…

“She was once a tall, beautiful woman, as much at home in the fashion halls of Paris or Milan, as she was in her native subdivision of Sunnyvale Heights; the trailer park on the outskirts of Marlow, Oklahoma from which she hailed.  She was desired by men and women alike, and chose her lovers as freely as a bird chooses the tree in which to make her nest for a short time.  The world was hers to take as she wished, and like the bird she seemed to emulate, she would flutter from tree to tree; from lover to lover, gracing each in turn with her beautiful song of life and love.

She was elegant at her very essence, and when she walked, it was not as if she was walking at all, but rather floating on a cushion of sweet, spring air.  When she spoke, her voice was indescribable.  It was sexy yet not promiscuous, soft yet full of confidence, and in the final calculation, operatic.  Although I never had the honor, her kiss was said to always have the hint of the taste of fine champagne; as a crystal glass was never far from her delicate hand.  In the impregnable circles of the European haute couture she was “known,” and to know her was to be “known” as well.

After years of this fantasy-laden Bohemian existence, the combination of 30 or so filter-less Lucky Strikes each day and hours upon hours of daily exposure to the Mediterranean sun shriveled her once lovely, svelte frame into a wrinkled, raisin-like shell barely five feet in height.  This was compounded by the inescapable desire for the rush of meth-amphetamines coursing through her veins.  No matter how high into society she would climb, the hillbilly heroin of Sunnyvale would always be her nemesis in hiding: her secret no one could ever know.

Eventually, as society moved ever higher, she reached her peak and began her descent.  As these vices took their toll upon her body her spirit began to rebel, and in an attempt to regain the life she had once known and lost, she turned to vodka for the confidence and courage which were once her calling card.  A glass “on the rocks” a couple of days each week became a couple of glasses “straight up” each day.

Now, between the bottles of vodka, the occasional glass of Martini & Rossi takes her back to those gay nights in evening gowns that are now lifetimes, if not light years, away.  She works as a B2B inside sales representative for an office supply company and speaks to her reluctant customers with a crone-like cackle which brings to mind an amateur thespian’s portrayal of some ancient and evil witch from a Greek tragedy.

Drunk and covered in “imposter” body-sprays, she seeks her prince in the local pool halls, and honky-tonks.  She is as anonymous as the men who write of her on public restroom walls, giving her phone number to any who happen to stop there.  Many call, and these desperate, lonely, and angry lovers are now all that is left to her: none of them are still there when she awakens late in the morning, rolls over, and lights her first cigarette.

Without a passport or prospects, she is both forgotten by the bon-vivant of Europe and shunned by the trailer queens of Sunnyvale.”

Okay, so that sad little story didn’t lighten the mood that much.  Oh well.  Still, I hope you enjoyed it.

Peace and Love to all,

Niemand

If there is one thing in this world that bothers me almost as much as the Christian and political right wing’s declared war of cultures between them and the muslims of the world…believe me, there is nothing on this orb that distresses me more than that…it is the rise of drone warfare.

This post is based loosely on a short article I wrote about the rise of America’s use of drones in combat, and I firmly believe that this has evil ramifications far beyond the combat zones of the far-flung areas to which we send these killers.  I purposely did not use the term “battlefields” to describe the areas in which we currently use these.  We do no use drones in any sort of conventional battlefield.  We use them in areas in which no one would expect their sudden and unwelcome arrival.

The article referenced above originally began as a rather angry reply to an author of an article in a biblical “Prophesy in the News” type of magazine called “The Philadelphia Trumpet.”  The item which angered me so was written by a man of the surname Oostendarp and was entitled “In Drones We Trust.”  What angered me so, was Mr. Oostendarp’s apparent lack of moral  outrage toward the rise of drones in American warfare.  If the article had been written for a secular journal, then I would expect some level of moral ambiguity toward the issue, but it was not.  It was written for an audience of so-called Christian believers, and as such should have been an outright condemnation of any sort of warfare.

The use of drones in offensive warfare has been a concern of mine since their first reported usage, and this article so galvanized my spirit that I knew I had to write about the subject.  I suppose you could consider this post a piece in my continuing series on war.

To give you an idea of how angry this article made me, I have placed a few statements, which were deleted during the editing process, directed at the author in my original letter:

“…I think you need to state your positions before God and see if you can stay off of your knees and not beg forgiveness for this article and the poison within you that drew it from you.”

“…you are apparently oblivious to all of this.  Or perhaps you are not oblivious to it.  Perhaps you welcome it.  Perhaps you feel it hastens your “end times” fantasies and the coming of The Kingdom of Heaven…or, perhaps, hell.”

“…I’m not going to seek to advise you on your theology except to say that you might spend more time writing about the great commission of Christ than fawning and drooling over America’s preponderance of firepower in this evil world.”

Yes, I was angry with this man.

I will start with the absolute truth of the matter from a spiritual perspective: warfare of any sort, and especially its new evolution regarding the drone killer, is against the will of God.  In fact, I would argue that the injection of drone warfare into the human history of mass murder for political ends is the most dangerous evolution of satan’s game ever known to man.

Armies (for my purposes, the word “army” refers to all branches of military service) always seek, out of necessity, to convince their young conscripts and volunteers that God is on their side and that the kills they notch on the butts of their rifles are righteous in His eyes.  Every army does this…EVERY ARMY!  This statement is as untrue of the armed forces of the United States as it was for the Waffen SS.  If you feel, somehow, that armies do not do this then please explain to me in a reply to this post why German soldiers in World war II were issued belt buckles that read “Gott Mit Uns (God is with us).

It is no secret to those of us who have spent major parts of our lives studying this plague called war, that one of the major factors that has kept a lid on the wantonly violent levels to which conventional warfare will go is that commanders on the scene understand that they have to send their own soldiers into battle.  In modern warfare, even under the best of circumstances, many of them will be killed.  The generals want glory, they want victory, and they are willing to suffer others dying to achieve it, but invariably, when given the choice they will have their soldiers come back in one piece, or better yet, not go at all.  This is called, discretion in the fog of war, and the murderous operators of the predator and reaper drones experience no fog, and lack all discretion that emerges therefrom.

Any human who has experienced the horrors of the battlefield are never quick to send people into that version of hell on earth.  Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of American politicians are quite eager to kill for power.  The generals, unfortunately, must stand ready to do so on the best and smartest terms they can muster when ordered by the civilian authorities.

When you take warfare to the point that a couple of grunt computer geeks at NORAD can kill people in Afghanistan, then the world is in for a disaster.  In terms of it’s effect on the immediate vicinity of combat; when all limitations imposed by the discretion of soldiers confronting an enemy and the personal danger they face in doing so are removed, the influences of valor, courage, discretion, and humanity are also removed from the equation.  When this happens all that remains is a morbid, impersonal, half-a-world-away, fist-person-shooter-game and the violence of conventional war will inevitably spiral out of control.

Right now this spiral does not, under the limitations imposed by our current low-intensity conflict wars, entail a significant rise in the sheer tonnage of ordinance deployed over a given amount of time.  There are numerous spirals of violence in war and this particular spiral envelops innocent human beings who are not soldiers nor would, under almost any circumstance, become one.  Unless, of course, their mother and little brother are killed by a HARM missile fired from a predator drone miles away.

One of the most grotesque policies of the American government in its effort to add some level of validity to their drone program is to determine that any male, 18-years or older, killed in a drone attack is considered an enemy combatant (don’t even get me started on that term!) and…you guessed it…a righteous kill.  Therefore, a missile fired from a reaper drone that destroys the equivalent of a city block in the United States which  kills 5 suspected “terrorists” and 25 other people achieved a righteous kill total of 20.  There are 10 19-year olds engaged in a small football match around the corner, and 5 old men sitting in a cafe nearby as well.  The other 10 dead women and children, well, that’s what you call “collateral damage,” or, as we like to say in America: “tough shit.”

In drone warfare the suffering imposed loses its reality because it is not felt by the people responsible for the killing.  When you pilot a craft with death hanging under its wings at the same time you’re chugging a diet dr. pepper and munching on a bag of cheetos, there is no manner by which you can truly connect to what you are doing.  You are galaxies removed from the death your fingers cause, and the “intelligence” used to validate what is done in the name of corporate freedom is, to say the least, suspect.

The overwhelming weirdness of this entire development in warfare is that if you thought taking war to a nuclear level was scary, you just wait until we start handing it over to the drones.  The common wisdom of the politicians in charge of this is: Nuclear weapons are too destructive to use, drones are too cool not to.

In terms of the effect of the rise of these machines on our domestic life, I shudder to think of the Orwellian nightmare that awaits us.  Privacy will be a thing of the past, and Big Brother will watch you always…that is, if you have a credit score of less than 300…or are of any number of brownish hues.

Now, I don’t expect local police to start using predator or reaper drones to start taking out American citizens suspected of crimes; not yet anyway.  However, when we have police forces across this country that now kill people on a whim (and it is growing worse every day), do any of you reading this post really think that the day will not come when they use drones to do this?  The surveillance drones are already in use in certain parts of the country.  The predators are next.

So my question is this: “Why would any person, especially anyone who considers themselves to be on God’s side not stand against warfare in general, and war waged with drones in particular?”

When thinking of our growth and expansion of the use of drones to kill people, I am reminded of the words of Lord Arthur Harris, Chief of Bomber Command for The Royal Air Force in the Second World War.  When offering his rationale for the bombing of German cities he said: “They have sown the wind, now let them reap the whirlwind.”  I think we can all agree that the whirlwind was much more horrific than the wind, given the sheer amount of ordinance that was deployed.

I can guarantee you that if the United States continues to sow this wind we will reap a whirlwind for which none of us are ready.  It will be a whirlwind which only the generals and politicians will deserve, but which the poor and innocent will suffer.

Love and Peace to all,

Niemand