Random Reflections Pt9

31. Rosie “My bodyguards can have guns but you can’t” O’Donnell recently claimed there’s no difference between Islamic Fundamentalists and Christian Fundamentalists. An opinion of this nature can only result from a severe case of mental retardation or a severe case of stupidity.

Last time I checked, the most vocal wing of Christian Fundamentalism wanted to teach evolution in public schools, outlaw abortion, and take Christina Aguilera off MTV (and both of those last two points have a smidgen of merit).

Also last time I checked, the most vocal wing of Islamic Fundamentalism wanted to tax unbelievers for the privilege of not being killed, institute Sharia law all over the world, and just generally sally forth and kill anyone not found kneeling in an easterly direction five times a day.

If you can’t tell the difference between the two, you need to have your head examined.

32. Anything and everything is a perversion when taken to extremes. There’s a little tribe in New Guinea that practices institutionalized cannibalism, the men hold raunchy conversations with the spirits that live in the rafters of their huts, and the citizens are occasionally accused of witchcraft and killed if they can’t cook a perfect torte (or the small, strange New Guinea tribal equivalent).

Confined to a small portion of a small island, they’re an anthropological oddity, interesting to study and watch.Now imagine that small, strange New Guinea tribe spread over the entire world. Their laws are our laws. Their religion is our religion. Their customs are our customs.

Yeah.

Ain’t pleasant at all to think about, is it.

You take anything too far, it becomes horrible. Christianity. Islam. Communism. Capitalism. Democracy. Eating. Drinking. Driving. Love. Pets. When ideology or belief becomes obsession, and obsession becomes religion, and that religion becomes the center of the world, something that once was beautiful is destroyed by the hold it has on someone, and the hold someone has on it.

When Christianity becomes the sole object of the mind of everyone on earth, to the exclusion of all else, there WILL be Hell on earth. When capitalism becomes the sole object of the mind of everyone on earth, to the exclusion of all else, we will have the tyranny it keeps in check. When good health becomes…fastforward…life won’t be worth living.

I think it was the Greeks who had a saying about this. “Nothing over much.” Wise words.

33. My dad once told me that ironically, the freest people are those who exercise the most control over themselves. I’ve attempted to live all my life by this credo. Control is all that separates human beings from animals.

34. It is now time to be inflammatory. Not without reason or intelligence however. Avert your eyes if your are easily offended.AOL recently had a feature on how the twin girls making up the white supremacist pop-folk band Prussian Blue have been ostracized by their hometown. They’ve received death threats and “get out by high noon” style missives, have had signs posted on their fences and yard, etc and so forth.

Their message, roughly translated from the propaganda, is that they want white people to recognize how wonderful being white is.

Ahem.

When you’re caught modeling Hitler Smiley-Face shirts, you’re not celebrating your race, you’re celebrating mass murder on the scale of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Armenian genocide…that one defining piece of legislation enabled all +120 million homicides is not something we’ll cover today. Anyhoo, Hitler isn’t a racial pride symbol, he was a murderous nutcase.

And then I got to thinking.

Sometimes that can lead to unpredictable results. I hesitate to say these next words, honestly. But I will.

What would happen to me if I started an organization called the Nation Association for the Advancement of White People? Petitioned Congress for a White History month? Demanded certain acceptance quotas of white students in colleges across the country? Started a television channel called White Entertainment Television?

Do you have any idea how fast I would be excoriated in the media? How fast thousands of people would call me an evil, bigoted racist? How fast my symbolic head would be hoisted upon a symbolic pike? How every acquaintance of mine would be put in the public fishbowl, their association with me examined by pundits and talkshow talking heads? How fast doctors and psychologists would be examining my psyche on national television, saying I had one mental malady after another.

Seems to me we’ve got entrenched racism, or at the very least preferential discrimination in this country, and we don’t even know it. At least the white-colored racists marginalize themselves.

35. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the inhabitants of the planet Stupidia lived in nearly perfect freedom. After a long, bloody war they had secured a democratic republic much like our own was intended to be. Peace reigned for a hundred years.

After a hundred years, a small segment of the population caught the disease of radical religion. Now, growing on the planet of Stupidia was a plant called the Amora plant. Since the Stupidians had crawled out of the oceans and discarded their fins, they’d chewed the berries of this plant. When ingested, the berries made the Stupidians very happy, and loosened their inhibitions for a short period of time. The various varieties of the Larom plants had the very same effect, to different degrees. Due to the effects to the different types of plants, a statistically small percentage of the Stupidians chewed the berries to excess, lost their jobs, became addicted, sold their possessions to buy more the plants, etc and so forth. This has been the way of things for thousands of years. Many people enjoy the effects of the Amora and Larom plants to moderation, and a handful use them to excess.

So: A group of Stupidians get the radical religion virus. And they decide that the cause of society’s evils is the Amora plant. With much arm-twisting of the elected representatives, they get the berries of the Amora plant banned from public consumption. The Stupidians can no longer buy, sell, or grow the Amora plant. These actions, which have been legal for thousands of years, are now crimes.

But strangely enough Stupidians go on doing what Stupidians want to do. They form underground organizations to grow and distribute the “A” berries to those who want them. Because those caught with the plant risk jail time, they demand a higher price for their risk. Local police forces have to be bribed and corrupted to overlook the crime going on under their noses. Due to the profitability, the underground organizations go to war with one another to eliminate competitors, secure distribution territory, etc.

After ten years of skyrocketing crime, the Stupidian representatives realize that human behavior can’t be controlled, only guided. They legalize (despite much crying and hand-wringing from the religiously sick) Amora again. Crime does not skyrocket further. Now that “A” sellers and growers can do so openly, and market their products freely, they have no reason to bribe the police, go to war, stay underground… Crime goes down.

However, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people who’s work it was making sure that Stupidians didn’t use “A” as they had for thousands of years were now out of work. So with the help of the religiously sick, they sold the Stupidians on the notion that Larom was now the cause of all society’s evils.

No one thought to ask…but weren’t you wrong last time? Or, why wasn’t it the cause of society’s evils last year, or the year before, or any year in recorded history…

So now Larom is illegal. The same crime skyrockets, the same people who used Larom before are still using it. But this time something is different. The Stupidians DON’T abandon the prohibition of Larom. As crime grows and grows, and its citizens demand action, the Stupidian government does things it would never have dreamed of doing before. It starts whittling away at the Stupidian’s rights to privacy. And to travel. And to defend themselves. When last checked, the Stupidians were still slowly sinking into tyranny, all while looking at the failure and its evidence around them and shrieking “Something must be done.”

Now, the question for you is: Why hasn’t anyone told us about this planet yet?