Thursday, June 12, 2014
Dry Drunk
Following a speech in San Francisco, Rick Perry compared being Gay to being an alcoholic. I do not doubt the sincerity of his beliefs, after all, he did stop drinking. And he did so without help. We call that a dry drunk. I wonder if that was his own experience with same-sex attraction rumored some years pas.
Ranting about Stupidity
Someone I like a lot put something on his FB page this morning that I thought was stupid -- a word that has a lot of power in my life experience and is therefore used sparingly. For the record, I say "Fuck" more often than I say "Stupid." It was a cartoon that suggested the massacre of about 150 Lakota at Wounded Knee was because the Sioux people were forced to give up their guns. Yeah, right, that was the reason. It had nothing to do with racism, revenge, Manifest Destiny, and overFUCKINGwhelming population advantage which gave the Whites the advantage similar to the Germans vs. Jews in the 1930s than any other comparison I can come up with.
But to the issue at hand, I seldom have anything to say about the idea of guns. Almost everyone to whom I'm related has a personal firearm as well as several rifles used for the several types of hunting they do. I'm totally cool with that. I do not feel unsafe when I'm around them. The guns I feel unsafe around are the millions of easily and cheaply obtained weapons of various power that proliferate our national landscape.
When friends visit me here in Oakland, California, I advise them to consider everyone they encounter eight years or older to be armed. And anyone carrying a handgun thinks it bestows upon himself a magical cloak of power. This results in the death of hundreds and thousands of young men and women of color in every city in the United States. I have yet to hear anyone in the Pro-Life camp express concern for this ongoing tragedy, but I digress.
I am disturbed when I read a news story about a 15-year-old high school student taking an AK-15 (whatever that is, but it sounds bad) into his high school and killing someone and then being killed. Where does a 15-year-old get access to any kind of gun?
I am not a part of any sort of liberal movement to ban guns. I get it, your guns are more important to you than peace and quiet. I have no interest in participating in an exercise of frustration. Keep your fucking guns. Keep them cheap and plentiful so that they trickle down to eight year olds riding the bus, or killing one of their friends showing it off. Keep them cheap and easily available so any 15-year-old can get one.
We are who we are and like Pogo said many, many years ago, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
But to the issue at hand, I seldom have anything to say about the idea of guns. Almost everyone to whom I'm related has a personal firearm as well as several rifles used for the several types of hunting they do. I'm totally cool with that. I do not feel unsafe when I'm around them. The guns I feel unsafe around are the millions of easily and cheaply obtained weapons of various power that proliferate our national landscape.
When friends visit me here in Oakland, California, I advise them to consider everyone they encounter eight years or older to be armed. And anyone carrying a handgun thinks it bestows upon himself a magical cloak of power. This results in the death of hundreds and thousands of young men and women of color in every city in the United States. I have yet to hear anyone in the Pro-Life camp express concern for this ongoing tragedy, but I digress.
I am disturbed when I read a news story about a 15-year-old high school student taking an AK-15 (whatever that is, but it sounds bad) into his high school and killing someone and then being killed. Where does a 15-year-old get access to any kind of gun?
I am not a part of any sort of liberal movement to ban guns. I get it, your guns are more important to you than peace and quiet. I have no interest in participating in an exercise of frustration. Keep your fucking guns. Keep them cheap and plentiful so that they trickle down to eight year olds riding the bus, or killing one of their friends showing it off. Keep them cheap and easily available so any 15-year-old can get one.
We are who we are and like Pogo said many, many years ago, "We have met the enemy and he is us."