Sunday, January 05, 2020 3:10
AM
Don’t Get Me Started
(2020Jan05)
As a child, I had a skewed notion of what the world was
like—I was assuming that it all, pretty much, matched our house and our family
dynamic—and later on, our TV shows. My context of ‘the world’ has been
broadened ever since, almost daily.
I know now that I can write nothing about which people will
fail to have strong views. Anything I say will loved by some, hated by
others—though my purpose is merely to avoid tedium or banality.
I started writing out my personal opinions and posting them
on my blog several years ago. I had a great deal to say, at first. Now, I find
it hard to say what I mean. Years of expressing myself have taught me that what
I want and what is true are two different things—just as what I write may
differ from what you read.
I’ve been thinking big-picture, you know? That thing with
Viet Nam and the Pentagon Papers coming to light—all of us learning that the
government had been sending boys to die over there, without any belief that
their sacrifice would have value.
It was shocking and disgusting—our government failed
spectacularly in their main job: to serve the people—and got thousands
needlessly killed, maimed, and wounded in the process. Not to mention the pile
of money they could just as well used to make a bonfire.
Nowadays, of course, when they tell us the same thing about
Afghanistan and Iraq, we hardly blink an eye. It’s no different—it’s just as
shocking and disgusting—it’s just not a surprise anymore.
Likewise, women couldn’t vote until the 19th
Amendment was ratified in 1920, one hundred years ago. Why (or How) women were
seen as fit to raise children, but too feeble-minded to cast a vote, up until
1920—is hard to figure.
Nevertheless, women’s legal rights did not suddenly become
equal to men’s. Margaret Sanger opened a birth-control clinic in 1916 and was
promptly arrested, charged with ‘distribution of contraceptives’. Our ‘Comstock
Laws’ lumped contraceptives in with dirty pictures and sex toys—and the
birth-control and family-planning movements were major legal opponents of those
who supported Comstock laws.
The 1950s discovery of the birth-control pill transformed
the debate into a business transaction, giving contraceptives a reformed
reputation among true capitalists. In the 1960s, it suddenly occurred to men
that baby-proofed women might be fun. And by the 1970s, women had had it up to
here.
Then you had Ruth Ginsburg and her 270 laws-discriminating-by-sex she got overturned, repealed, whatever. And I just watched a movie about the lawyer lady “Saint Judy” who, just recently, fought to have our Asylum Courts recognize ‘Women who fight for women’s rights’ as valid refugee-status claimants. This ended a terrible ‘dead-end’ for women at risk, but it is not the end of fatuous laws that enforce gender inequality (or binary-gender identities, for that matter).
You see where I’m going with this, right? Our government
starts wars for no damn good reason—that’s insane. Our government has tried to
shackle women for centuries—and still resists their full equality—and that’s
also insane.
The Catholic Church, it turns out, has been normalizing and
promoting pederasty, in addition to spreading the faith, in every Catholic
country on Earth—for centuries. Apparently, forcing celibacy on people is
unnatural—and invites a certain type of mental-health issue into those
unnatural ranks.
The movie “Spotlight” made clear that pederasts have always
been—and still are—in every Catholic Diocese, domestic or foreign—and that
local civil authorities sometimes became entangled in the conflict between
reputation and scandal, helping the church hide this corruption.
I remember being under the nuns’ care during childhood CCD
classes—and encountering a priest or two after the children’s masses. They were
definitely a hinky bunch, but my interactions always involved fear of
cruelty—the clergy of St. Martin of Tours were really mean. Nobody ever made me
feel like I was being intimately accosted—with our nuns, it was more like being
attacked.
It’s odd to look back on that terror and think, I was one of
the lucky ones—it’s ironic without
being at all funny. Catholic priests, sadly, are not even the whole story. Sandusky’s
Second-Mile scandal, and USA Girls Gymnastics Dr. Nassar’s scandal, make it
clear that anyone teaching, training,
or working closely with young people, as a profession, need (and should expect)
much more monitoring by a third-party—a quality
control, if you will.
To me, it all paints a picture of a society dumb enough to
poison the Earth until we all die. We’re not done yet, no—but we’re well into
it. Besides Greta, nobody seems to give a fuck—which makes us suicidally
stupid. The only realistic public figures in our time are two teenagers, Malala
& Greta. Ms. Yousafzai has actual grown past her teens, fighting for
women’s right to education.
My problem is that these institutions, these pillars of our
society, are all garbage. We continually try to push aside or abuse women, to
ignore or abuse children—when women and children are the only things that have
any real value (and I’ll grudgingly include men). Our TVs try to tell us that
we got nothing more important to do than lay back and stare at the screen.
These ‘heads of state’ who make the Middle East a sandbox
for their wargames and power-grabs and terrorist recruiting—and their opposites
in the ‘free world’—love to point at a military ‘outbreak’ and shout, “Look!
This takes precedence! Forget about everything else, until we’re done
shooting—or talking about shooting.”
So don’t get me started on habitat-loss or population-doubling or acid oceans or economic-inequality—we are extremely close to proving that, as a group, as a species, we are too stupid to live.
If only we didn’t waste all our careful planning on profits and threat-scenarios, we might come up with some real great ideas—what with all the computers and new tech and all. But money and arms are all that matter, right? The ones with all the gold make all the rules?
And what about us patient liberals? Are we supposed to feel good about being right, when the proof is the whole world joining Australia in general conflagration? Are we supposed to respect people that lie to our faces? Are we supposed to watch news that promotes these liars? Why should we participate in this riot of ignorance and irresponsibility?
Like this:
Like Loading...