The attempt at rational gun control failed to get over the filibuster of the Senate Republicans. Anyone who thought any other outcome was likely is clearly living in the delusion that the United States of America is a functioning democracy. There will be much hue and cry, the right wing, NRA, and gun manufactures will gloat, and Obama looks like the weak excuse for a President that he has always been. The government has been owned by corporate interests for a long time now, particularly weapons manufacturers, and nothing has changed.
The people who have lost loved ones to gun violence and who were hoping for even a hint of understanding and justice must be deeply hurt. My heart goes out to them as they have been wounded with a callous disregard bread by corruption that is as evil as anything I have ever seen. They are on the front line of a people betrayed and many of them will never be whole again. Their tragedy is a microcosm of a failed society.
Any of us can be the victims of gun insanity at any time, the only bright spot in this dim reality is that the odds are still in favor of not being on the wrong end of a gun. One is much more likely to die of health complications resulting from obesity or smoking (1 & 2 on the list of killers), heart disease (3), cancer (4), respiratory disease (5), or stroke (6). Getting killed by a gun falls into category 7, "accidental", where it lies behind poisoning and car accidents.
The facts also show that one is even less likely to be the victim of gun violence if, a) one lives in a state where gun ownership is less prevalent and, b) one lives in a house that has no guns. (The NRA / gun lover arguments for a society awash in guns is pure bullshit, but you knew that already.) A lot of us live in the state we grew up in or the state where we could find a job, so "a" isn't always something we have much control over. "B" however, I kind of like. If there is a gun in your home and someone you love is killed or wounded by that gun (which is the most likely scenario if the thing is actually fired) well ... fuck you. Sad? Sure. Just like its sad when someone who has smoked their entire life is felled by lung cancer. Sad, but they have no bitch coming.
Of course most of the time those who actually die from a gun are more like the person who got cancer from second hand smoke or their work environment. Being victimized by other people's choices is a strange kind of "freedom", one I doubt the Founding Fathers were trying to protect. But then I doubt they imagined a government owned by multi-national corporations, or that those corporation would be judged by the Supreme Court as being "people" either. I suspect they would be surprised that, in a body made up of 100 people (101 if you count the VP) it takes 60 votes to get a majority. And I suspect gerrymandering would be a puzzle to them.
Of course women and blacks voting would be a surprise to them as well, but at least they set up a system for amending the Constitution that allowed for such progress to happen. No, I doubt they would count the government we currently endure as being remotely related to what they tried to create.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Guns and fury
I am surprised that the gun debate has gone as far as it has. Obama is actually showing a little backbone on the issue and citizen groups are flexing unexpected muscles. Even some of the folks at Fox news are giving way to a tide of reasonableness and looking, at least at this moment and on this issue, like rational human beings with a functioning brain. NRA leadership is being portrayed as loopy extremists and a good many people, even gun lovers, are having to admit that Wayne Lapierre is likely bat-shit crazy and truly paranoid to the point of needing some medical attention.
But it looks like the reality of an American political system sold to the highest bidder is about to reassert itself. Republicans in the Senate will filibuster any weapons bill and thus derail any exercise of democracy that threatens the profit center of weapons manufacturers. The true curiosity is, what happens next?
Of course, in all probability, nothing happens next. Rational gun control dies on the vine of a corrupt government. Dozens of people continue to get killed every week by gun violence. And a large percentage of those killed and murdered continue to be children. But there must be a small chance that something will start to happen. After all, every change in society starts as a barely noticed footnote to that day's headlines. Perhaps, this time around, Americans will realize that their collective desire for a rational gun policy has been thwarted by a corrupt government. Not in some vague, the government is always corrupt, kind of way. Rather in a These-Fourteen-Senators-and-T/Party Representatives-bought-off-by-the-gun-lobby kind of way. Focused. Angry. Infuriated.
Infuriated, that is the key. At some point people are going to get angry. Not just irritated. Spitting mad. Furious. The kind of fury that takes to the streets. The kind of public fury that every politician of every type in the whole world dreads. The fury that has the Chinese government moving carefully so as not to put a dent in the improving life of their billion + citizens. The kind of fury that has North Korea's idiot savant of a "leader" talking war to keep his people from seeing the real enemy. (On the one hand I loathe this clown, on the other I fully realize that our government is doing the exact same thing to us.) The kind of fury the Ayatollahs tap into to topple tyrants, and that will some day turn on them as well.
The kind of fury it takes to bring down a corrupted government.
That kind of fury is like a forest fire. Once it gets going there is no real way to stop it. We have realized that is the way nature works. Fire is a natural part of renewal. Without it the forest decays, smothered in the detritus of past generations. The generation currently in power (mine) has left a pile of debris that includes the worship of greed, crony capitalism that loves nothing but profit, selfishness, an addiction to violence and war, and a religious fanaticism pounded into us in our youth (late 1940s and 1950s Leave it to Beaver morality) that we never quite managed to shake off. Our society is being choked to death by it.
Granting civil rights for gay people, ending the drug war, realizing only the rich profit from laws passed, sickened by the violence of the gun culture, tired of war, knowing the environment is changing, embracing and not fearing multiculturalism, understanding that a free society must be a just society, admitting that "our god" is probably not "the god", these are all struggling to grow out from under the pile of trash that is our current society / government. That trash pile needs to be burned away.
Maybe it starts by burning down the careers of politicians spitting in the face of Americans at the command of the gun lords.
But it looks like the reality of an American political system sold to the highest bidder is about to reassert itself. Republicans in the Senate will filibuster any weapons bill and thus derail any exercise of democracy that threatens the profit center of weapons manufacturers. The true curiosity is, what happens next?
Of course, in all probability, nothing happens next. Rational gun control dies on the vine of a corrupt government. Dozens of people continue to get killed every week by gun violence. And a large percentage of those killed and murdered continue to be children. But there must be a small chance that something will start to happen. After all, every change in society starts as a barely noticed footnote to that day's headlines. Perhaps, this time around, Americans will realize that their collective desire for a rational gun policy has been thwarted by a corrupt government. Not in some vague, the government is always corrupt, kind of way. Rather in a These-Fourteen-Senators-and-T/Party Representatives-bought-off-by-the-gun-lobby kind of way. Focused. Angry. Infuriated.
Infuriated, that is the key. At some point people are going to get angry. Not just irritated. Spitting mad. Furious. The kind of fury that takes to the streets. The kind of public fury that every politician of every type in the whole world dreads. The fury that has the Chinese government moving carefully so as not to put a dent in the improving life of their billion + citizens. The kind of fury that has North Korea's idiot savant of a "leader" talking war to keep his people from seeing the real enemy. (On the one hand I loathe this clown, on the other I fully realize that our government is doing the exact same thing to us.) The kind of fury the Ayatollahs tap into to topple tyrants, and that will some day turn on them as well.
The kind of fury it takes to bring down a corrupted government.
That kind of fury is like a forest fire. Once it gets going there is no real way to stop it. We have realized that is the way nature works. Fire is a natural part of renewal. Without it the forest decays, smothered in the detritus of past generations. The generation currently in power (mine) has left a pile of debris that includes the worship of greed, crony capitalism that loves nothing but profit, selfishness, an addiction to violence and war, and a religious fanaticism pounded into us in our youth (late 1940s and 1950s Leave it to Beaver morality) that we never quite managed to shake off. Our society is being choked to death by it.
Granting civil rights for gay people, ending the drug war, realizing only the rich profit from laws passed, sickened by the violence of the gun culture, tired of war, knowing the environment is changing, embracing and not fearing multiculturalism, understanding that a free society must be a just society, admitting that "our god" is probably not "the god", these are all struggling to grow out from under the pile of trash that is our current society / government. That trash pile needs to be burned away.
Maybe it starts by burning down the careers of politicians spitting in the face of Americans at the command of the gun lords.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Good people and evil acts
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Steven Weinberg
For many years this was a favorite quote for me. Religion, particularly the monotheism of the Jewish / Christian / Muslim traditions, demean humanity as failed and fallen, with most of us destined to an eternity of torture at the hands of a loving, but vengeful, god. This view has validated much of the evil that people do to one another. In our time Islam is the poster child for murder in the name of god, but they are just the latest to join the party. Christianity has a 2000 year history of war, torture and murder that lasted right up until the 1990s battles in Northern Ireland. Before them, at least according to the Old Testament, the Jews were ordered to put entire civilizations to death - well, sometimes they got to keep the young girls for their own amusement. Jews are still killing Muslims. Muslims are still killing Jews (and other Muslims and Christians). Thanks to Misters Bush and Obama many Muslims are convinced that the Christians are on another Crusade, this time using drones. Though the violence of the god of Abraham is most familiar to me, stories of Hindu and Buddhist violence make the news as well. Mr. Weinberg's quote would seem to find support in at least one headline a day.
Yet my fondness for his observation has faded. It is certainly true that good people do good things and bad people do bad things, with or without religion. That is, after all, how we tell them apart ... the good and the bad that is. And clearly religion muddies the water when it comes to what is good and what is bad. Religious leaders of every stripe continue to demand that denying civil rights to gay people and restricting the freedom of women is what god demands of human kind. Suicide bombing is an exclusively religious exercise at this point in history. Racism is alive and well in many religious traditions, as are calls for ethnic cleansing and the ritual mutilation of babies. Without religion all of these would be considered evil by any normal human being.
Mr. Weinburg's quote would suggest that there are good people doing these evil things, good people who think they are obeying the dictates of a god when they kill, maim, and demand discrimination for this group or that. But are they good people who have been fooled into doing evil things, or are they evil people doing an evil thing using religion as a cover?
The older I get the more I think it is the latter.
I know good people. I know of and have, on occasion, gotten cross-wise with evil people. It seems to me that the two groups are mutually exclusive. It isn't that no good person has ever done anything wrong or no evil person anything right. Human beings are not two dimensional cardboard creatures. But at the point of doing real evil, of doing actual harm to another human being, good people will hesitate and then back away. God or no god they will find a way to sidestep the demand. I think that's one of the main causes for the rifts inside religion, good people seeking to find a doctrine that provides a path away from what (it must be admitted) would appear to be clear calls to do evil. Slavery is a good example, as was (and is) demands for civil rights. More esoteric fights (at least to this unbeliever) include arguments over hell and what, precisely, it takes to be "saved." And esoteric though they might be, these still appear to me to be efforts of good people trying to avoid the evil inherent in very idea of "hell" and the tribalism and conflict born of the claim to being "god's chosen."
Good people who chose to remain religious fight a continuous battle against the evil inherent in the ideologies. I'm not sure why they cling to the religions in the first place, but I cheer their constant efforts to limit the evil that religion tries to do. To a large degree though, I fear they are fighting a losing battle. In the thousands of years that organized religion has bedeviled human kind the good people in religion have never managed to limit the evil very much at all. Millions of good Catholics can't convince the Church that women are equals or that birth control is not only a civil right, but the only moral choice in a world currently trying to carry more than 7 billion of us around the sun. Millions of Christians of all sects have been unable to drag Christianity away from its stand against gay people. An admittedly smaller portion of American Christians have failed to save the church from various "prosperity" doctrines or driven the hucksters from the TV and radio airwaves.
Millions upon millions of Muslims have failed to prevent Islam from decaying into a death cult.
The evil that religion does continues to expand in spite of the best efforts of the good people in religion to do the right things. Why is that?
Religion's major flaw is that it can so easily be manipulated by evil people. Once wrapped in the mantel of the authority of a god they can find a myriad opportunities to practice evil without being caught, condemned or punished. They can hack away at the vagina's of screaming baby girls, rape and abuse as many woman as they please, profit from the slave labor of orphans, stir up war and hatred and watch cities burn, and send children wearing bomb vests into stores to kill other children. They indulge in the evil like any other addict, and no one does these things who can be thought of as "good".
Religious leaders can live in the finest palaces, eat the best food, and have the best health care all paid for by the back breaking labor of others; all "tax free", and all without having to do any real work themselves. They get to dictate how people live, who they are allowed to love, what they can eat, where they can go, and what they can wear. They can picket funerals and heap verbal abuse on mourning families. None of these are the acts of good people either.
The good people in a religion don't take advantage of these opportunities, something that must be okay with the evil people. The good people do a lot of the grunt work required to keep the whole operation running and financed. They make good cover. Often they are well aware of the evil but "faith" blinds them and keeps them from speaking out. But there is nothing special about that. Good people don't take advantage of opportunities to do evil outside of religion either.
I don't think religion takes good people and makes them do evil. I think the religions are primarily designed by and run for the advantage of evil people from the very start. A lot of evil people know a good thing when they see it.
And I think the good people are not doing themselves any favors by staying involved. In fact, if there were a just and caring god out there, it would certainly not tolerate much of what passes as religion among human kind.
For many years this was a favorite quote for me. Religion, particularly the monotheism of the Jewish / Christian / Muslim traditions, demean humanity as failed and fallen, with most of us destined to an eternity of torture at the hands of a loving, but vengeful, god. This view has validated much of the evil that people do to one another. In our time Islam is the poster child for murder in the name of god, but they are just the latest to join the party. Christianity has a 2000 year history of war, torture and murder that lasted right up until the 1990s battles in Northern Ireland. Before them, at least according to the Old Testament, the Jews were ordered to put entire civilizations to death - well, sometimes they got to keep the young girls for their own amusement. Jews are still killing Muslims. Muslims are still killing Jews (and other Muslims and Christians). Thanks to Misters Bush and Obama many Muslims are convinced that the Christians are on another Crusade, this time using drones. Though the violence of the god of Abraham is most familiar to me, stories of Hindu and Buddhist violence make the news as well. Mr. Weinberg's quote would seem to find support in at least one headline a day.
Yet my fondness for his observation has faded. It is certainly true that good people do good things and bad people do bad things, with or without religion. That is, after all, how we tell them apart ... the good and the bad that is. And clearly religion muddies the water when it comes to what is good and what is bad. Religious leaders of every stripe continue to demand that denying civil rights to gay people and restricting the freedom of women is what god demands of human kind. Suicide bombing is an exclusively religious exercise at this point in history. Racism is alive and well in many religious traditions, as are calls for ethnic cleansing and the ritual mutilation of babies. Without religion all of these would be considered evil by any normal human being.
Mr. Weinburg's quote would suggest that there are good people doing these evil things, good people who think they are obeying the dictates of a god when they kill, maim, and demand discrimination for this group or that. But are they good people who have been fooled into doing evil things, or are they evil people doing an evil thing using religion as a cover?
The older I get the more I think it is the latter.
I know good people. I know of and have, on occasion, gotten cross-wise with evil people. It seems to me that the two groups are mutually exclusive. It isn't that no good person has ever done anything wrong or no evil person anything right. Human beings are not two dimensional cardboard creatures. But at the point of doing real evil, of doing actual harm to another human being, good people will hesitate and then back away. God or no god they will find a way to sidestep the demand. I think that's one of the main causes for the rifts inside religion, good people seeking to find a doctrine that provides a path away from what (it must be admitted) would appear to be clear calls to do evil. Slavery is a good example, as was (and is) demands for civil rights. More esoteric fights (at least to this unbeliever) include arguments over hell and what, precisely, it takes to be "saved." And esoteric though they might be, these still appear to me to be efforts of good people trying to avoid the evil inherent in very idea of "hell" and the tribalism and conflict born of the claim to being "god's chosen."
Good people who chose to remain religious fight a continuous battle against the evil inherent in the ideologies. I'm not sure why they cling to the religions in the first place, but I cheer their constant efforts to limit the evil that religion tries to do. To a large degree though, I fear they are fighting a losing battle. In the thousands of years that organized religion has bedeviled human kind the good people in religion have never managed to limit the evil very much at all. Millions of good Catholics can't convince the Church that women are equals or that birth control is not only a civil right, but the only moral choice in a world currently trying to carry more than 7 billion of us around the sun. Millions of Christians of all sects have been unable to drag Christianity away from its stand against gay people. An admittedly smaller portion of American Christians have failed to save the church from various "prosperity" doctrines or driven the hucksters from the TV and radio airwaves.
Millions upon millions of Muslims have failed to prevent Islam from decaying into a death cult.
The evil that religion does continues to expand in spite of the best efforts of the good people in religion to do the right things. Why is that?
Religion's major flaw is that it can so easily be manipulated by evil people. Once wrapped in the mantel of the authority of a god they can find a myriad opportunities to practice evil without being caught, condemned or punished. They can hack away at the vagina's of screaming baby girls, rape and abuse as many woman as they please, profit from the slave labor of orphans, stir up war and hatred and watch cities burn, and send children wearing bomb vests into stores to kill other children. They indulge in the evil like any other addict, and no one does these things who can be thought of as "good".
Religious leaders can live in the finest palaces, eat the best food, and have the best health care all paid for by the back breaking labor of others; all "tax free", and all without having to do any real work themselves. They get to dictate how people live, who they are allowed to love, what they can eat, where they can go, and what they can wear. They can picket funerals and heap verbal abuse on mourning families. None of these are the acts of good people either.
The good people in a religion don't take advantage of these opportunities, something that must be okay with the evil people. The good people do a lot of the grunt work required to keep the whole operation running and financed. They make good cover. Often they are well aware of the evil but "faith" blinds them and keeps them from speaking out. But there is nothing special about that. Good people don't take advantage of opportunities to do evil outside of religion either.
I don't think religion takes good people and makes them do evil. I think the religions are primarily designed by and run for the advantage of evil people from the very start. A lot of evil people know a good thing when they see it.
And I think the good people are not doing themselves any favors by staying involved. In fact, if there were a just and caring god out there, it would certainly not tolerate much of what passes as religion among human kind.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)