No longer the difference between Coke and Pepsi

Here's the blog as it should have been written:
I'm fixin' to go to church tomorrow, and no one had better try and shoot me. Ask anyone, I'm hard enough to deal with on a good day, much less when I'm feeling more pissed off than usual, and protective of my fellow UU's. Apparently, my fellow Unitarians are also similarly inclined, when it comes to protecting each other. In case you've been on a "news diet" lately (and I would totally understand why) -I meant to blog about this right after it happened, but usually I'm glad when I let my hot head cool down for a couple days, at least. I'm talking about the shooting at the Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee on July 27th. The killer was apparently motivated by hatred (duh), the flames of which were fueled and fanned by right-wing talk radio. Specifically, this guy listened to Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, and Michael Savage. {I feel like I have to go take another shower now, just from typing their vile names.} The killer brought a shotgun into a children's musical performance, and turned it on the audience intending to kill as many "goddam liberals" as possible, and then kill himself. Well, he didn't get the chance to commit suicide at least, thanks to my brave fellow UU's who tackled the motherfucker after he blasted one large congregant in the chest (who stood up on purpose and tried to shield other members) and then got off only one more shot, randomly spraying a 60-year-old woman in the face (who also died) before he was brought down and pinned to the ground. But not killed. Yeah that's right motherfucker, this is what happens when you try and fuck with a true community. People will stand up for each other and take a bullet if they have to, they won't run screaming from your terrible show of force, abandoning old people and children to their fate. Nuh-uh. And after they stand up, they'll smack your sorry ass down on the floor and maybe kick you in the head a few times. But they won't kill you, because it's just not in them. Oh no, we want this sad sack of shit to confess as much as possible, and tell everyone far and wide why he did what he did. If the deaths of these two good, caring people can serve any wider purpose at all, it should be to wake people the fuck up to the kind of hatred and lies being perpetrated by "respected" media figures. The shit they spew every day, for hours at a time, is directly responsible for this violence, and it SHOULD be prohibited by the FCC but somehow, hmmm, in the past 7.5 years, has been allowed not only to exist somewhere on the airwaves, but to dominate.
*Update: For awhile I was skittish about going to church or going anywhere where I could readily be identified as a "liberal," because depending on the media and public reaction to this hate crime, there would almost certainly be copycat crimes. And lo and behold, there has been, in my opinion. Just today (Aug.13th) a man walked into the Arkansas Democratic Party's headquarters in Little Rock, and shot the Democratic Party Chair. Thankfully, he was also caught, and unfortunately, shot by police during a high-speed chase. I'm still looking forward to a public explanation for this stomach-turning shite.

I've been a Unitarian for going on 8 years now, and my husband is fixin' to join too just as soon as another "intro" class rolls around. My spirituality is pretty private and personal to me, but I joined the First Unitarian Society of Denver because their ideals and values seemed to most closely match my own, and for the first time I saw that a church could be a very positive force in a community. When I joined, they were making the slow, onerous switch from being a "pastoral" (taking care of its own members) church to a "programmatic" type church, which is basically like applied anthropology- you take your shared ideals, and go out into the community and actually try to make the world a better place. This does not include proselytizing. Our "programs" are much like the church in Knoxville's. We proclaim ourselves to be a "Welcoming Congregation" which means open-arming people of all sexual orientations, specifically, but really it means everyone. For a couple years now we've had a banner hanging on the side of the church that reads "Civil Marriage is a Civil Right" that has caught us some flak. And for the Easter service, when Rev. Mike (who is awesome) put the title of the sermon on the display board/sign: Jesus Was A Liberal, some numbnut threw a rock through the plexiglass and smashed it. But these are biggest tastes of backlash we've gotten for our liberal, tolerant, peace-loving, tree-hugging, life and diversity affirming views.
The shooting in Knoxville was a massive, tragic wake-up call, to say the least. In the back of our heads, I guess we all knew/know that holding certain beliefs in this day and age, and having the temerity/courage to stand up for them unwaveringly, can be a very dangerous thing. Those who lived through the Civil Rights movement remember getting tear-gassed and fire-hosed like it was yesterday, but for those of us born after that, it's not even a vague memory. We're grateful for the people who went before us, and know that they went through hell and suffered numerous indignities so that we could have a more just society- but who among us really knows what it's like to have dogs set on you, or police billy-clubs, or god forbid be staring down the barrel of that gun, prepared to die for your beliefs? (*ahem, and no, the Tent State kids who are vain enough to think that the FBI is actually taking their dang pictures? They don't count)
Fortunately, not many of us.
The thing that impressed me first about FUSD was its Religious Education curriculum. Ok, it was also the beautiful stone building and the stained glass, but truly- 5 years before I had a kid- I was stone-cold pleasantly shocked by their RE programs, which focus on teaching tolerance, kindness, tolerance, open-mindedness, tolerance, respect for diversity in both mind and body, and did I mention, tolerance? At the time, I knew of no other religion that did this. Most of them seem to have some permutation on "Our way is The One True Way, and All Others are Inferior (or even, Satanic/Evil)." They start indoctrinating their kids in this sort of absolutism, seems to me, way too early. Maybe they're hoping that insecure little kids will glom onto the "Be in Our club Because We're the Best and Everyone Else Sucks and Doesn't that Make you Feel Good?" thing, but personally I think it would backfire.
Anyway. This is a pretty common theme of the Left, in my experience. Tolerance, tolerance, tolerance. EVEN, up to a point, of people preaching nothing but hatred, lies, intolerance, war, more lies, and more hatred, of anyone different. But for me, that point has been reached. The line has been crossed. I still am fine with anyone who has integrity in their beliefs. That means you know why you believe what you believe, and you can back up your beliefs with hard, cold facts, statistics, and yes even stories of real personal experience, as long as they're tempered with education, count. But lately, oooo lessee... for about the past 7.5 years, the folks on the right have little to none of that on their side at all. And their beliefs have gotten increasingly less harmless, to say the least. You believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? No, you don't have to back that up, because they're harmless beliefs. You believe you really look good in orange even though friends and loved ones keep telling you it's not your color? Well ya know, fine. You're only affecting yourself.
But beliefs start becoming not-so-harmless when they traipse into other people's personal space, and personal freedoms. Especially when you don't know exactly what those beliefs are based on, or you think you know, but they turn out to be lies, and then you refuse to accept the non-truth of them primarily for egotistical and emotional reasons. Example: the War in Iraq. Invasion and occupation would be better words. This is also a good example of the mass hysteria/ normalized insanity we've been living under for way longer than the past 7.5 years. Anyway. This country went to war on a rumour and a bunch of ginned-up propaganda and fear which those of us on the left (or anyone with more than two functioning brain cells who wasn't in total denial about the nature of this country/government/administration) knew was a pack o'lies from the very beginning. Many people chose to believe those lies because they were scared shitless, used to trusting anyone in authority, didn't want to believe their government would ever mislead them, etc. etc. despite all evidence to the contrary. Literally, we had the chief weapons inspector (Hans Blix, yah?) on the TV one second saying, "We've found absolutely no weapons of mass destruction here, nor the ingredients for them, nor the technology," and the next second the President-select was on TV squealing, "see see! he's got bombs! He want to use them on us!!" and his Ph.d. Russian expert security advisor actually had the balls to say to CONGRESS "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." This should/did create what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance." We were being told not to trust our own eyes, ears or instincts, but to listen to what the Chimp in Chief said was true.
Because they didn't want to be wrong, and don't want to ever admit that they're wrong, many people persist in "believing" the ensuing avalanche of lies despite the mountain of evidence piled up, these 5 years hence, to directly contradict them.
So, you say, as Dick Cheney might- so what? Part of the foundation of America is the premise that people can choose to believe whatever they want to believe, and no one can or should tell them different. Welp, the actual premise of that whole freedom of speech/thought/worship thing is that, it ends at the tip of someone else's nose, or personal space. Again, you can believe whatever you want, as long as it harms no one else. In this case, the folks on the right think they can still get away with it, because the people being harmed by their erroneous beliefs are not American citizens. And therefore, I guess, in the twisted, inhuman logic of the Right,they deserve to die.
So because of this heretofore widely held erroneous belief, close to one million Iraqi citizens have had not only their noses punched by our flagrant "freedom of thought/expression", but they've had their personal space totally extinguished. They're dead. Finito. And in the eyes of many of the same Americans who hold these erroneous beliefs dear, those dead Iraqis aren't even in "a better place"- nope, they went straight to hell because they're Muslim, not Christian. So there goes that little rationalization for killing.
This is where the difference in belief systems ceases to be the difference between Coke and Pepsi drinkers, amigos. If the hate-mongering assclown posse were simply telling their listeners to stay up all night in the pumpkin patch so that the Great Pumpkin can come and deliver you candy- fine. But nope. No such luck. The right-wing talk radio hosts and pundits see all the anger and frustration of the American people, but instead of trying to soothe it or find a healthy solution, they fan the flames for their own short-term personal gain. They do that by telling outright lies that support their agenda and apparently validate the wounded pride of the average white American male. In this case, an out-of-work Army vet who blamed his joblessness and every other problem on us "Godless Liberals" not to mention, all those brown "illegal" aliens, gays, and probably anyone who owns a small dog, for good measure. (you're obviously a pansy elitist if you own anything smaller than a Rottweiler). So, because of that, they deserved to die.
Maybe there was a time when picking a belief system was just as harmless as choosing a soft drink, but if there was, I wasn't alive during it. I know my cynical Jr. High Social Studies teacher, Mr. Johnson, described the two American political parties and the Left-to-Right spectrum as "the same, completely, but with different colors." I guess I can remember a time in my life when it wasn't really about choosing sides, so much as like choosing side-dishes from a Chinese menu. Here in Column B, you have what the adherents call Fiscal Conservatism- but that costs 20 million dollars and assumes you have inherited wealth! Whoa! But ya know, if you like to rub elbows with the wealthy and powerful, or think of yourself as one of them even though you're totally impoverished, go ahead and try it. In Column A we have something called the Social Contract which basically says, the people can have whatever regulations and programs they want, as long as it's a majority decision and they're willing to pay for it. E.g., if you don't want to step over homeless people on the way to work, you better be willing to spend some money on programs to prevent homelessness, etc. Blaming the downtrodden for their predicament gets us nowhere, and besides it's just not very Christian, nor very American. Ok- sounds good! Can I have that? But wait, the items in Column B are calling my choices "Tax and Spend Bleeding Heart Liberalism!" Wait- I don't want to be a bleeding heart... do I? (what the hell does that mean, anyway?) They're also saying.. come over here! Order from us! We have this thing about "personal responsibility" that no one else has! (Really? Can you define that please, and tell me ALL the ingredients up front so I know there's no MSG in it?) and "small government"... hmmm, I guess they're out of that today because Homeland Security's taken over the kitchen and the restaurant owner isn't even that interested in serving the customers anymore, he's got this idea that the customers should serve him. Yeah, that's him over in the corner booth sitting on his fat ass with his back to the wall so no one can sneak in and shoot him (because you know Homeland Security is too busy stuffing their faces with all that free food to actually PROTECT anyone)- woops, I've gone too far with this metaphor! But anyway, you get the idea. Some people like the pork chow mein, and some people want the vegetarian Happy Family, whaddreyagonnado? I mean, I would think you were a total moron/hypocrite for believing any of that crap coming from the right hand side of the aisle, but who friggin cares what I think, anyway? I never met a conservative who could actually back up their beliefs with facts, figures, or even convincing stories, but I didn't associate with them that much so it was okay.
But now.. with these incidents in particular, and just because all of their crap has finally made my temperature reach the boiling point- it's become blatantly obvious to everyone, I think, just what HUGE hypocrites and whopping liars they really are, ESPECIALLY with that tripe about "personal responsibility." Sure they talk a good game about being "self-sufficient" and "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps" out one side of their mouths, and then out the other side (as well as out their arses) they're fanning the flames of bigotry and hatred and ENCOURAGING their listeners / followers to blame anyone and anything else for all their problems, but nowhere on the list is the individual having all those problems. Popular scapegoats now include "illegal" immigrants, or basically anyone with brown skin; "liberals" who include anyone to the left of Jerry Falwell, and I think you know what's coming next- the usual suspects; Jews, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, the diseased (hello, Savage), the poor, the dark-skinned, and yes, the intellectuals, who are already branded as "elitist snobs" because we dare to contradict their wild-eyed fantasies with rational, critical thought and these things called facts.
But anyway. This guy in Knoxville admitted as much, he thought the liberals were responsible for taking his job, his woman, his dignity- so all he had left were his truck and his gun. Give me a fucking break. Don't even get me started on how wrong that is. But you think the Insane Assclown Posse will take a smidgen of Personal Responsibility for this sad sack, who apparently was following their orders to a "T"?
uhhh... hmm.. I mentioned the fact that they were cowardly hypocritic liars, right? Who encourage people to go fight in wars for them so their defense contractor stock will rise? But actually couldn't win a thumb-war themselves, much less a fist-fight, much less a battle? Everyone knows Rush is a fat,drug-addicted bastard who can't get out of his chair to try and squash me, nevermind throwing punches. And Coulter? I'll snap her scrawny ass across my knee like a bundle of dry kindling. Done.
Not anymore. The subtitle for this blog should be, "Why it is no longer okay to be a Republican asshole." I could go on about how the conservative movement in America has been highjacked by the NeoCons, and the mainstream "fiscal" or "faith-based" conservatives or whatever they choose to call themselves, have totally gone along with it- but that may be a whole 'nother blog.
And all of this is being marketed to us as a perfectly acceptable "choice" you can make, that has no greater consequences than a fashion mistake or dieting slip-up. Are you on this side, with the winners and all the money, or that side, with the discredited losers in their ruined world? We on the left are supposed to be "tolerant" of such hateful, divisive tactics, because we're the peaceniks right? Love and respect for everyone and their various points of view? Here's the thing, mofos: if you are actually believing that shite that the hate-mongers sling, despite all credible evidence to the contrary, rah-rahing for WAR of all things when we don't even know who attacked us- the BURDEN OF PROOF IS ON YOU. You want to go to war on a rumour, that so -and-so might have to plans to not like us very much, some time in the future? Nuh-uh. Your plan is to attack a CIVILIAN CITY in the DEAD OF NIGHT with no opposing army in sight? And you rationalize this by saying that every person in that city is potentially a terrorist, including the babies? PROVE IT, motherfuckers. Your case for going to war has to be IRONCLAD, and after that, something called an actual battle plan has to be put in place. Oh, there's not going to be an actual "battle" you say? It's going to look more like a video game, called "Shock and Awe" and if the opponents have any sense at all , they'll flee from your terrible show of strength, and failing that, the survivors will welcome you as liberators? Hmmm. Explain to me how that's different from the Nazis bombing London during the Blitzkrieg. Something tells me they were following a similar script, written by Adolf Hitler. That's right, I said it, Americans are no better than the Nazis in this scenario. Chew on that for awhile. Find a way to rationalize it away.
Nope. No longer the difference between Coke and Pepsi, my friends, even though we've all been marketed-to our whole lives to believe it really is. I'm not going to stand for hate-speech anymore (not that I ever did) whether it comes from a coworker, a friend, a so-called "superior", family, in-laws, whatever. I'm done. This is too important. And if any of those hate-mongers dare to set foot in my town, on my turf, they can prepare to be bitch-smacked within an inch of their lives. If anyone so much as murmurs that they're voting for McCain because he seems "strong" and Obama seems "scary," you can bet I'll berate them verbally until they come to their senses and realize what they're saying. They might cry. I might cry. I don't care. Public humiliation and shaming people into doing the right thing is a time-honored, non-violent, force for social change. I aim to use it wisely. Oh, and I'm fixin' to go back to church every week if we have to. As Starbuck said on Battlestar Galactica, when someone asked her, "What do we do now??": Fight 'em until we can't.