12/4/15
I was out of the office yesterday due to some form of illness that made my face into a snot-dripping balloon of pressure. It was dumb. I didn’t care for it. So anyway, that’s my excuse for failing to update yesterday. I tried to work from home, but, c’mon, everyone knows that “working from home” is just another term for “jacking it ‘til raw.” So, yeah, that’s the story of yesterday.
Professional death-wisher Scott Weiland finally got what he wanted. Dude was only forty-eight but, jay-sus, he could have been eighty-four for all I knew. Sometimes when a well know figure dies, it’s tragic. But other times, like this one, I feel happy for the guy. Perhaps in his twenties and early thirties Scott was merely flirting with death, but later on he started to beckon, and, failing that, he got aggressive in his courtship of the reaper. So, no, I don’t feel bad for him. If anything, I feel good for him. Now his atoms shall be recycled, for better or for worse. Still, STP fucking rocked house in the day, so respect to Scott Weiland for that. Peace out, homie.
“Societies are held together, not primarily by the fear of the many for the coercive power of the few, but by a widespread faith in the other fellow’s decency.”
In the wake of the San Bernardino shootings, social network feeds are again being overrun by pro/anti-gun rhetoric and for the most part I’m like, man, whatever. There are shitty, shitty people in this world & I hate to be so blunt in the face of tragedy, but dying is a risk everyone runs, everyday, simply by being alive. Does this dismiss, or even downplay, the actions of those two cunts that shot up that office? Fuck no. Fuck those people.
I will say that it’s telling that many of the people who are staunchly opposed to any gun control are the same folks who gladly handed the fourth amendment rights of everyone over to Uncle Sam because they were scared of terrorists. Patriot Act ring a bell? Remember when the Snowden shit leaked and all y’all were saying “Well, I don’t care if the Government is spying on us, I’m not doing anything wrong.” Well, what if now I say, “I don’t care if the Government takes your guns, I don’t own one?” See, because I’m scared of people with guns. I’m scared that my Chicago-based family is unsafe. Some nights, like two-nights ago, after hearing about San Bernadino, I truly fear for the lives of people I love. Who says this won’t happen in my brother’s office, or little cousin’s school, or, God forbid, to the whole city? These are frightening, real concerns.
Our Founding Fathers, those old white men we hold so dear, were fucking fearless. Undermanned, underfunded, and out gunned, those men quite literally put their lives on the line for an idea. Freedom is a risk. A free man is someone who can’t deal in certainties, because absolute freedom is absolute absurdity. Freedom is the acceptance of all things, good & evil, because denial of any possibility is the denial, in essence, of freedom. So we’ve been blessed with the right to speak without being hung (unlike in Saudi Arabia), the right to own weapons (unlike, well, a lot of places), and the right to privacy in our own homes (a seriously cool deal!), among other things. The risks involved are obvious, but necessary if we’re to be free. Freedom, as far as I can tell, is the acceptance of death. After this, what is left to fear?
I don’t think gun control is the answer. If anything needs banning in this country, it’s the divisive discourse laid out by Republicans, Democrats, & mainstream newspeople. We’re stupid & uninformed, the whole plebian lot of us. I’m repulsed by the “ra-ra” high school football pep-rally jock attitude perpetuated by WWE style politics. These are the people destroying freedom. These fucking cunts all funded by the same companies, spouting the same talking points day after day after day & changing nothing. NO-fucking-THING. Yet we all keep falling for it. Remember HOPE & CHANGE? Do you? I don’t. And until the retarded memes on either side stop & the people (not the fucking politicians) begin a discourse, we’re fucked. We’ve lived through Bush Jr. & Obama, & we can all agree that there has been very little change. We’re still in Iraq. We’re still in Afghanistan. Schools are still underfunded, yet there’s a $500 billion dollar military budget & $50 billion a year being vainly pumped into a perennial failure called “The War On Drugs.” We’ve the second highest childhood poverty rate. Private prisons. Somehow when private citizens need a few thousand $ a year to eat, it’s “welfare” & they are labeled “leeches;” yet when banks fuck up the entire economy (which, by the way, resulted in more people needing “welfare”) and need a couple hundred billion $, it’s a “bailout” & it’s cool. Yet our citizens are still shooting each other to death. All the hope in the world is proven useless in the harsh face of a reality in which rich, power hungry sociopaths have convinced the poor masses that the blame for their destitution lies not on the affluent, powerful few, but on their fellow poor.
It’s possible that the best form of revolution in light of all this bullshit is simply to look at our fellow citizens as human beings. A basic attempt to respect another’s opinion instead of dismissing him/her outright may well change the course of history. It’s worth a shot, because the status quo is, quite obviously, not working.
Frank X Maloney
