osan

Originally Posted by osan

Originally Posted by tod evans

Freedom's messy business.

THIS is the bit about freedom that makes people run, as if from a pyroclastic flow racing toward them. People want the nice bits but reject the ugly with such violence that they end up choosing pretty slavery while having the unmitigated temerity to call it "freedom". That, more than anything else, impels me to slap such people that they would spit out their teeth. I find few things as all-consumingly disgusting as this particular brand of willfully ignorant cowardice. It is so lacking in any art whatsoever that nausea and other disgust are the only responses I can muster in its wake. Such people do not even make the least credible pretense to hide it, exposing themselves as the buck-naked poltroons, dastards, and recreants that they truly are, while thinking they have fooled smart men into seeing them otherwise. There are few things that I can barely stand from others and this is right at the top of the list. It is one of those few things that challenges my commitment to true liberty for all. That is the depth of my contempt for people of such bottomlessly willful stupidity.

When you are willing to tolerate people who move you to desire their destruction for no better reason than you find them distasteful, then have you made the commitment to proper human freedom. Short of that, you are a poseur and perhaps worse yet, a self-deceiver and. worst of all, a hypocrite.

If anyone thinks that freedom is a cakewalk, they fool themselves. Here is but one example taken from my own set of "issues". There is a part of me that, were it possible, would gather up all the ghetto people into one place and put them to the sword. Why? Because I grew up in that environment and I know how awful it is; how utterly rotten at its core. That part of me would throw the switch and have no regrets in ridding the world of such vermin. That same part of me would rid the world of plenty of others, too. But there is the side of me that is committed to the notion of proper human freedom and it holds the other in check because it knows that the monster must never be loosed upon the world. We have seen what happens when the monster is set upon the earth to roam. We see it every day, in fact, and it is a non-solution, save to see the race of men destroyed.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of it is the fact that I would do all of this with nothing but the best of intentions for myself and, presumably, the world. A side of me would exterminate perhaps billions of people for the good of "right and decent folk". Sound familiar? If not, you need to crack a history book. For 1500 years the Roman church attempted to butcher its way to a "better world". How'd that work out? Hitler was no different, nor Stalin, Mao, Pot, Amin, and so on down the depressing list of ostensible do-gooders who thought they knew what was best for all and were willing to do what it took to make perfect the world. We now stand in sadder shadows than ever before in all human history. Our grand technologies have availed us nothing. Why? Because we remain committed to narrow, parochial visions of what the race of men should be. We remain married to one-size-fits-all thinking applied at the wrong levels and in the wrong ways. They are "wrong" because we consistently fail to achieve freedom, happiness, equality, prosperity, and good health. Nothing we do politically is life-affirming; rather, we have fallen into a vicious cycle of life-destroying insanity wherein we apply "solution X" and when the desired result is not obtained we apply more of the same.

What madness has grabbed the world by its balls that we refuse to stand back from that which we have wrought, examine it with a coldly reasoning eye, and call it what it truly is: death and disease and misery and poverty? The madness is raging and rampant and virile and moving across the face of the earth such that no corner is left untainted by its infection. We cut off a joint of the human finger, wince in pain, shout at the injustice, and proceed to cut off the next, expecting the finger to be made whole once again. This is what we have been doing for an age, only with ever deeper roots and wilder refusal to call the result what it is. That's some brand of crazy there, I tell you.

Anyway, if I am to spare myself the sin of hypocrisy, I must cowboy up and get real about certain truths and make a decision. I have made my choice, and in some ways it pains me daily. That is the price I pay for my belief in, and advocacy of, freedom and rights for all men, no matter how a given individual or group thereof may send my constitution into somersaults of nausea. I have chosen freedom for all because I choose it for myself.