Hey everybody. How’s it going? It’s finally snowing in Sweden - real snow this time, actually covering everything. And that makes me happy enough to end this sentence with an emoticon :)
It’s good to be back in the warmth of my apartment.
I’ve been thinking about the human condition.
Only the unloved can hate. Of course, I hate when I’m late for class. I hate when I stub my toe. But I’m talking here about the hate that comes up in the face of the homeless, the gay, the biracial. I’m talking about fabricated, unnatural hate. And you don’t have to beat someone with a bat or burn a cross in their yard to hate them. It’s almost always more silent and insidious.
The fact that same-sex marriage is still illegal in any state is a shame. I don’t mean “a shame” in the casual usage, like when your football team doesn’t win the championship. I mean it in the biggest scope of the word. This kind of intolerance will go the way of slavery and denying women suffrage. It’s the exact same kind of oppression, and those who don’t realize it now will realize it later. Because no matter how long it takes, the progressives always win.
Sometimes, those who support the legalization of same-sex marriage are suspected of being gay. But making this assumption illustrates a vast ignorance of how compassion works.
“Oh, but it’s in the Bible!” I’ve heard that argument to justify a ton of things. “It says, in plain English, that a man is not to lie with another man!” This would be a good argument, and I don’t intend to dismiss it with the typical tools of atheism. Because I am not an atheist. But the Bible was edited by men. Whether or not it was handed down from God, men spent whole lifetimes editing it, slicing and dicing out whole sections. So even if the words really are God’s, they were plugged into the bizarre Mad Lib of human interpretation.
Jesus Christ associated with thieves, prostitutes, and scores of people who went against the Ten Commandments. He ate with them. He loved them and forgave them. It’s insane to me that “Christians” justify certain flavors of intolerance because they choose to listen to Leviticus instead of Christ himself.
Man, these paragraphs are too long. I’ll attempt brevity.
1) Abortion is one of the few topics that is literally too complex and heavy for me to have an opinion on. I’m not pro-choice, I’m not pro-life, and these terms are way too simplifying to even foster a debate.
2) A society without religion wouldn’t be any better or worse than a society with religion. Humans define themselves by creating an “other”, an outside group to hate and therefore foster cohesion within their group. This, I believe, has been the real root of all conflicts. It would still exist without religion.
3) World War II was the only war the United States needed to get involved in. There is almost always a solution that doesn’t involve combat. However, an army must be maintained (entirely within the home country, without imperialism), because no one knows what the future holds.
4) Capitalism isn’t evil. With efficient regulation, it is one of the best ways to create jobs and innovation.
5) However, not everything can be left to the free market. For example, any politician who advocates discontinuing the National Board of Education is a jackass.
6) A lot of the time, those who get freakishly passionate about things are those without talent, hobbies or imagination. I’m not talking about those with passions like ending world hunger or child mortality. I’m talking about parents who want to sue the school cafeteria because they don’t want their child eating Spaghettios.
7) People who read are usually more interesting than those who actively don’t. If you don’t have favorite books listed on your Facebook, that’s fine. But if that section says something like “hahaha wut r books??” or “readin sux”, odds are you are a boring-ass individual.
8) Adding “-ass” to the end of adjectives increases their descriptive value.
9) If you’re a native English speaker and use “your” for “you are” more than once, I pretty much dismiss what you’re saying. Your opinion on that topic ceases to matter to me.
10) Those who pine for “the good old days” either have bad memories or were children in said days. For example, a lot of big things happened in the nineties, but most of what I remember involves eating Popsicles or falling off my bike.
11) People who talk about “White Pride” and preserving a “safe world for white people” need to get over themselves. These people also say dumbass things like, “If there’s a black history month, how come there’s no white history month?” Holidays all throughout the year are devoted to history, much of which was stolen by white people.
12) Any revolution that effects lasting, fundamental change must be bloodless. As long as there’s blood, there will always be whiplash. Real revolution will only occur when every person looks at one another and says, “Hey, let’s just stop all this bullshit.”
13) If you read all of this and dismiss me as a “liberal”, I hope you would reconsider your choice of word. I think a lot about what I say, because using the old words continues the old ways of thinking. If we never change our tune, the song will always remain the same.
-Jay
~7 December 2011~
