Every year I make the same tired jokes about Veterans Day. This is usually accompanied by a background anxiety that people will think me glib or insensitive about what people in the armed forces contribute. There are two things I have learned, though:
1) It is impossible to care about what is offending people that have a surface-level sense of humor
2) It is impossible for me to stop making idiotic jokes. No matter how much I want to.
When I was a boy, I wanted to join the Marine Corps. I investigated this option once I grew to the age of eighteen and it became clear that no college with a sentient human working the admissions process would admit me. Sadly, my life took me in a different direction, which, in case you were wondering, is a thing that craven cowards say when they are too spineless to admit their own spinelessness. I don't think a day goes by when I don't regret not going into the Corps. Do I make up for it by contributing to veterans causes? Lobby the government for better care for returning vets and the families of those killed in action? Buy a homeless vet a cup of coffee?
No. I'm an American. Despite a couple days that we set aside to say hollow niceties about people that put their lives on the line, we don't give a shit. We cut their benefits. We make sick jokes about the rampant PTSD caused by stretching a fighting force to it's breaking point. We allow callow, manipulative elected officials send them into nightmarish, unwinnable conflicts we have no business creating, aside from the very good business it will mean for some of their friends. We re-elect these same subhumans as if nothing had happened.
In a world where moral fiber is a devalued commodity, these are people willing to die for their principles. But we've watched our own government treat them as disposable and feed them into a meat grinder for so long that we have followed suit. It's enough to just click 'like' on a picture of men in uniform to 'Support Our Troops' as if that 'like' button will buy diapers for their children.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Horrifying News Roundup!
So many horrible things are happening in this country and around the
world that I have to cram them into a blog entry! It says a lot about
human perseverance and ingenuity that we are always topping ourselves in
depravity and degradation while increasing the speed at which
civilization goes down the tubes. You can't keep us down!
These are the worst links I can possibly provide. If you think you can top me, please don't. Fair warning, that if you try to stay away from the news to maintain your sanity, you should read no further. I'm not putting these together just to gawk and gape at the horror of it all. We are being desensitized a little more each day with every click to the next sickening news story. I picked these out to highlight specific social ills in the hope we can look at each one a little closer and get down to the root cause.
You may have seen these on social media already, but we're going to discuss them here so we can get it out of our systems and don't bring them up at dinner with the in-laws while stuck for a conversation topic.
It's important to act like everything is fine in real life. I'm not kidding. Hang on to illusion. It's getting to be all we've got, especially in a world where:
- a man advertises his desire to watch a stranger beat and rape his 11 year old daughter.
Anthony Brinkman's nauseatingly perverse desire was exposed after police found an ad he had placed online. An undercover officer, posing as an interested party, lured him to the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel (naturally) where Brinkman was arrested. Upon confessing, Brinkman said that he was 'sorry' and 'stupid'.
You didn't break a window with a baseball, Anthony. You tried to violate and traumatize your own child.
I have stopped caring what creates animals like this. Nature, nurture, video games, telenovelas, don't make no nevermind to me. You could make the argument that the internet fosters and feeds this kind of psychosis that would come up with this, but of course, if it weren't for the internet (coupled with a lack of foresight that many of these kinds of scumbags fortunately don't have) they might never have caught Brinkman. The weird thing is, we don't want law enforcement invading our private lives, but no one reading this would care if the police didn't follow protocol when arresting Brinkman and accidentally danced all over him while wearing golf shoes. Which brings me to exhibit B:
- After being stopped for a minor traffic infraction, David Eckert is physically violated and humiliated in a vain effort to find drugs that he isn't carrying in his rectum
This happened back in January, but Eckert's lawsuit was just filed this week, leading to a flurry of reporters' questions for the head of the Deming, NM police department, who, rather than address valid concerns about the ordeal, refer the press to their lawyers, who also refuse to answer any questions. Until they do, the only version of events we can go off of is Eckert's account of being repeatedly rectally violated via enema, doctor finger, and colonoscopic probe and having to defecate in front of officers so that a doctor could examine the stool. All this happened because some patrolman thought he was clenching his butt too hard to NOT be carrying contraband. The cherry on top is that Eckert is being billed for all the procedures. That's right, the hospital that went along with this and performed all these procedures because some jackass in a uniform told them to is threatening him with collection, which is one better than Milgram ever did with his experiment.
Last and most heartbreaking:
-After being in an accident, 19 year-old Renisha McBride is shot and killed while seeking aid at a nearby home.
A message was sent with the Zimmerman verdict. It's been heard by the paranoid, the entitled, and the heartless, the kind of person that responds to a cry for help by shooting a teenage woman in the face. Michigan being a stand-your-ground state, the shooter in question in this case stands a good chance of never being charged in this, unlike in the strikingly similar case in North Carolina from September. The trend is being set, though. Whether you are a civilian or law enforcement, whether you are frightened or just feeling bloodthirsty, you can react with deadly force to any situation as long as certain laws in your state are vague enough.
God help us.
These are the worst links I can possibly provide. If you think you can top me, please don't. Fair warning, that if you try to stay away from the news to maintain your sanity, you should read no further. I'm not putting these together just to gawk and gape at the horror of it all. We are being desensitized a little more each day with every click to the next sickening news story. I picked these out to highlight specific social ills in the hope we can look at each one a little closer and get down to the root cause.
You may have seen these on social media already, but we're going to discuss them here so we can get it out of our systems and don't bring them up at dinner with the in-laws while stuck for a conversation topic.
It's important to act like everything is fine in real life. I'm not kidding. Hang on to illusion. It's getting to be all we've got, especially in a world where:
- a man advertises his desire to watch a stranger beat and rape his 11 year old daughter.
Anthony Brinkman's nauseatingly perverse desire was exposed after police found an ad he had placed online. An undercover officer, posing as an interested party, lured him to the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel (naturally) where Brinkman was arrested. Upon confessing, Brinkman said that he was 'sorry' and 'stupid'.
You didn't break a window with a baseball, Anthony. You tried to violate and traumatize your own child.
I have stopped caring what creates animals like this. Nature, nurture, video games, telenovelas, don't make no nevermind to me. You could make the argument that the internet fosters and feeds this kind of psychosis that would come up with this, but of course, if it weren't for the internet (coupled with a lack of foresight that many of these kinds of scumbags fortunately don't have) they might never have caught Brinkman. The weird thing is, we don't want law enforcement invading our private lives, but no one reading this would care if the police didn't follow protocol when arresting Brinkman and accidentally danced all over him while wearing golf shoes. Which brings me to exhibit B:
- After being stopped for a minor traffic infraction, David Eckert is physically violated and humiliated in a vain effort to find drugs that he isn't carrying in his rectum
This happened back in January, but Eckert's lawsuit was just filed this week, leading to a flurry of reporters' questions for the head of the Deming, NM police department, who, rather than address valid concerns about the ordeal, refer the press to their lawyers, who also refuse to answer any questions. Until they do, the only version of events we can go off of is Eckert's account of being repeatedly rectally violated via enema, doctor finger, and colonoscopic probe and having to defecate in front of officers so that a doctor could examine the stool. All this happened because some patrolman thought he was clenching his butt too hard to NOT be carrying contraband. The cherry on top is that Eckert is being billed for all the procedures. That's right, the hospital that went along with this and performed all these procedures because some jackass in a uniform told them to is threatening him with collection, which is one better than Milgram ever did with his experiment.
Last and most heartbreaking:
-After being in an accident, 19 year-old Renisha McBride is shot and killed while seeking aid at a nearby home.
A message was sent with the Zimmerman verdict. It's been heard by the paranoid, the entitled, and the heartless, the kind of person that responds to a cry for help by shooting a teenage woman in the face. Michigan being a stand-your-ground state, the shooter in question in this case stands a good chance of never being charged in this, unlike in the strikingly similar case in North Carolina from September. The trend is being set, though. Whether you are a civilian or law enforcement, whether you are frightened or just feeling bloodthirsty, you can react with deadly force to any situation as long as certain laws in your state are vague enough.
God help us.
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