Posted first at Liberal Street Fighter

“People suck, and that’s my contention. I can prove it on a scratch of paper with a pen. Give me a fuckin’ Etch-a-sketch, I’ll do it in three minutes. The proof, the fact, the factorum. I’ll show my work, case closed. I’m tired of this back-slapping ‘aren’t humanity neat?’ bullshit. We’re a virus with shoes, OK? That’s all we are.” – Bill Hicks

It gets so hard to separate what people do from what they are, what WE are.

Hate, fear and ignorance … we wrap them around ourselves like tattered old quilts. Tomorrow, the petty thug we call President will give a speech appealing to homophobia to call for the passage of a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage, to rile up the vile base of his vile party. For months now, blatant racism and nativism, driven by hateful rhetoric, have screamed forth from our political “news” programs and talk radio, from the blowholes of the leaders of the ruling party.

A frightening number of Americans LOVE this style of politics. We, a heavily armed people, hiding in our locked and barred homes and aggressively driving one another off the road on our way to our jobs, jobs which many of us hate but which many of us fear losing more, LOVE to grin like aggressive chimps when one of these venal men appeal to our darkest demons.
“Not me,” you may say. Hell, we don’t like to see ourselves this way. Many of us try to live without hatred, live without bigotry, live and let live with our neighbors … but this is the country we all participate in. Not you?

How many times have you looked askance at the kid asking the uncomfortable questions when you were in school? How many times have you nurtured your hatred of one group or another? When have you voted for a politician cut your taxes, despite our dying public infrastructure, schools and public health system? How many of us supported the war on Afganistan, let alone Iraq? How many of our wars have we looked away from, how many dictators have BOTH of our political parties supported? Look in a mirror, before you assert that it is only the right that pushes the hate and fear and ignorance buttons.

We hear over and over that America is a conservative country, but conservatism as it’s practiced now is an ideology of hatred, fear and envy. Is that what we are, what we want to be?

“We are like pygmies lost in a maze of haze. We are not at war, we are having a nervous breakdown,again.” – Hunter S. Thompson

I have to hold down my bile when confronted by the avidly religious. Like Pharyngula, I have little patience for the God worm that feasts on the rational parts of people’s brains. Religion is a poison on human society, it always has been. This I firmly believe. However, the vehemence of this belief puts up barriers, denies common ground, but it is hard to repress. That is MY hatred.

My misanthropy grows from the observation that we are beings who create ourselves. We aren’t just meat sacks, or members of a tribe or nation or religion we’re born into, or the training or facts that are poured into our heads. We are our choices, and for much of human history we haven’t chosen well. In my entire lifetime here in America, despite that spasm of reform in the late sixties and early seventies, we have chosen to wallow in ignorance, to build a military machine that could rip all life and much of the crust off the surface of this planet that nurtures us. We don’t educate, we TRAIN. We don’t shepherd, we CONSUME. We divide ourselves in gated communities and redlined suburbs and endless ribbons of highway and sheets of parking.

It isn’t the raw building blocks of our hearts and spirits and the vast and glorious edifice of human learning and art and music that I hate. It’s that we choose so frequently to turn away from them. Instead of facing honestly our mistakes of the past, we try to gloss them over the better to gleefully repeat them. I hate what we are because I can imagine what we could choose to be instead. I hate that we’d rather turn out in the streets to celebrate a championship victory of a sports team than to protect and preserve our freedoms, freedoms that we wove out of hope and carefully chosen words, freedoms that we always more a promise and a goal than a reality.

We could be so much more, if only we would listen to the critics, the dreamers and jesters, if only we would sit at our collective table and talk and rant and shout and nod and hash out what we all want for our present, what we wish for our childrens’ future. We might suprise ourselves and find more common ground than we think possible, but it can’t happen when our political culture only serves the narrow interests of a fraction of the country. We don’t debate vital issues. We don’t debate the insanity of our drug war/war on civil liberties. We don’t debate honestly about how the lack of universal health care puts us ALL at risk. We still won’t talk about how poorly we treat women, how we still treat them as second class citizens, especially when it comes to them making choices about their own bodies. We don’t debate, we aren’t even allowed to KNOW, how much treasure we spend on more and newer and better ways to kill people, rather than on ways to build a better future at a fraction of the cost of maintaining the biggest military on the planet. WE … DON’T … DEBATE. Those subjects, and so many more, are off the table.

We choose to wire our collective jaws shut, look away from the hard choices, close our ears to those who’re too different from “us”, whatever “us” we consider ourselves to be part of. The promise in those founder’s words was contingent on having these debates, continuing these debates. As we listen to George Bush, child of privilege, greed and connections, tell us that some of us CAN’T choose to marry who we love because of bigotry and “faith” we’ll put off our vitally needed national conversation a little while longer. If our homosexual brothers and sisters, neighbors and co-workers, aren’t free to order their lives as they see fit, then NONE of us are free. Yet here we are again, and we can’t find a way to get the so-called opposition party to stand up and fight for equality of all Americans, so Bush and his minions win, and drag us down into hatred and oppression.

It gets harder and harder to believe we could choose something different as we descend down into the mud once again, and the misanthropy soaks into me more and more.

Given my mood as I face tomorrow, I’ll let a much-missed fellow misanthrope have the last word about this, offer up some hopeful words I can’t seem to find tonight.

“The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly coloured and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: Is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, ‘Hey – don’t worry, don’t be afraid ever, because this is just a ride …’ And we … kill those people. Ha ha, ‘Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.’ It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter, because – it’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace. – Bill Hicks

If only we could make it so.


Update [2006-6-5 11:52:11 by Madman in the Marketplace]:
More good Xtian love:

More than 50 gay rights activists wearing rainbow-colored sashes were denied Holy Communion at a Pentecost service yesterday at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in St. Paul, Minn., parishioners and church officials said.

In an act that some witnesses called a “sacrilege” and others called a sign of “solidarity,” a man who was not wearing a sash received a Communion wafer from a priest, broke it into pieces and handed it to some of the sash wearers, who consumed it on the spot.

Ushers threatened to call the police, and a church employee burst into tears when the unidentified man re-distributed the consecrated wafer, which Catholics consider the body of Christ. But the Mass was not interrupted, and the incident ended peacefully, said Dennis McGrath, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Jesus must be so proud.