SXSW is going on in Austin, and that event always brings the heat… awesome music and tech, chill people who are down to get along and enjoy good stuff…
Unfortunately, for every force there is an equal and opposite force, and there are shitty shitheads in that town who are as uncool as the South-By crowd is cool.
You may have heard about the package bombs that were delivered to homes in Austin. A 75-year-old Hispanic woman was seriously injured, and 2 guys named Draylen and Anthony were killed.
Whoever is doing this… SCREW YOU FOR BEING SO TERRIBLE.
I’m mad about all this crap today… watching the clown show in DC, which speaks to the same moral bankruptcy and misguided outrage that pushes people to these disgusting lengths, and seeing the political “leaders” continue to be adherents rather than heroes for truly-good principles, and how it affects people who are less-informed and undereducated and otherwise ill-prepared to mentally process these issues…
It makes me mad, sad, frustrated, and disgusted.
It makes me mad that we’ve been so let down as a trusting and hopeful and trying-so-hard-to-be-good people. We’ve been let down and misled by religion and government and celebrity – the three MAJOR things that hold peoples’ attention and admiration.
The celebrity aspect is obvious. I don’t put much stock in people just because they’re on-screen, but I know others do. I respect the grind it takes to “make it,” but the day that Kim Kardashian became a valued member of society was a dark day for the quality of the general public.
Politics has always been a game, but people have taken it so seriously because of how it’s taught, especially the personalization created in people about the value put on democracy.
Think about the belligerence of a Rush Limbaugh, and the lack of knowledge that typically accompanies such self-assured, red-faced “certainty”… (gags)
And I’ve LIVED the dissonance of what ‘Religion‘ says & what ‘Religion‘ does, and the absolute shyte people get away with IN THE NAME OF or as long as they keep showing up on Sunday mornings.
My childhood church was full of it – people being rude, catty, unkind, even racist, and nobody correcting it.
There’s nobody correcting the BS that goes on.
Somebody should have put the kibosh on the people who get to the point of shooting up schools.
The free press is important, but nobody body-checked the [in]accuracy of news outlets who do no more than enflame personal sentiments.
Nobody told the soulless red-headed family at our church that their buttholeishness would not be tolerated. Even in the place you’d expect people to stand for “right” and “good,” nobody spoke up.
And it’s a horrible cycle. It creates and perpetuates and permits all sorts of lousy behavior when those we entrust don’t actually stand for what we think they do.
And there’s a pattern.
Nobody corrects talking heads and politicians when they spew absolute falsehoods or opinion-stated-and-accepted-as-fact. In fact, it’s been normalized as “fake news” and “alternative facts”… WHEN IT’S JUST UNTRUE.
[note: there’s a difference between honest and true]
And it misinforms and poisons people who feel helpless and hopeless and forgotten, “bullied” by the way Life is moving, and are looking for guidance or protection…
You see it in people who say that Christianity is threatened by people saying “Happy Holidays” or because there isn’t stated Prayer Time in schools.
Guess what, the morning Moment Of Silence IS the time to pray. It doesn’t prevent anybody from praying, just like marriage being available to everyone doesn’t prevent anybody else from moving.
And we stopped calling these people out for being incorrectly-outraged and ignorantly-enraged.
But those people who get so mad & feel under attack when they truly aren’t lash out. And because of their “protected status” as a demographic or because of peoples’ stupidly parroting of “that’s my free speech”… they receive no reproach.
They’re just free to go around with their wrongness, totally misguided and dangerously indignant… and it’s out of hand.
I saw it teaching college government. I see it in my own family members. It’s a disease – an infectious one, too – the uneducated hostility, the same blind fervor that many direct to their beliefs that then allows someone to dehumanize fellow humans, reduce strangers to sweeping generalizations deserving of a pathetic individual’s moronic frustration or dogma-driven justification for being an objectively-shitty person.
and for what?
Because the news said to be mad about an issue?
Because other people are being given more space in society?
Because an idea makes their tiny brains hurt?
We can’t allow it any longer. Like Bill Maher said, “We’ve become tolerant of intolerance,” and many people hide behind constitutional rights in not speaking up to tell someone they’re effing stupid or irrational or just plain wrong.
It’s cowardice. I’ll write something more about why it’s stupid, but I’ll leave this for now: THE FIRST AMENDMENT HAS TO DO WITH OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE GOVERNMENT (Congress shall make no law regarding… speech, establishment of religion, press, etc), SO WE ARE FREE TO TELL PEOPLE TO STFU AND/OR THAT THEY’RE FULL OF SHIT.
The complicit complacency in the face of lies, hate, aggression, violence, and all the many forms of crappy human’ing can’t stand.