Antonio says,
“Bob, My experience leads me to wonder if there is something congenitally wrong with our people and the only remedy is to tear power from their grasp.”
“A few years ago I lived in a loft with five roomates. There we were, five white kids living in Spanish harlem behind an iron fence and barred windows. One of my roomates was a New England Anglo Saxon who’s ancestor fought in the Revolutionary war. He made a good income and devoted his free time to teaching illeagal hispanic imigrants to read and write. To his amazement most of his students were illiterate in Spanish as well. Some couldn’t read the floor numbers in an elevator. He felt just terrible for them.”
“One day he was out walking in the Barrio with our pretty blond female roomate and some Latino Youths began yelling threats and insults at them. They kept walking. The girl said “Those lousey _____ want to kill us!” The guy replied, “No they want to kill me. You they just want to beat and gang-rape.” And he wasn’t joking. But he kept volunteering his free time to help educate the “newcomers” and give back to the community, not caring that the community hated him for being white. And he wasn’t alone. Another friend of mine teaches swimming and martial arts at the community center in the same neighborhood.”
“What do you do with people who are impervious to argument because they’re locked into a death spiral like some suicide cult member?”
Comment by Antonio Fini — 12/
Antonio, every soldier who has ever held a dying comrade in his arms has knows that, back home, tens of thousands of people were using the war for profit.
There are no exceptions to this.
In every single case that soldier has had two options. 1) He could encourage his fellow fighters to keep up the fight or he cold 2) obsess on the profiteers and tell them they should get out of way and let the enemy have theirmiserable homeland taht was full of traitos and opportunists.
Your mistake is that thinking that the guy you are talking is any different from the war profiteers because he is not making money off of his treason. There is NO difference.
There will always be us and the traitors. We must decide whether we will follow reaction 1) or reaction 2).
As for taking power AWAY from people, I have just engaged in a long explanation of why it is that no one HAS power.
We are steppting into a vacuum that I have very, very carefully explained.
If you think there is something congenitally wrong with us, you may not believe that the Jews in Nazi Gemany and the Russians under Stalin reacted even WORSE than we are reacting.
The South African Boere are truly pathetic.
Please stop hitting on Reaction 2) and get in the battle with me.
This is a critical moment. I need a seminar, not a bitching session.
I have met you, Antonio, and I need you desperately to jump in here right here and right now.
For every ten thousands bitchers there is one person who can actually THINK.
You are the one in ten thousand. Knowing that is the only reward you will get.
But as you approach my age, you will learn that all the praise in the world means very little compared to the approval of what you have done by the one person in the world whose approval means everything to you.
Yourself.
#1 by Peter on 12/21/2005 - 2:47 pm
On something being “congenitally wrong:” as Bob has said, this is how every revolution has looked at the beginning. When we show signs of success, suddenly 95% of everyone jumps on the bandwagon declaring that they were always secretly behind us.
Old Westerns are full of this theme. Take a corrupt town controlled by a crook. One man has had enough and takes action. A friend or two appear. The whole town that he is trying to help seems to be against him, but a latchkey mysteriously appears at just the right moment and an anonymous note with critical intelligence is dropped off at the last minute.
As Bob noted, Adams was wrong when he offhandedly said that a third of the people were behind the revolution of 1776, a third were indifferent, and a third were Tories. He was wrong because in the beginning, there were really only a handful and in the end almost everyone was behind it.
At a local grocery store, they were selling DVDs with two movies on each for $1.00. I got several of the Roy Rogers. I love these movies. Partly it is because it was shot in all my favorite places that I have hiked and explored so I can say oh, that is Melody Ranch, or Golden Oak, Vasquez Rocks, or the back side of Big Bear (it’s easy to sneak quietly onto the movie ranches if you keep an eye out for the dust cloud of a truck coming your way). But as hokey as this sounds, these old movies give me hope.
In these old movies, Roy goes through all kinds of crap, loses everything including his reputation, gets injured, people hate him, but he always keeps his spirits up and sings great music for the ladies. And of course he always wins and the people thank him for helping them.