Alright... would you kill someone?

While I am willing to bleed for what I believe in, I will not make others bleed.
I am a supporter of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, and hope to be able to join them along the Mexico/US border later this year.
Like the CPT motto says "Reducing Violence By Getting in the Way".

The headline on their website (http://www.cpt.org) says:

What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?

Shalom,
Chewy

 

The government is oppressive in the way in which it conducts business on capitol hill. Granted, they're not taking us out into the country-side and forcing us to dig our own graves, ala Nicaragua, but that doesn't mean they aren't oppressive. Let us not, in the vein of the conservatives, entertain a false dichotomy for even a moment.

Congress takes backdoor money from all different sorts of special interest groups, and the only ones they listen to are the ones with big bucks i.e. big business. Then they pass legislation based upon these funds all the while never paying any mind to what the average citizen wants. Our representatives don't even represent us anymore, they're simply co-opted schills for corperate powers. Tort reform is a good example of just how tied up in the money game our congress is. We live under a plutocracy, not a democracy, and the only individuals who have a say in our government are the aristocrats that run it.

Your government expects you to be a good little worker bee obsessed with consumerism and the corperations spend billions a year making sure you feel just bad enough about yourself that you stay that way. They also spend billions of dollars a year lobbying to keep the minimum wage down to a despicable rate as they reap the rewards (never paying anyone the proper, respectable percentage for their work); the misappropriation of funds in this country is one of the most disgusting things about the place in which we live and we can't even change it because of how co-opted our officials are. The upper 1% of this country own more money than does any government on the entire continent of Africa combined and the disparity between low classes and the upper class is larger now than it has ever been in the history of the United States -- this disparity is growing due to huge incentives to corporations who out-source, and the destruction of tax laws like the A.M.T. 42% of the people in this country live under the poverty line, and your government gives tax-breaks to the rich, upper 1% (i.e. themselves) and huge tax breaks to McDonnel Douglas, Boeing-Richmond and Lockheed Martin just before a war they muster up for their own profits.

And, ofcourse, if you break your back at work, or asbestos makes you sick, or you get cancer from their by-products the corporations with their tort re(de)form pay millions a year in lobbying money to make sure that you can't get a God-damned cent in a civil suit and then spread with their sensationalist powers propaganda about how there are hundreds of millions of suits a year against them and that they're the "poor little corporation" and that these suits are destroying our medical system and putting millions of doctors out of work and they're allowed to spread this kind of shit because they're contributing huge amounts of money to slush funds and campaign finance.

We don't owe our government a debt of gratitude, and don't have any false notions about whether you have any power to change anything at all because you haven't the power to change a thing, sadly. That, my friend, is what I call oppression, and the only thing you owe your government is a swift kick in its metaphorical throat from the proverbial boot until it finally finds itself inconvenienced enough to actually change something for the better, God forbid.

Do I love America? Sure. Do I want to be an expatriate? No, not particularly. I simply feel there needs to be rapid, rather extensive change in the country I love and will not allow myself to be blind enough to believe for a second that my government isn't serving its own interests (corporate interests) every chance it gets.

 

i'd probably run away and then feel bad about it afterwards

 

I happen to like being dumb, happy, and mindless, and some smart mouth in a few posts is going to say that i manage to succeed just fine in that. Things are much more simple when you're mindless. Besides, i would never sue the government, or anybody else for that matter, cuz it was probably my own damn fault. My gramps is dying from lung cancer, and he's happy as can be. He's not pissed at the tobacco industry, or the 'Man' for providing free cigarettes with his C-rations during the Big One.

 

I actually don't think you're dumb, happy, or mindless, AHumblePatriot (can I call you AHP or would you prefer your full name?). The fact that you're exposing yourself to viewpoints that oppose your own shows me that you're not dumb or mindless. If you preferred to be mindless you wouldn't be here on the forums. You would be content to live in blissful ignorance and not give a damn about what other people thought.

You also say things that are very provocative and you know they are provocative. That tells me that you're upset about something and you're here because you want to talk about it.

While your viewpoints are often oppositional and in contention with some people here, you're pushing us all to think more deeply about our own opinions and I hope we're helping you do the same thing.

 

I don't think you're dumb. I don't think you're smart either, by simple nature of the fact that you've never really expressed to me your views in any detail. You notice that I wasn't condescending to you in my post -- that kind of thing isn't my style. I just express how I feel and do my best to objectively listen to what someone else says and do some self-auditing and find exactly how I feel about it.

Things aren't more simple when you're mindless, though. Well, they are more simple if you truly are mindless (ofcourse ignorance is bliss), but if you're simply pretending to be mindless because you believe you prefer the cold-comfort and complacency over revolution and spansive change that would actually, if effective, change your life for the better about 50,000-fold, you're not truly going to be happy; if you're truly intelligent enough to realize you're being fucked and are able to assimilate in your brain the many various ways in which that is occuring, you cannot simply go to the bar on a Friday night and come home to your little place in the suburbs and get some rest so you may work yourself into the ground for the next 5 days again for the excessive wealth of another man who works half the amount of time you work and gains 15 times the amount you gain in wealth -- you cannot happily do that if you've any brain capacity and dignity at all.

Although, I do believe a lot of Americans truly are mindless at this point, I don't believe they started out that way, and I believe they've the mental capacity to be something much more profound than they've become and simply haven't utilized it. I think television had a lot to do with that, as did the endless messages therein telling them that the only thing that mattered was glitz and glamour and clothing and new cars/sofas/televisions/computers galore, and that educating yourself was goofy, stupid and a waste of time (nah! You don't need that. Why would you need to read when you can come in to our place and buy a refrigerator and sofa and pay no money, that's right! No money for 18 months! But hurry! This deal's going fast!). I just get sick of people being complacent and not taking the time to truly educate themselves on the way in which their government is actually fucking them. The worst part is arguing with someone who truly believes they owe their government and employer a debt of gratitude for turning them into a complacent, know-nothing jackass rabid consumer. These people act like America couldn't be better than it is now, which is hilarious. I love America, and I'm seriously a capitalist, I just don't agree with the many ways in which many individuals manipulate the capitalist system and create egregious social injustice. Ironically, those being fucked are usually those who feel the most pride in their broken, failed system; invariably those people are mongoloids, without the mental capacity to have any kind of multilinear thought, or conceive of a thought that goes beyond what kind of food to go waste money on that night or what time the next trite, baneful, uninspired sitcom is going to be airing.

These people who buy 70 foot yachts, an island off of Corsica or *cough* spend $16,000 on an umbrella stand are the very same people who're misappropriating funds and getting away with it through many various, W.A.S.P.-designed governmental loopholes. Do you realize that if this kind of disgusting division of wealth weren't considered acceptable and weren't allowed to occur you wouldn't have to work 9 hours a day in order to acrue a good bit of wealth and a much, much more comfortable life than that which you are living today? Do you realize that 9 or 10 hours a day is an unnecessary amount of time for a wage slave to work in order for our country to function properly and still maintain all those industries which provide you those things you love so much? People needn't work their fingers to the bone in order to keep this country a super power, it's simply those that acrue for themselves excessive amounts of wealth off of the workers' labor that attempt at every moment to instill in us that fearful notion to keep us frantically working our valuable lives away. Oppression, I say, oppression over the many by the hands of the few.

I do agree with you that some civil suits are disgusting and the person suing should be thrown out, which they usually are, but a young boy losing his eye-sight and becoming brain damaged due to a growing absess in his brain that went undetected due to a hospital refusing, even after parental consent to give him a cat-scan getting a mere $250,000 of the established $7.1M due to tort reform laws in California is disgusting. The government sees your suing over various malpractice a nuissance and a waste of cash. Your governmental officials are the same well-to-do Super-Yuppies that gentrify your city, drive up prices in the area and then turn around and allocate $0.00 to the areas of the city which they actively, consciously destroy with their business ventures. You think congress is the only place in which your house and senate leaders are doing business? Think again. Most of these guys still have ties to places they used to work (ahem, Cheney in the Ford and original Bush administration, not to mention Jr.s administration), take soft-money from companies exploiting workers and destroying the environment and subsequently spend part of their fortunes they made off of your back lobbying to make sure you don't have the ability to become compensated when their chemicals or cut-corner business tactics harm your physical health and possibly even destroy your life entirely. Plain and simple, when you look at the evidence, you realize that your government is full of business men and lawyers who're in it for their own gain and couldn't care an ounce less about you or your happiness.

 

ahaha... i just had to say.. i love that pic of bush you have there...

 

Ignorance is no longer bliss, it is dangerous. Can we agree on that?

 

Ignorance is blissful for the ignoramus, and danger is its incidental. And truly, I don't think "Ignorance" is the correct prefactory word, but more "mental ineptitude is bliss". You can be ignorant of the way in which you're being fucked but still be aware of and equally effected by the way in which you're being fucked, where as if you're incredibly stupid, you're easily pleased and also quite unaware of a horrible situation unless it is at the most base and obvious level, such as an ethnic cleansing. A moron has no clue that he's being fucked and probably wouldn't care if he did stumble ass-backward onto the information of his being taken advantage of because he's so enamoured with his car that gets 12 miles per gallon, and the numerous vehicles he bought on credit that he trails behind his gas-guzzling monster.

 

Never been to another country, but i'm fairly certain that the US is better than Rwanda.

 

Have you seen that movie "Hotel Rwanda"? I agree with you, I would prefer to live here any day over Rwanda. But I think what FedUpAmerican wants to know is what about America is so much better than other countries.

America has a history of oppression that you appear to be overlooking. America may not be oppressive to you and, therefore, you don't think it's oppressive, but America has been and still is oppressive to certain groups of people in this country and around the world. White middle-class males are extremely privileged in our society as opposed to a middle-class Amerindian, for example.

While I agree with you that America is a better place to live than certain other places in the world, it is by no means an example of how to treat ones citizens.

 

I will say that i like america. I do not, however, feel that we are the BEST country in the world. Hell, i can't even tell you who i do think is the best. But i don't think it is us.
dont feel that this opinion speaks ill of america though. We got some work to do. There IS oppression. That doesn't mean its outright, but it is not neccessarily hidden, either. Its like we all kind of know we are getting fucked, but, you know, maybe it kinda feels good. Let me explain: Its like there is bad shit going on and people are making money left and right, and you feel like the little guy (or gal) a lot and you struggle sometimes to make ends meet, but then you got a house, (even if you're renting) and you have a car, and its convient to go out and find food...and you sort of like those things, because its familiar and easy, but the satisfaction is only temporary (kind of like...getting fucked) (And i mean this in a very lighted hearted, kind of serious way) We all are getting an idea of how bad these quick fixes are for society...but man, we better find a quick fix for some of these problems, or not only are we fucked, but we're knocked up, too.

peace and love