Friday, June 19, 2015

on charleston and the self-defense lie

when i bought the gun to guard against other drug dealers ripping me off my intention was to defend myself.
when i bought a gun to scare george zimmerman with a warning shot on the highway, i meant to defend myself. he had threatened me. i felt in danger. therefore my shooting at him was an act of standing my ground. my lawyer thinks i have a case.
when i bought a gun to not be pushed around and then shot someone talking smack about me, i was defending myself. myself and my reputation.
when i bought a gun to feel safe on the walk home from work and shot a homeless man, i was defending myself.
until the moment i realized i had made a mistake.
when i bought a gun to stop the black invasion and pollution of our pristine white culture, i was defending myself. and all of us!
when i bought a gun to protect myself in church and shot a white person who walked in, a white person who it turned out was hoping to hear our choir, i was defending myself.
they said i was a hero, an example of self-defense. i had set a precedence, even if the target had been mistaken.
i didn't feel like a hero. i felt like i had let go of Jesus and let myself be taken in by idol-worshipers. people who believe possession of an archaic instrument is proof of individual existence and power.


everyone who buys a gun is doing so to defend themselves. and everyone defines 'defense' differently from the next person, as well as what is so valuable it requires defending with guns. and in the heat of the moment (of fear, of rage, of jealousy), an act of violence can be justified as an act of defense. what counts as defense entirely depends on the mood, the situation, the mindset. murdering people in the next car can be defensible -- if you are feeling defensive. isn't that easy?


this (il)logic works for national policy too. our attacks on panama, grenada, iraq, vietnam, were all defensive in nature -- if one considers an act of violence based on paranoid fear to be 'protecting oneself.' once you are occupying another country, the need to defend yourself so constant and wearing you might actually forget that it was your act of aggression in the first place which invited the counterattack. but that is all too complicated. what matters is not how the other person (in this case, the iraqi who just fired at me) felt: what matters is how i feel, me, me, me! and i feel in danger. that's it. wonderfully simple.


we're americans. no matter who or how many we kill, we are always just defending ourselves.


with defense like this, who needs aggression?


all we have are 'laws' such as stand your ground which depend on the scientific standard of 'feeling threatened.' that's it! feel threatened, and you can let loose. feel the victim, and do whatever you like. the law lets me! it incentivizes victimhood. HE pushed ME. so of course i drew. i felt scared.


so when the sikh taxi driver pulled up alongside me, calling up images of osama bin laden in my mind, and causing my palms to sweat, what i did next was just defending myself.


supporters of the law may say: but the judge will never buy your explanation. clearly the taxi driver was no threat. ah, but it is irrelevant: the man is already dead. the absurd law had already planted its seed in the uninformed mind.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

water delivery

today i held open the door a little listening for the water delivery man. he stopped several times on landings. when he got to the top i saw he was a woman, in calf-length jeans, sweating and hefting the two huge jugs down onto the doorstep. she had delivered to us once before. she was muscled but not as massive as the average man in such work. she did the same work with fewer muscles: she is tougher. i asked if anyone had referred to her as 'nu hanzi,' something like 'female tough guy.' she laughed and said, maybe one or two. when i handed her the money, plus two extra yuan for the five floor climb, a tip we have pushed on the delivery people, she wiped her forehead and said, 'i feel bad.' (bu hao yisi). no, i said, that is tough work.