A Short Post About Pit Bulls

Pit Bulls will undoubtedly be demonized again once people forget about the whole Vick thing.

So before that happens, and for the sake of argument, let’s say many people hurt other people; shooting, raping, destroying lives. Let’s say some people in this country claim the moral authority to send other people to die in a faraway desert. Let’s say some people gain power by demonizing an Other. Let’s say people destroy their planet. And let’s say (again, just for the sake of argument), that we are sad little creatures with an unfulfilled potential for greatness, who from the moment each and every one of us is born can only think, “How can I get my hands on the world’s limited resources?” and “What’s in it for me?”

But even if we decide to subscribe to this sad view of the world (and it’s a conscious decision. Nothing here or anywhere else is a truism), is that enough for us to lose faith in the human race?

What I’m saying is, leave my Pit Bulls alone.

My New Job IV

I read the other day about a woman who attended a meeting with social workers and stormed out, taking her one-year-old baby with her. When the social worker and the security guard followed her she stood in the middle of the road, held her baby with one arm and said, “If you come any closer I’m gonna kill the motherfucker.”

I meet the people who will die soon from overdose, or from a bullet to the back of the head, or from AIDS, or quietly in jail. They fall asleep while they talk to me because they just don’t give a damn. Society gave up on them a long time ago and they gave up on themselves even sooner. They laugh when I ask for their fathers’ names but at the same time they have six children they’ve never met and never will.

And legalizing all drugs will solve some of the problems. Addicts will not spend their lives in jail but will be treated and some will come out and see life for what it could be, the way they saw life when they were children rather than as something they need to endure between highs. And the drug dealers will be forced to find something else to do. And the police won’t spend all its resources staring at street corners but will actually work to make the streets safer from violent crime… I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. I love this city; don’t get me wrong, but going back to work after a two-day weekened takes away the illusion. Here I am with my unborn child and my Honey and my doggies and my house and my mortgage and should we take the carpet out in the guest room and what do I do about the poison ivy in the backyard and the drycleaner messed up the clothes again and Comcast costumer service department sucks. And here is a generation of people who won't live to see forty.

There’s an all-encompassing truth hidden there for me. Between all the filth and the fury there’s something begging to be understood. Maybe it’ll make me get out of my shell and devote my free time to volunteer work or to spread the message of drug-law reform or prison reform or public education reform. Maybe it’ll make me see the unity of the human race in its collective pain and beauty.

Or maybe I’ll eventually get a new job and forget about it all.

About Those Damn Mexicans

So there's this buzz going on right now on the left. Bush has made a political mistake and turned his so-called base against him. Some on Free Republic call for his impeachment. And I say, if only someone on Free Republic could spell impeachment...

Now's our chance. Finally we can get the higher ground by getting tough on immigration. We can take the Democratic Party away from the Move Ons and into victory by building this high wall and kicking immigrants back home. It's not just our right, it's our duty, now more than ever.

But why is that? We get our opinions or at least our water-cooler topics of conversation from the media. Why are we talking about immigration now and not four years ago? Simple. Four years ago we were busy debating the sanctity of marriage. Why haven't we talked about illegal immigration twenty years ago? Because we were talking about crack cocaine. Why haven't we been talking about damn Mexicans until now? Because we were talking about AIDS. And about hunger in Ethiopia. And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Iran and Lybia and Vietnam and inner-city violence and drugs and the morality of euthanasia.

And now? We have endless wars all over this crumbling planet, inner-city violence rises and wage decreases, people still go hungry due to economic policy dictated by the greed of the few, and people still die of AIDS. Yet somehow we dare talk about illegal immigration.

They're destroying our culture and our way of life - What culture are you talking about? I don't like to watch cars driving around in circles. I don't like backyard fireworks. I don't like wrestling. But it doesn't destroy my culture, just like my activities don't destroy your culture. When they cancel a Nascar race for an emergency discussion about Nabokov we'll talk. Meanwhile, drink your beer and shut up.

Security!!! Now more than ever!!! - It's been said before and I hate to repeat the obvious here, but the 9/11 attack wasn't done by illegal immigrants. This country was relatively safe without a wall, and it will continue to be relatively safe. People die from preventable car accidents, from an ill-conceived war on drugs, from poverty and hunger and even from boredom-driven suicide. People die. It's a fact of life.

They're stealing our jobs - Spend more time looking for a job rather than going online. Go to school and learn a trade. Become a philosopher. And what's so wrong about having people driven to work and succeed in a country that has lost its sense of self-pride? Democrats love to put their heads in the sand and hope for the best. They apologize to people in other countries, saying "Don't blame me. I didn't vote for him." But they're just as guilty as the Free Republican ignorant xenophobes, because one day they woke up, and not knowing why, they said, "Maybe he does have those weapons." The next morning they woke up and said, "I'm all for equal rights, but why do they have to call it marriage?" And yesterday they woke up, after five hundred years of illegal immigrants coming to this country, and they said,

They don't even speak English - Then teach them. Help them. You'll feel better about yourself in the morning.

Hey, Everyone Else is Doing the Imus Thing

Alec Baldwin wants to know why, even though we're in the middle of a war in Iraq and a struggle against the Bush crooks at home people still obsess about Imus. In his words:

[T]his Imus crap is just another distraction from what really matters. The Attorney General may be a corrupt, lying hitman for the Bush-Cheney junta. The war is a disaster that is being prolonged in order to potentially embarrass Democrats in 2008. Global warming is now recognized as a major and looming emergency by literally everyone on Earth but the White House

Yet African American people continue to talk about "the Imus crap." So, what's going on here? Are they so easily distracted? Don't THEY know there's a war on?

Or maybe they're just so sick of this momentary spotlight on our inherent social problems that they wish maybe this time it will last for more than a week; maybe this time we'll talk about black men's treatment of black women, about elitist media that rather than face its own race problem spends its time--now more than ever--condemning hip hop music, about the problem that will not go away until we deal with it.

But It won't happen. Not yet. Not as long as for every Imus in the Morning we have a hundred Glenn Becks in the evening. And for every racist comment made in public, we have a million racist comments made in private.

My New Job II

So in my new job I have to wear a tie. You know this world exists, and you know some of your neighbors live in that world and follow its deranged logic, but until you step into this environment you have no idea what’s it really about. Apparently, ties have to match your clothes. Your shoes as well. Everything has to match.

It’s this whole new culture that exists under your nose, but unless you’re a part of it you simply have no idea what’s it about and how prevalent it is. You just live your own life as if it’s the only possible way to live, not thinking for a second there are others all around you who do heroin, or sharpen their teeth and dress like vampires, or practice voodoo, or have crazy orgies, or wear ties.

I get compliments on the ties Honey bought me. People ask me about brands and stuff. I search for a label.

“Nautica? Is that the brand? Nautica?”

“Ahh, Nautica is good,” they say.

One of the guys straightened my tie today. Apparently this thin piece of cloth has to be centered.

Personally, looking at tie patterns make me dizzy. I’m not even mentioning fun ties; that’s a whole new type of evil I’m too scared to get into. What’s going on here? Who randomly decided men can only look professional if their upper body is divided symmetrically by patterns? I would have loved to be in on that meeting.

Moving to the US

The day before I moved to the US, a news program in England talked about how most Americans don’t believe in evolution. They showed a protest where one guy said, “I don’t want my children to think they came out from a bunch of monkeys.”

The first car sticker I saw: “She’s not a choice, she’s a baby girl.”

Now, in other countries, Americans are considered the joke of the world, culturally able to do nothing but produce extravagant shows (on ice). On my first visit back to England, an old friend told me about a new reality show where regular people go into an island and try to survive. I said, “In America there’s also a show like that, only there one person is voted off the island every week, and the one that stays at the end gets a million Dollars.” Men, did they laugh. America, turning every interesting concept—like the testing of human endurance—into a game show.

So it took me a while to understand.

It took me a while to understand that a place where people have a right to protest against evolution is not necessarily a bad place; just a funny place. And that some people stick their beliefs on their cars and it’s not for me to judge, even if they’re wrong. And that screw that other show; the first season of Survivor was great because a bunch of people fought each other to become millionaires, and who cares about people stuck on an island for no good reason. Simple endurance’s got nothing on greed and competitiveness.

So I ended up liking this place. So what if people watch O’Reilly? What’s that got to do with me? So what if people buy Coulter’s books? So what if Buchanan preaches xenophobia and Limbaugh is a racist? A place where people like that succeed must, by definition, also include the best of humanity, with people doing what they can to end the war, and people working in small communities to pull children away from crime, and people making great music and great art because half of their country is insanely conservative.

And it’s true what they say about the American Dream: it’s been only seven years since I moved here and I’ve already become Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. The land of endless possibilities indeed.

Should prostitution be legal anywhere?

Gave my two cents again:

Who are we kidding? In our hypocritical war for the preservation of perceived values we don't dare legalize prostitution (or drugs, for that matter). After all, why risk the wrath of the blind conservatives who are unable to see themselves as "the other" when we can let people do what they want while keeping the right to take them into custody whenever we choose and hide them in our leper-colony-like prisons.

How does a prostitute view the system? How does she view us who go online to debate the legality of her life like the Gods in Acropolis, high and mighty with our borrowed opinions based on borrowed world-views? Where were we when her father abused her? Where were we when she failed her exams? Where were we when advertisements promised her a life she would never have? Where were we when she lost her life opportunities? Where were we when she made a beautiful drawing above a beautifully written journal entry? Where were we when she wanted to learn to play an instrument? Where were we when she had a chance to be somebody? Where were we when she grew up to face a choice between making an easy five hundred a day or making $6.50 an hour in McDonald's?

Should prostitution be legal? I have a better question: How come prostitution is illegal while giving people $6.50 an hour is legal? And how long can we keep pretending we all have choices in this world?

Should Homosexuals be Allowed to Marry?

Here's a copy of my response to the Washington Post blog question, "Should homosexuals be allowed to marry?"

Should homosexuals be allowed to marry? Actually, the word Allowed implies a power issue that should not be there in the first place. Who are the we that allow or forbid another group of people from marrying? Are we the majority? Does our power to allow or forbid come from the fact there are simply more of us out there?

And even if the power to allow comes from numerical superiority, isn't it our greatest task as a Democracy to maintain the rights of minorities, as Tocqueville maintained nearly 200 years ago, warning us to avoid a dictatorship of the majority?

The only question is, then, what exactly is the threat? The children, of course.

However, the same people that avoid one scientific proof after another for global warming will wave in your face a study by a social scientist claiming a child needs a mom and a dad.

The same people that cry over the number of unwanted, out-of-wedlock babies will tell you that a baby raised by a married gay couple, which clearly worked harder than heterosexual couples to have that baby, will be neglected and mentally abused.

They will tell you the child will have a better chance of growing up gay. Well, even if we take that into consideration, there is only one remaining question in this debate: Is growing up gay a bad thing? They will tell you that Yes, the life of a gay person is difficult, mainly because he or she will not have the same rights heterosexual people have.

And here the paradox is complete. By taking away the rights of homosexuals we give reason to this denial of rights. The majority in Europe denied Jews land ownership and then complained when Jews turned to money lending. The majority denied African slaves an education and then treated them like animals with no learning capacity. Similarly, the majority now wants to deny homosexuals the right to marry in order to protect children from growing up as an underclass. The solution seems very simple. Now can we concentrate on getting out of Iraq?