Adventures in Facebook
2013-03-09
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I received a friend request on Facebook and a twitter follower.
The person requesting those claimed to be part of the Catholic Worker movement. Now, I am no longer a part of that community, which was 25 years ago, but I have known a few of those folks.
Consider: they're pacifist, followers of Christ, believing that Good Works helping the poor is the work of the Lord. What's not to like, right?
Consider also I moved past that many, many years ago abandoning most of those precepts, such as non-violence as a means of making peace, the concept itself of social justice, only to later learn that while looking good and sounding good on paper, those concepts are both potential social calamities for the poor.
But I am a sentimental human being, and I thought it was good to maybe reconnect to see where individuals such as the requester were, or how far they had gone down those roads. The people I knew sure as hell knew how to throw a party, besides.
Only a day or two later, around the the time of the anniversary of Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision, the guy posts this missive in which he said that antiabortionists were actually warmongers because they wanted to suppress womens rights enough so that women could spawn cannon fodder for the wars of the plutocracy.
Squeezing those concepts through your brain is a little like trying to look out of one skull socket with both eyes.
Unlike the great massive majority of conservatives, I know how to deal with crazy people. You really have two choices.
You can chuck them out of your life summarily and without debate and never make contact with them again. In this method, you get all the safety you desire and nearly zero personal cost. But on the downside you don't get to look into the face or hear the voice of madness.
Or you can listen to them, consider the ideas they have, perhaps even debate them at some moment. An intelligent individual can do this all without even fearing whether such contact will taint them, or that their ideas could overwhelm your own good sense.
Then you tell them they are out of their minds and to either start drinking heavily or to get help.
I have nothing against crazy people. They exist and they have as much right as anyone to express their views. The same with the majority of the population, crazy people are harmless, probably less than one percent of them represent a threat to others or even to themselves.
Unfortunately, mentally ill people are about to become victims of the political class as discussions become more focused on making mental health issues a matter of public record for the purpose of purchasing a gun. I read Saturday morning an opinion piece by a Soviet immigrant now residing in Florida that gun registration is bad but mental health background checks are good. All of which has been proposed and advanced in some states in an effort to prevent tragedies such as the Sandi Hook school massacre last December.
Criminal background checks, for warrants and the like make sense, but the rest of it, protective orders, misdemeanor convictions for assaults going back a lifetime do not.
By the way, I am a prohibited person, not permitted to buy a gun through a federal firearms dealer because of a now 19 year old protective order. Getting the order lifted would cost me a month's pay, and the cooperation of the other party. Only one of those two conditions are insurmountable. My rights have been taken away from me forever for something that isn't even a crime.
Does anyone think that mental health background checks would not be abused the way the law is now with gun buying? Do you really want the same people who interpret law to impose a lifetime ban for misdemeanors to make the same decisions with regard to your mental health? But it is law now, the court have endorsed this madness repeatedly to the degree that the only way real justice can be served is from the barrel of a gun.
And we have friends who agree that it is a good thing I can't protect myself. To those, I say: wait until the state or a pissed off ex-wife and her lawyer in a divorce declares you as mentally ill. I'll be laughing my ass off.
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