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The World.
Jun. 4th, 2010 12:23 pmPrefatory: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
faeshale FB'ed this morning that he was 'in serious need of anger management'; I felt the immediate need to respond, to offer myself to him—though I have no assurance any of my faculties are remotely suited to ameliorate his primary stressors, whatever they be at present. Not even sure how well I can continue to assuage and appease my own. In any case, the following discussion begins with a chunk of my response to Nick.
I've been in serious need of anger management most of my adult life; it's just that, right now, it seems remarkably justified. In Midway Airport the other day, unable to extricate myself from television news, I watched a 45-second update on the Deepwater oil spill, bereft—as every single MSM treatment I'd seen—of any mention of BP's patently fraudulent FedGov application to drill or the desserts thereof (now, of course, USDOJ's making grumbly noises that I have to assume won't amount to more than censure); and I marveled how this peremptory update was followed up by a good 5 minutes of impassioned reporting, complete with phoned-in vox pops, on whether or not the latest infanticide should be put to death if found guilty. I'm like: You fucks. Here's a disturbed young woman who killed one infant human, which she made in the first place. These oilmen have been caught red-handed killing the planet. Where is your sense of proportion?
(Baby-killing sells, of course. I understand this.)
This was immediately followed by my spotting an 'I'd love to die for Christ' T-shirt on a fellow passenger: white or Latino, bearded, middle-aged (too young to be authentic hippie or 'Jesus Person'), his T-shirt said, 'Living life for Christ and for the community' and underneath had the scriptural citation, 'Philippians 1:20-21'. Once seated on the plane and before we pushed off from the gate, I looked up the passage on my phone browser:
Anyway. I sat in the front row of the plane, considering the irony. Here was a person whose T-shirt arguably espoused martyrdom. Of course, having been raised Christian, I supposed that I knew what message the guy actually meant by wearing that particular T-shirt. And of course, I've never heard of a hopeful Christian martyr blowing up a plane to finagle a slightly upscale (though still conspicuously virgin-free) cloud from which eternally to sing his adoration of the LORD. So my deliberations about whether or not to bring this guy and his T-shirt to the attention of the Southwest Air staff were mostly about making a point: Were this guy a shade browner and were his T-shirt touting a similar verse of the Qur'an, y'all would want to know about it, right? So what makes this situation less troubling?
Mostly about making a point, not entirely. It still made me nervous. But it was probably due more the Deepwater Horizon spill that I spent the afternoon in a kind of existential dread—which at some point I realized has, to a greater or lesser extent, colored my entire outlook recently. Tom Lehrer once compared the then-happening Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear dread of all Western civilization to 'a Christian Scientist with appendicitis'. It's a fine summation of how I've been feeling like vis-à-vis the planet.
On a happier note (treating the symptom though not the cause), the radiant human being Scott Robinson posted THIS thoughtful, ambling exploration, which, as I gratefully told him, 'better adjusts and piques my despairing outlook on life than anything I've read in a long time.'
faeshale FB'ed this morning that he was 'in serious need of anger management'; I felt the immediate need to respond, to offer myself to him—though I have no assurance any of my faculties are remotely suited to ameliorate his primary stressors, whatever they be at present. Not even sure how well I can continue to assuage and appease my own. In any case, the following discussion begins with a chunk of my response to Nick.I've been in serious need of anger management most of my adult life; it's just that, right now, it seems remarkably justified. In Midway Airport the other day, unable to extricate myself from television news, I watched a 45-second update on the Deepwater oil spill, bereft—as every single MSM treatment I'd seen—of any mention of BP's patently fraudulent FedGov application to drill or the desserts thereof (now, of course, USDOJ's making grumbly noises that I have to assume won't amount to more than censure); and I marveled how this peremptory update was followed up by a good 5 minutes of impassioned reporting, complete with phoned-in vox pops, on whether or not the latest infanticide should be put to death if found guilty. I'm like: You fucks. Here's a disturbed young woman who killed one infant human, which she made in the first place. These oilmen have been caught red-handed killing the planet. Where is your sense of proportion?
(Baby-killing sells, of course. I understand this.)
This was immediately followed by my spotting an 'I'd love to die for Christ' T-shirt on a fellow passenger: white or Latino, bearded, middle-aged (too young to be authentic hippie or 'Jesus Person'), his T-shirt said, 'Living life for Christ and for the community' and underneath had the scriptural citation, 'Philippians 1:20-21'. Once seated on the plane and before we pushed off from the gate, I looked up the passage on my phone browser:
For I fully expect and hope that I will never be ashamed, but that I will continue to be bold for Christ, as I have been in the past. And I trust that my life will bring honor to Christ, whether I live or die. For to me, living means living for Christ, and dying is even better.Full disclosure: that translation the most dramatically scary rendition I found on http://bible.cc/ and I use it here advisedly. Most other translations don't wander far from the King James, where verse 21 is 'For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.' But it's telling that the 'New Living Translation' that basically renders the text as 'Die for Christ today!' was produced in 2007: just one more indication that there is no natural, esperable progression from murderous monotheistic zealotry to universalism; that we are all at the mercy of the worst as well as the best aspects of the species' collective brain as evolved to date.
Anyway. I sat in the front row of the plane, considering the irony. Here was a person whose T-shirt arguably espoused martyrdom. Of course, having been raised Christian, I supposed that I knew what message the guy actually meant by wearing that particular T-shirt. And of course, I've never heard of a hopeful Christian martyr blowing up a plane to finagle a slightly upscale (though still conspicuously virgin-free) cloud from which eternally to sing his adoration of the LORD. So my deliberations about whether or not to bring this guy and his T-shirt to the attention of the Southwest Air staff were mostly about making a point: Were this guy a shade browner and were his T-shirt touting a similar verse of the Qur'an, y'all would want to know about it, right? So what makes this situation less troubling?
Mostly about making a point, not entirely. It still made me nervous. But it was probably due more the Deepwater Horizon spill that I spent the afternoon in a kind of existential dread—which at some point I realized has, to a greater or lesser extent, colored my entire outlook recently. Tom Lehrer once compared the then-happening Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear dread of all Western civilization to 'a Christian Scientist with appendicitis'. It's a fine summation of how I've been feeling like vis-à-vis the planet.
On a happier note (treating the symptom though not the cause), the radiant human being Scott Robinson posted THIS thoughtful, ambling exploration, which, as I gratefully told him, 'better adjusts and piques my despairing outlook on life than anything I've read in a long time.'
