Quotes of the Day #24: Three Passionate Writers
“No one who supports putting a drug user in jail has any right to shed crocodile tears over the death of someone whose life they have proved willing to throw away. The middle class moralist prides emself for saving their victims from the shadows’ imagined atrocoties. Yet it is such a moralist who supports the real, unimagined atrocity of destroying other peoples’ lives because the moralist feels threatened by their existence as a creeping social plague. It would not matter if the prohibition laws could not be shown to have caused this young woman’s death. Every arrogant bourgeois who supported a law to jail her for her regulation alread pronounced their intention to regard her life, choices, and dreams as worthless.
I wish I had any hope of overcoming this dualised, fear-ridden and bigoted consciousness. But I think most Americans (and people throughout the world) are wedded to this kind of life, psychically and socially, which demands the forcible suppression of alternatives for its persistence. And I fear that this kind of life, while horrid, is ineradicable and dominant for socially functional reasons.
But that aside- I have no patience for those who talk of the ‘good intentions’ of those ‘concerned’ about drug use. Anyone who doubts that should remember that the same people who mourn that ‘drugs’ killed this woman would, if a miracle had granted her resuscitation, greeted her return to the world with courts, manacles, and jail.
For words constitute the distinct chime of the leper’s bell of social conservatism:
“FOR YOUR OWN GOOD”.
“When you strip away all the verbiage, all the intellectual tap dancing, and all the efforts to “understand” and be “tolerant,” that is the inescapable, the terrible bottom line: many of you think we are Freaks. Speaking for myself with regard to these issues, I don’t want you to “understand” me or to be “tolerant” of me. I don’t want you to “study” me, and try to graph all the various points of similarity and difference between us: I want you to recognize that I am completely and entirely a human being, just as you are. And I want you to understand fully what that means, and to genuinely mean it.
It is one thing to be openly hated and despised, as gays and lesbians are by many on the right. We’re used to that, and we got used to it a long time ago. As was required, we manufactured intellectual and emotional armor to protect ourselves. In the current climate, we have to put it on every single damned day. It weighs a great deal, and it exacts an awful price. But without it, we would suffer injuries too grievous to be borne.
But how much worse it is to be cajoled into taking off that armor — to hear you tell us that you understand we’re “just like you” in all the ways that matter, and that we’re really “just the same” — and then to read or hear about “how easy” you think it is to “make fun” of us, especially when our status as Freaks is too obvious. How much worse it is when we believe you, when you tell us you think we’re all equal — except that you can get married, while almost every leading Democrat will say, well, no, we can’t get married. But we can have “civil unions.” Because, you see, Freaks don’t get married.”
“Love offers the model of perfect communication: the orgasm, the total fusion of two separate beings. It is a glimpse of a transformed universe. Its intensity, its here-and-now-ness, its physical exaltation, its emotional fluidity, its grateful acceptance of the value of change - everything indicates that love will prove the key factor in recreating the world. Our emotionally-dead survival cries out for multidimensional passions. Lovemaking sums up and distils both the desire for, and the reality of, such a way of life. The universe lovers build of dreams and one another’s bodies is a transparent universe: lovers want to be at home everywhere.”
Natasha | Drug War, LeftLibertarian.org, Quotes of the Day, Sexuality
