Life, Love, and Liberty

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

I read this piece on a plane trip to Maryland. I was simply emotionally floored by this part of it. I’ve highlighted the part where King really starts to shine.

I found this intriguing article on Jason Pappas’s blog.

And I quote:

BAGHDAD — After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.

In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.

“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”

This is some of the best news I have heard out of Iraq in ages! If there is any one that I want the U.S. government to be spending my tax dollars on, it’s these young religious skeptics. I can only hope that this is a growing trend in Iraq that will completely demolish the influence of the abusive peddlers of authoritarian religiosity.

And if you doubt the thuggisness of these cretins, then you need to read this:

While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied. Fingers caught in the act of smoking were broken. Long hair was cut and force-fed to its wearer. In that laboratory, disillusionment with Islamic leaders took hold.

If only I could pay to have some of these outraged young individuals helicoptered out of Iraq and brought to a freer place — with their consent; of course. I would love to sit down with them and hear about what’s going on in their heads. And I would really like to deeply connect with them. Somewhere along the line, I’d hope to contribute some intellectual ammunition to their newly burgeoning worldview. The feeling of revulsion against clerical authority can be the first step down the road of liberty towards a world where individuals can truly create lives of their own.

My thoughts and feelings are with you; young Iraqi rebels. I wish you much happiness and properity in this world. And I can only hope that you will find it somewhere.

Folks,

I am editing the greetings page, so it may be down. I just didn’t want people to think the site was going haywire or anything.

Infoshop.org is accepting donations via Little Black Cart.

Antiwar.com is also looking for donations right now.

I am not sure if I’ll donate to either of these, because I need all the money I can get to move out. I’ll have to check my budget first.

I just sent some of my cash to the Crossroads Infoshop and Radical Bookstore. I am worried about whether it’ll survive or not, so I am doing a post to solict donations for them.

Please consider donating to them. You can find a link to the donation page on the site.

LabourStart informed me of two important things today.

And I quote:

ZIMBABWE: UNION LEADERS ARRESTED

Unions around the world are condemning the arrests yesterday of Lovemore Motombo and Wellington Chibebe, respectively President and General Secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). The two trade union leaders were charged with “inciting people to rise against the government and reporting falsehoods about people being killed” in speeches given on May Day.

The International Trade Union Confederation’s statement is here:

http://www.ituc-csi.org/spip.php?article2107

The IUF is calling for messages of protest to be sent to the Mugabe regime:

http://www.iuf.org/den5018

And the Education International is concerned about rising violence directed against teachers in Zimbabwe, noting that many teachers in rural areas are being killed, maimed, tortured and abused. Read more here:

http://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/show.php?id=771&theme=rights&country=zimbabwe

I haven’t been following the recent events in Zimbabwe, but I know a repressive action when I see one. And these arrests are most definitely a cause for concern. I urge people to investigate the incidents.

You should also consider this message:

BURMA: UNIONS APPEAL FOR HELP FOLLOWING CYCLONE

Unions have begun to raise money to support the Burmese people following the catastrophic cyclone which hit the country several days ago. Here are links you can follow to donate in your country.

USA:
http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/05/06/help-provide-relief-to-burmese-workers/

UK:
http://www.tuc.org.uk/international/tuc-14740-f0.cfm

Australia:
http://www.apheda.org.au/news/1210217214_29405.html

If your national trade union center is raising money, let us know and we’ll publish the link on LabourStart.

Show these folks that mutual aid can work!

The depraved thoughts of a defense attorney in Irvine, California provide a great lesson in misogyny and anti-sex puritanical attitudes. To quote Charles Johnson:

Last month, in Irvine, California, Officer David Alex Park, stalker and rapist, was acquitted by a jury of eleven men and one woman. He was acquitted, not because he is anything other than a stalker and a rapist—which he as much as admitted in open court, and which was proven well enough anyway by phone records, license plate requests, and DNA evidence. He was acquitted because he is a cop, and the woman that he harassed and sexually extorted danced at a strip club, and so the jury concluded that she made him do it, and besides, if she strips for a living, she must have been asking for it anyway.

You might think that I am exaggerating the defense’s position for polemical effect. No, I’m not. Here’s defense attorney Jim Stokke: She got what she wanted, … She’s an overtly sexual person. And in cross-examination of Lucy, the survivor: You do the dancing to get men to do what you what them to do, … And the same thing happened out there on that highway [in Laguna Beach]. You wanted [Park] to take some sex!

Let’s review what should be rather obvious points to any decent human being:

1. Women are not the property of men.

2. The expression of a woman’s sexuality is hers to make decisions about.

3. You should not act on the premise that a woman flaunting her sexuality is inviting anyone to lay coercive claim over her.

Is it really that hard to understand this?

Additional Info

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In reading this, I ask that people please understand the horror of what I went through. I was literally locked up, and at the mercy of doctors complicit in a psycharistic-state alliance. All I wanted was to go home, and I had to spend nearly all of a day waiting for them to approve my transfer to the hospital that my psycharistist is connected to. If I had not been working with him, then they may have held me for a longer period of time.

I’ve prefaced it with two quotes.

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

~ Ayn Rand

“Of all social theories Anarchism alone steadfastly proclaims that society exists for man, not man for society. The sole legitimate purpose of society is to serve the needs and advance the aspiration of the individual. Only by doing so can it justify its existence and be an aid to progress and culture.

The political parties and men savagely scrambling for power will scorn me as hopelessly out of tune with our time. I cheerfully admit the charge. I find comfort in the assurance that their hysteria lacks enduring quality. Their hosanna is but of the hour.

Man’s yearning for liberation from all authority and power will never be soothed by their cracked song. Man’s quest for freedom from every shackle is eternal. It must and will go on.”

~ Emma Goldman

I now know the meaning of confinement much more acutely. I now know the state’s destructive power much more personally. And I have had my convictions against coercion and anti-individualist ethics strengthened.

There is no justification for a therapy based on guns — metaphorically, of course — and bondage. In the future, I refuse to deal with any therapist or social worker who refuses to renounce their monstrous “right” to have me civilly committed. Whether they know it or not, they are my enemies. They are the people who accept the fundamental ideas that are destroying America and other parts of the world. They prop up the legitimacy of the creeds of morally mandatory self-sacrifice, the nationalization of human beings, and the exercise of coercive domination in the name of benevolence and charity.

Don’t you see the connection between the mentality that can justify the military draft, and the mentality that can justify coercive commitment? Both of them are based on the fundamental conceptual premise that man does not belong to him or herself, but to the society that he or she happens to live in. And it doesn’t change a damn thing when you dress it up in the language of helping the person being coerced. There is no equal power balance between the psycharistist and the person on the receiving end, so the talk of consent is all a sham. Most likely designed to help monsters sleep at night.

And they are monsters. Never forget it, and don’t let a Christian sense of “love thy neighbor” make you feel guilt for being profoundly angry at them.

In light of what they help make possible, they have earned it. And the path forward for the world is away from their anti-individualist ethics. The world needs an intellectual revolution in favor of the supremacy of individual rights and individual thought. The friend of liberty and individual rights is simultaneously the foe of the racially motivated lynch mob, the tyrannical employer who mandates intrusive drug testing, and the vice cop who helps destroy the life of a sex worker. And this promotion of individual self-determination should make no distinctions between private or public tyranny.

When the peoples of the world become consistent friends of liberty, then I will dance and make merry, until I can do so no more. Please consider joining us today! Not for my sake, but for your own.

(I threw in that point about opposing both private and public tyranny, because I want the libertarians to see that the oppression of employees by private employers should be met by us with a demand for social justice. In other words: the libertarian philosophy should be connected to a wider philosophical totality concerned with individual self-realization, rather than just starting from the premise that the state must be opposed)

Well, my updates haven’t been daily lately — and I didn’t have enough quotes to keep up the quote of the day feature. I do want to get back to that eventually, but I’ve been suffering a major depression. I even had a suicide attempt that got me involuntarily confined to a mental hospital for a good part of a day.

Needless to say, I wasn’t very pleased. I’ll have a beautiful and passionate denunciation of involuntary commitment written soon. I am hoping it will make me feel happier, because I absolutely adore passionate writing!

Alix Lakehurst of Chicago was kind enough to quote me in one of her recent posts.

Thanks! Alix.

By the way, I’ll be revising and potentially expanding my comment on there in a future post.