So I'm resting my head for a minute, listening to some tunes when the phone rings. I pick it up on the chance that it is business related, and a soft spoken person is on the line, with his carefully crafted script. He tells me he is from the NRA, and that OUR Second Amendment Rights are UNDER ATTACK! Eeks, I think, the Barbarians are at the gates, and they are coming for us. Heck, maybe they are Zombie Barbarians... and they are hungry and haven't had breakfast yet. You can hear their empty, growling stomachs making such a hungry sound... and it could be freaking me out if I wasn't tired from reading something dry and technical this morning...about biogas in Germany and what a kickass system they have for encouraging this kind of farm activity versus those (so far) slackers in neighboring Poland. Or come to think about it, New York State seems pretty much in the dark, biogas speaking. Maybe if we weren't so worried about staying so armed and dangerous... we could do something about the collapsing rural economic activity that could be at least partly alleviated by employing the German renewable energy payment system (see http://www.papers.itc.pw.edu.pl/...)
But I'm just coming into full awake status, but not quite there yet, and I interrupt this propaganda blast from the void that obviously did not connect with the desired demographic rubes for this call, with the concept of "our Second Amendment Rights" lingering in the air like a cloud of something that really does not belong where it appeared. "Only in a demented reality" I say, cutting off this person who may be volunteering or who may be getting paid a pittance which he can then perhaps use at the supplier of his choice to get his bullet fix. "Good luck with your hustle" and then I hang up, wondering if he knew that I really did not wish him/them any luck in connecting with the desired types of people who will send them money and call their legislators, telling them to quit picking on innocent guns.... You know, sort of act like Zombies...
And on second thought, is our "Second Amendment Rights" all we have left? What happened to the "First Amendment Rights" or the other ones that make up the Bill of Rights and don't these trump the lines in the following amendment that were ALSO designed to allow for well armed enforcers of slavery to keep the large numbers of unpaid, resentful and often raped by the "owners" labor in line, ignorant and UNARMED, with severe penalties for any slave gaining access to weaponry...
Of course, the sad fact of the matter is that the First Amendment Rights are in a whole heap of trouble, and events are conspiring to render them increasingly meaningless, while other rights stated or implied (like privacy and control over whether to reproduce, or not) are also getting beaten like a rug. Increasing mass poverty and media consolidation/corporatization can make a mockery of "freedom of the press" and "redress of grievances" - if such trends continue unabated, rights will only exist for those who can afford them, unlike today where those without money and connections sometimes have "rights". For example, this weekend, a whole bunch of people will be protesting in Washington DC how our planet's climate control system is getting trashed by the dumping of more CO2 into the air each year than will get absorbed by oceans and plant life, a result of too much fossil fuel combustion and not anywhere near enough job creation in the renewable energy biz. What good is that dangerous weaponry when there is not enough food and/or jobs to go around, or the cost of buying oil products (which has doubled every 5 year for the last 15 years, on average) trashes the economic vitality of a country that consumes more oil than it makes, and along with that minimizes the job prospects of most every one of us? Maybe that's why we need those armaments - to defend what constitutes our stash from someones wanting it for their own purposes, be it to alleviate destitution or just because they woke feeling nasty and they want to pass that nasty onto someone else..? Like me or the dude on the phone....
So does this:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
trump that:
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The ability to inflict terror and horror via threat of injury and death has gone up by many orders of magnitude from the musket and bayonet days of old. And with millions of "Mutually Assured Destruction" actors able to go into action all over the place and at all kinds of times, stressed beyond belief economically and eventually, climatologically and ecologically, well, that old way of thinking does not work so well anymore. Besides, supposedly we don't have slavery any more (at least in the indentured agriculture and housepets/servants of the past mode, all identifiable via skin color), and thus no need for armed posses to round up the escapees and either make a lessen of them via public displays of torture and execution or else to just keep from having to buy a new member of the unwilling labor force. The Second Amendment is just not the same due to that improvement.
Can we ever be safe enough? Will RPG's added to the personal armory finally bring peace of mind? With many tens of millions plus or minus a few million armed to the teeth and spending ever larger amounts of hard to get money on ever more expensive killing machines ($2000 for a Bu$hmaster!), it's just probability in action when a few go off, like in Denver or at an elementary school in New England. How about an upgraded Trebuchet with a moderns projectile guidance system for a shaped package consisting of a 20 lbs propane cylinder in a package filled with aluminum power - something that will take out a city block, and keep the infidels on the neighboring block in line, unless they, too succumb to The Crazy...? The possibilities for destruction seem so endless...
Anyway, I guess the good news is that the NRA has run out of suckers and overly gullible in the traditional databases of people with phones, and they are going after low probability chances of scoring a new supporter. Of course, dial enough times with tried and true messaging carefully and expensively researched and they will hit their target once in a while - and what is unknown and unknowable is whether they "connect" enough times. And with enough disciples of doom recruited, enough people who subsume the messages embedded in "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" to the Second Amendment - as without (Amendment) Number 2, life itself will have no meaning - well, sales of weaponry will keep on increasing. After all, that is now the real reason for the NRA - IT'S ALL ABOUT WEAPON SALES - as the NRA as evolved/devolved into the main lobbyist for the small arms manufacturers and sellers in this country.
And in a country getting increasingly unfair, with most people slowly getting poorer with time and with the oil needed to power transport of people and stuff around - in effect, our economy - getting rarer as oil fields get drained/depleted, a bunch of people ever more armed as well as ever more ignorant of the causes of their gradual impoverishment or just plain unhinged is not exactly a vision of loveliness for most of us. People being cast adrift with barely a notice, and weaponry being advertised as a solution - well, its not only a spiral, it's also a positive feedback loop, in control systems terminology. And if you stand to make money in this loop, anything is fair game to promote the image of the horror of that Assault on the 2nd Amendment and thus make more money, some of which can be recycled to keep up the sales pitch, conflate it with patriotism or the defense of this last bastion of civilization itself, which we know is always under attack....
So there is this guy sitting in a room with an automated phone list this morning, going after low probability potential suckers who might donate money, call some politicians, write letters to what passes for newspapers or better yet, BUY A NEW GUN and help with the profits on those who finance most of what the NRA does, and who call the tune for the NRA. It is unlikely he will do anything worthwhile about our gradually unhinging climate, or dependency on oil (domestic or foreign, with oil it barely matters). He might be able to join in the exercise of the First Amendment this weekend, and try to overcome the defacto corporate gag order on the media they mostly own. But instead, he toils away doing the Devil's own work, after which he will drive somewhere in his oil products powered transportation unit, adding another nail into our climate coffin and exporting money to countries where we have overstayed our welcome long ago. Oil consumption is the leading cause of CO2 pollution in our country, and like the Hot Rod Lincoln that Commander Cody sang about, enough to drive us to drinkin' if we don't stop driving that Hot Rod Lincoln...
Nb41