Posted by
Sue on Sunday, February 11, 2007 8:06:54 PM
I started
as an extreme, liberal, bleeding heart feminist. I went thru the Sixties wanting equality of opportunity opened to women and minorities. I was a
founding member of a local NOW group, protested, attended
demonstrations at the ABC Entertainment Center (is it still called
that?) in Century City, California. I was one of two who "broke" the
dress code of our company. But, I never got into drugs. I should
explain. I am extremely susceptible to anything that medicates or alters perception:
alcohol and drugs of any kind. I have to always stress to doctors
that they must be careful with the type of medication they're trying to
give me for anything, and the dosage. I once lost a full 24 hours because
the doctor had prescribed Soma for a rib that had popped out of
alignment. Almost drowned with valium. Flushed the entire bottle!
I
have always been able
to "have a good time" simply by existing. I could never understand the
concept of "mind alteration". Why would people do that? There are two
reasons that I can think of: pain or boredom! By pain, I don't mean
broken bones, I mean the pain of mind and soul because of some mental
insufficiency, real or imagined. It has been my experience that drugs
are the choice of youngsters, in pain, who either become so addicted it remains a
part of their entire lives thus ruining their own lives and those they
come in contact with. Or boredom! It is a rare thing for adults to begin the mind
altering process.
That
youngsters that begin to ameliorate their "pain" with drugs and/or alcohol, should come as
no surprise to anybody. It is, indeed, that in that difficult and
painful time, say between 11-16 children come upon the opportunity
to medicate themselves with drugs or alcohol to keep the pain of adolescence
away. There is nothing great or pretty about morphing from a young person
with absolute knowledge of everything, to that of an adult who knows, he
knows nothing. I have been watching my 16 year-old go through
this process with the added real pain of losing, not only his father (a
lost youth), but his grandfather via a stroke and a best bud in a stupid, careless
automobile accident. My grandson has it good and bad simultaneously.
He cannot say he doesn't have everything he knows he has, yet, he
doesn't have the one thing that can salve the pain, anger and hurt:
adulthood. Adulthood that affords the experience and opportunity of added knowledge. Adulthood at least offers up that master secret: we don't
know!
In my first posting on Martin Amis' Horrorism, I was
smug. I was smug because I thought I had read it completely. I missed
the third part of it. But my smugness continues, because he has
written an essay of great worth on three very important subjects:
women, god and Islamism. He ties them together with excellent thoughts
on each subject. Explains how they intertwine and demonstrates the need for for the truth to be understood by
every true human being. Understands that freedom for women, freedom
from a God of religion, and, the resultant upheaving that would come about would be
death to Islamism and the terror it has begun to bestow on the peoples
of Earth. If the women of Islam gain their freedom from Islam then perhaps other peoples will have a chance to gain theirs.
He
writes brilliantly and in so short an essay (even though to the average
reader it may seem very long indeed) about the need to understand Islamism. It is crucial. Westerners who can read it should do so. It will clearly delineate the path
humans have set themselves on: those who kill and those who do not
understand those who kill. There is no possible method of appeasement
that will work. None. The terrorists look not for salvation, they feel that they
have that in life...no, it is in death that they get their reward, the
seventy virgins. It has always been a weird want: seventy virgins.
But it is this "want" that has resulted in the aberration we call
Islamism...or Islamofascism in the past forty or more years. The "want" is the fuel that ignites the
absolute rage of hatred they bestow on infidels. It is the West's sexual depravity, as they see it,
that animates them. They are like young, untried boys who have yet to "know"
woman. They want an orgasm and they cannot obtain one because they
have devalued their women to less than that of their animals. You
cannot obtain "release" with this thought process. So, Islamism
creates the faithful who willing die for its achievement. Allows
its women to exult in their men killing themselves so that in their
widowhood they can finally do without those men who beat them and force
them to be less than human. Crazy, isn't it. A true mental affliction
of millions. What a religion!
Ah, but here, smugness does not
become me or the West. We, too, have a failing and Amis puts it well indeed. The
belief in a diety. True, there was and is a time when the human being
used the concept of a diety as a means to establish moral order and
discipline for the populations, but we are no longer children, we have
reached young 11-16 stage of pain and/or boredom as a species. That religion has been used to
pervert, lie and cheat does in no way diminish its role as a setter of
order. God, you see, doesn't "do" anything. We humans choose to "do"
but blame God for our own sins, those of others and anything else that negatively befalls us. Amis has the right of it. So, I
confess: I am an atheist! But I do not have negative feeling for anyone who
believes in their God, so long as their God doesn't preach my
destruction in any way, shape or form. And, to be truthful, it has
always seemed to me to be the height of conceit for a human being to
think he can hear, write or know the will of "God". My "god" is the
universal processes that started the cosmos as we have
begun to know it. Whether a diety or an alien being makes little
difference to me. It is important because we are here now and we will
cease to be if we don't resolve our current problems and get off this rock eventually. We may, in any event, for one reason or another cease to be a species on this planet and that would be a very said outcome.
For the human species to continue to inhabit this earth in a meaningful way, it is required that all humans aspire to the same thing: freedom. But with freedom comes very hard, complex responsibilities: birthing beings who will be loved, unconditionally, love with good, strong discipline, consistency, taught respect and responsibility and the love of learning. Humans, in the beginning, were "taught" these attributes. Each of us had as an example: our parents. Few of us had parents who filled the bill 100%. Humans need a society where each individual is honored just for being, supported through trauma but not to the exclusion of respect and responsibility for ones self and those entrusted to us. Few of us had the very best examples but most of us, I think, had love and love trumps all. Without love, it is very difficult to overcome the myriad damage done to our psychological, biological and physical persons. It has been done and can be done, but the work is so terribly hard. To add insult to injury, since we learn from our parents, they, of course, learned from theirs and so on, and so on. We are a product of who our parents were, our grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins. And, in the last 15-20,000 years we developed "religions", cities, education centers, all the while we were all trying to gain the upper hand: material goods, money or power through the destruction of others. May the future be a much better place.