He has been dismayed by public sentiments published on various forms of social media, which tend to include sundry plugs for various personal causes or things within the sentiments of mourning. I told him that he just has to ignore the public displays of "sadness" and focus on accepting his loss and honouring his friend's life by continuing to enjoy the things they did and enjoyed together, and though he is not a believer, to also focus energy on wishing his friend peace wherever he is now.
My dad's best friend died a couple of weeks ago as well and it's a very sad thing. They were friends for more than seventy years. It's strange that he's gone.
The point of all this, and the point that I made to my brother is that bad things are all around us, they happen to people all the time. If a day goes by without sad, without loss, it is really a blessed day.
Nightmares happen in real life, too. And the realist, the honest student of human nature must admit that some things have no silver lining. Some things that humans go through are just sad, and shitty.
I live on planet reality. It's a choice.
The real world with it's pain, the real human condition.
The real exhaustion, the real exhilaration.
I forbid myself from visiting planet utopia, where wishful thinking makes everything better or acts as an artificial, noxious sweetner to swallow bitter pills. I refuse to walk there. I refuse to socialize there. I won't take my children there.
Where do you live?
Do you live on planet reality with Mark Steyn?
Or do you live on planet fantasy, hoping that if you follow direction, keep your head down, keep quiet and plod along quietly as you submit, that everything will be OK?
This essay is certainly one of his best and he brings up several of the most insidious forces that collude with evil to strip us of our hard-won freedoms and put us on a modern death march, step by step. Some seventy years after the end of the Second World War, it's not our flimsy shoes that are being shredded on a cadaver-creating winter death marches through the fields of Europe, it's not even our bodies, it's our souls.
Dennis Miller says Steyn is Yoda, which is well and fine, but he is most certainly visionary, with prophet-like vision.
Mark Steyn is Yoda.
— Dennis Miller (@DennisDMZ) May 10, 2015
Who are the residents of planet utopia?
The first major group, of course, is the mainstream media and their blaming-the-victim complicity.
Attacking Pamela Geller is shameful and embarrassing but these people are beyond shame.
They honestly believe that their pandering will save them and they have a visceral contempt for Judeo-Christian values. Thus, they are for mocking religion when there is no risk of death. They are for questioning authority when they are not in power. They are "for the children" only when they can totally control the ones that have not been aborted through radicalized public education cirricula. They are for sex-for children of course, and every sort of non-procreative sex, but want to put puritan sex-control laws into play on college campuses because that's the wrong kind of sex, between consenting adult men and women. All these roads lead to evil.
Additionally, with respect to the media, lot of people were wondering last week how pollsters could have got it so wrong again-first in Israel and then in the UK.
How? It's the bubble. Journalism, like acting, self-selects individuals who are of a similar leftist, self-centered mindset. Before the age of the internet, these professions were largely monopolies as well. Nobody except a left-winger could get news out to the public. Nobody except a left-wing "artist" could get entertainment out to the public.
That is changing, rapidly but the gravitation of this type of human and their mindset has not evolved with the actual pace of technology. Nor will it.
There is a gap. And these smarter-than-you, holier-than-you, anointed nincompoops have no interest and awareness of their utter ignorance.
That's why the pollsters "got it so wrong". Everything they think is wrong. Everything they wish for is wrong. They are the exception, not the majority. But through their unending quest for power, publicly funded by taxes, they force their will and their blindness to evil on a relatively captive audience, yet the truth seeps out!
That's why they hate democracy.
Thus, more than "just" freedom of speech is under attack. It's our entire lifestyle. And that's why the attacks against defenders of freedom are so ferocious. The peddlers of evil understand exactly what is at stake. There are no accidents, no slips of the tongue. It's all about the power and the control.
And at the head of this hydra, much to my heartbreak is the current leader of America, once the bastion of freedom, President Obama.
There is no exception to freedom of speech. There cannot be. The speech keeps you free.
If you want to know who controls you, all you have to do is figure out who is telling you to shut up.
Remember that "security" is the new shut up.
It's also the new white flag tarted up like a cheap hooker in the guise of concern for safety.
Where do you live? In reality or fantasy land?
People like Irwin Cotler, mentioned in Steyn's essay, are a disgrace.
In fact, they have no right to mourn a single Holocaust victim because for all their "never again" blowhard uselessness, they are the ones who are giving the green light, or rather the green flag, to "again".
They are the ones who would have said "just keep your heads down" in the ghetto, and "you'll be OK". Don't get any guns! Don't speak back to those Nazis, just quietly do what they say...
Some people are strangely puzzled and even troubled by Michael Coren's newest incarnation as a squish, and for jumping the Catholic ship that was a pretty good cash cow for a while. I am not.
I believe that individuals like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are probably most upset not about what they may see as a personal betrayal to 'the cause'-which it's actually not.
The real issue is that the risk is once again, no longer shared.
As Mark Steyn says:
"In Copenhagen, in Paris, in Garland, what's more important than the cartoons and the attacks is the reaction of all the polite, respectable people in society, which for a decade now has told those who do not accept the messy, fractious liberties of free peoples that we don't really believe in them, either, and we're happy to give them up - quietly, furtively, incrementally, remorselessly - in hopes of a quiet life."
"Because a small Danish newspaper found itself abandoned and alone, Charlie Hebdo jumped in to support them. Because the Charlie Hebdo artists and writers died abandoned and alone, Pamela Geller jumped in to support them."
"By refusing to share the risk, we are increasing the risk. It's not Pamela Geller who emboldens Islamic fanatics, it's all the nice types - the ones Salman Rushdie calls the But Brigade. You've heard them a zillion times this last week: "Of course, I'm personally, passionately, absolutely committed to free speech. But..." And the minute you hear the "but", none of the build-up to it matters.
Everything before the "but" is a lie. A terribly evil lie.
Where do you live?
What do you risk?
Who is telling you to shut up?
Will you?
Why?
And until when?
