G-Poppers … February 16th, 2018

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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There’s no upside to horror.

After seventeen bodies lay in a schoolyard, riddled with bullets, any attempt to assign valor, purpose or mission to such a scene of mayhem is sacrilegious.

G-Pop insists that three things should never be stated:

A. “They’re in a better place.”

No mortal can say such a thing for certain. Since we have not navigated the oceans of eternity, we should be careful touting our knowledge from our port of bewilderment.

B. “There were heroes.”

There are no heroes in a murder spree. There are people who die, people who intelligently run and people who feel compelled in the moment to step in and try to stop the craziness. All of them are victims.

C. “No one saw it coming.”

Liars.

Rather than getting worked up into a froth over gun control, sit down and understand the process of what causes someone to reach a point where they unleash bullets into the bodies of their brothers and sisters.

There is a fourteen-step process. Yes, at any point in the fourteen steps, these killers can be stopped.

1. “I’m disturbed.”

You know the crazies in your family. Take care of them.

2. “I’m disturbing others.”

Disturbed people are not satisfied with a solitude of pain. They want notice, attention and to inflict heartache on others.

3. “I insist on being the victim.”

Disturbed people who are disturbing others will accuse them of bullying and mistreatment.

4. “I threaten.”

This is the first sign that the soul of the human in front of you is beginning to disintegrate.

5. “I am drenched in self-pity.”

Look for lack of hygiene, wearing dark clothes, smelling bad on purpose, grimacing and hiding away.

6. “I plot.”

Not the final plot–just ways to communicate that everyone is crazy and he is misunderstood.

7. “I intimidate.”

Sometimes it’s animals. Sometimes a next-door little boy, but they always go through this phase of domination.

8. “I write warnings.”

Read their Facebook. See the journal they scribble in. It will be filled with rancor and hate.

9. “I purchase a weapon.”

10. “I practice.”

11. “I am arrogant and brag about my gun.”

12. “I wait for the right moment, which will seem logical to me for committing my insane action.”

13. “I warn.”

There’s always someone who’s told.

14. “I kill.”

Pursuing gun control is a piece of liberal propaganda to pass the responsibility for the poor mental health of many of our young people on to the National Rifle Association.

You can’t tell grown-ups in America what they can’t have or do.

But you realize that disturbed people go through a definitive process before they kill. The children in Parkland knew who the shooter was long before anyone told them. Why weren’t the grown-ups listening?

Every young person in America, along with his or her SAT scores, should have to pass a basic mental health exam before going to high school and then college. Maybe before high school.

It is not an intrusion–it is an inclusion which will protect them and those around them from the screaming demons that want to release hell.

 

 

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Acada-not me … March 3, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog  

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Thomas Jefferson was a fascinating gent. Attributed with the main authorship of the Declaration of Independence, he established a precept–“all men are created equal.”

Although he did not follow this philosophy through by freeing his slaves, he did contend that elitism and segregation by the hierarchy from the average man was anti-American.

So after I finished having a wonderful evening with fine folks in Chino Valley, Arizona, I arrived home just in time to see the last hour of the Academy Awards.

I nearly gagged through the whole experience. The presumption, pomp and circumstance and “holier-than-thou” attitudes expressed by Hollywood are so contrary to the Jeffersonian approach to freedom that this institution of the Academy of Arts and Sciences is more suited for the court of King George.

Let’s look at the basic premises.

Hollywood makes movies because they are artistic. So in the first premise is the notion that most people aren’t as gifted and talented as those living on “the coast with the most.”

Secondly, Hollywood makes a certain type of movie because they are superior to the masses, who may require some inspiration with their entertainment, but those wishes must be ignored in favor of more high-minded goals.

And finally, the masses are so ignorant and unable to assess quality that those in the Academy vote on their own material within their own ranks–because certainly John Q. Public is too dense to comprehend the subtle nuances of art.

Would you explain how this is any different from our two-party political system, which nowadays only marches to platform ideals, rather than to the heart of the people, or the religious system, which proclaims that the people’s desires to be ministered to in a certain way is childish, and therefore more pious avenues must be pursued?

Candidly, anytime a committee gets together and decides what anybody else thinks–other than the people on the committee–you are dealing with an arrogance which will certainly turn around and bite you in the ass.

And even though the same Hollywood that criticizes the National Rifle Association for being backwoods in their philosophy about guns takes those same guns and put them in their movies, with violent and bloody conclusions, under the guise of “realistic entertainment.”

I, for one, am weary of such hypocrisy.

I know it is considered to be intellectual and open-minded to view the movie “Twelve Years a Slave” as an exposition of the debauchery of slavery in this country, but here’s the problem: the subject is not new and we are not any less racially divided because these movies are made. The people who are already angry over slavery become angrier and the people who are defensive over the issue just become more defensive.

Hollywood continues to make movies they like without asking me–or you, for that matter. We are supposed to sit at home in our underwear watching the show, submitting to the supposed supremacy of the tuxedo-clad crowd, knowing that we have no business challenging their predilections.

I am against elitism in all of its forms. It turns our country into arrogant, bratty children, who stand across the playground from one another behind their makeshift forts, hurling snowballs.

• The Academy is not for me. It is a self-indulgent buffet for fat cats.
• The religious system is not for me. It is a cloister of over-educated religionists who have lost contact with the congregation.
• And the political system is not for me. It is a conglomeration of competitive children trying to get voted into a club that doesn’t do anything but make s’mores in the treehouse.

Can we do better?

Not until we admit to ourselves that we are not great. It is not necessary to be great. It is only wise to realize what Thomas Jefferson shared–that no one is better than anyone else.

 

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Ooey-Gooey… December 15, 2012

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I don’t care that President Obama cried.

I don’t care that the Governor of Connecticut desired people to reflect on their own families and children during this crisis.

I certainly am not interested in all the gory details of the merciless, meaningless actions performed by a narcissistic madman at Sandy Point Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

I just think that taking this “ooey-gooey” approach, where we try to handle such a fiasco by hugging our own children and thinking about the blessedness and contentment of our own family’s security is utter hogwash.

Pardon me if I don’t take time to reflect. I am weary of the self-indulgence in this nation, to lick our wounds until they partially scab over, only to have the scab quickly ripped away, once again exposing our bleeding sores. We are barely getting enough time to take the newspaper from one tragedy and wrap up our abandoned fish bones and coffee grounds before the next piece of insanity splashes across the pages.

Ooey-gooey is not going to solve this problem. Doing another special CNN report on the heroes of the moment is not only infuriating to me, but makes me want to open my window and scream out, “We are all mad as hatters–and I’m not going to take this hell anymore!”

When I heard about the tragedy, this is what crossed my mind: Would I be willing to trade my life for ten of those children?

It’s easy to talk about emotion in the abstract. It’s self-centered to try to equate the devastation that has occurred to these families into some sort of trivial, little piece of silliness about “hugging our own children.” Let’s get right down to it–if I had the opportunity, and God was in a bargaining mood, would I be willing to lay on the slab, dead, so that these ten children could rise from their bullet wounds, to live on? Would I do it for eight? How about six? What if it was just four?

You see, the lower the number gets, the more difficult it is to answer. And since this arrangement can not be negotiated with the Divine, what do I really plan on doing about the senseless slaughter of the innocent?

Because during this Christmas season, as we hear the tale about King Herod killing the babies of Bethlehem to eliminate competition, we, who consider ourselves much more civilized than this maniacal monarch, have now had innocent children slaughtered in our midst. What are we going to do about it?

Well, we might want to start with those who are against abortion–the destruction of a human fetus–having the consistency to also be against the wholesale distribution of guns which also, as we saw yesterday, not only kill womb-oriented children, but those who have actually learned to read, write and express themselves.

Guns should have three purposes:

1. For the awful possibility of war
2. To be in the hands of sober-minded law-enforcement officials, who rarely use them and when they do, needfully give a thorough account
3. And, in much smaller calibre, for sportsmen who like to go hunting and plan on using that meat to feed the poor

That’s it.

If criminals want to have guns, then criminals will have guns. We can not arm the entire United States to protect ourselves against a projected or imaginary enemy.

It is costing us too much.

I am tired of having my friend–Almighty God–who is generally shelved by the dozing masses, suddenly blamed because we are just too damned lazy and uncaring to take responsibility for our crazies and the destination of ammunition.

I did not think about my children last night. I did not weep because it happened, wondering why God was absent. I am angry that I live in a nation of childish politicians with an inert population which is incapable of thinking of anything deeper than its next Twitter.

I am angry.

I am tired of concern for human beings and the life we live being deemed by the conservatives to be liberal and by the liberals, because of my stance against abortion, to be ignorant.

Here it is: I am against killing, period.

• I do not believe in abortion.
• I did not favor the Iraq War.
• I think capital punishment is cruel and unusual.
• And I think referring to our handling of weapons as gun control is the problem with solving the dilemma. We don’t need gun control. We need extraordinarily limited access to anything that can propel a bullet and hurt anyone.

In doing so, we will put ourselves in minor jeopardy during infrequent robberies for the purpose of freeing ourselves from the possibility of macarbre murders made simpler by unfeeling politicians.

President Obama, don’t weep. Care.

Politicians, stop being afraid of the NRA and decide what would be best for you if you were given the premonition that your children were going to be gunned down by a madman next week, and what stood in the way of that happening were restrictions that stopped the villain’s possibility of getting weapons.

Democrats, stop pretending that our nation is filled with pioneers who periodically need to go out and hunt buffalo so that they might stockpile meat in the root cellar for the winter months.

And to the National Rifle Association–hat’s off to you for allowing people to have guns for the purpose of sport and hunting, but don’t allow yourself to become the eventual victims of your own paradox.

I don’t want “ooey and gooey.” I am not impressed with the flags being at half-staff. I want to see people who are against the killing of babies to also have a concern about the killing of children. I want to see each and every one of us to take responsibility for our own crazies. We must learn how to get in the faces of our loved ones when they are nuts. I do it all the time. Sometimes my family members don’t talk to me for a few days because I see them going down a path less desirable than their dreams and I throw a roadblock in their way.

Take responsibility … or be prepared to build many tiny caskets.

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