rant: March 2003 Archives

But for fuck's sake, there's some blind, ignorant, obnoxious people out there.

We protest.

The simplest fact is, we can. We are allowed to. The very foundation of the country is the right to hold contrary beliefs, and express them as you see fit. And so long as we're not doing physical harm to anyone or thing, you can damn well live with it.

We are not protesting against the soldiers. We are not even protesting against the military. More often than not, Protesters will independently share their concern for our troops. We are protesting against the Shrub, and everything he represents in this war.

This is a man with no experience in international relations, but an entire lifetimes experience in corporate affairs. This entire argument with Iraq has been based upon a pissing contest between our respective leaders. And Saddam Hussein has come out as the more mature.

How fucked up do you have to be to come across as a lesser man than Hussein? He is a blatant dictator who has a history of open aggression and nightmarish mistreatment. And he's still behaving more civilized.

We have not yet turned up a single weapon of mass destruction. We have not turned up any evidence, more substantial than seven missiles which go thirty too far, that Iraq has not lived up to it's requirements. At the same time, Iraq has accepted every increasingly ridiculous demand made by the US and the UN, right up until we simply told Hussein to go away.

We feel we have good reason to protest military actions being taken at this point. I already said this has nothing to do with not supporting troops. The very freedom those troops claim to be fighting for is what allows us, even now, to voice our concerns. You expect people violently opposed to an action to simply go away because that action has finally commenced? If that is what you would do, you are truly sad.

The neo-nazis can protest here. The religious fruitcakes can protest here. People can drive through the District with 6-foot tall pictures of aborted fetuses on the sides of their vehicles. Anti-nuke protesters have had a permanent station outside the White House for over ten years.

We are the people from the supermarket. We're every age, every color, and every faith. And we can damn well gather here to say we don't like the President.

A couple years ago, I lived with a girl from Tanjikistan, formerly part of the Soviet Union. She really wasn't too happy with any part of the world. Americans were loud and garish and too proud of their "freedoms". And for the sake of supposed freedom, people in her own country were having a hard time even getting food to eat. She said people had freedom to say what they wanted in Tanjikistan before the collapse of the USSR; they simply said it in their own homes.

It's seductive -- the idea that people should simply keep their concerns amongst their close associates.

But, we're Americans. We're loud and garish, and proud of our freedoms. We're going to stand on the corner and yell and scream just because we're pissed off.

Someone's child is dead. Someone's friend is dead. Someone's coworker is dead.

They didn't threaten violence. They didn't attempt to injure anyone. They just went to work.

There is nothing patriotic about this. And there is nothing good about this. One person is dead, and multiple people are grieving for someone they can never get back.

It has, as always, begun on the crumpled body of one dead person.

This man was angry. He wore the uniform of the neglected vet, but his fatigues are too new. His boots still shine. He picked through the trash with his left arm while his right hand held a 6-string guitar. The case was leaning against the bus stop bench.

This building has been under deconstruction since I've been here. It used to stand out like a cartoon, in an otherwise grayscale city, with it's fat curves and small windows. You could see the smell of india food emanating from it. Two years ago someone started gutting the building. I wasn't sure what you could put in someplace that looked like that. But you gotta admire the character. So I was a little depressed last month when it was obvious they had trimmed the curves and straightened the walls. They were making more like everything else. But today, ... today they apparently have chopped out half the building. The top floor and a half are totally gone. Gaps in the plywood barricades show a building gutted to the walls. And a sign hangs on the front saying "space for rent".

They erected a new crane across the street, this morning. I knew they would -- I had seen the plans at work a couple months ago. I live so on the edge that I don't know if it will be an apartment building or an office building. We really don't need either. Office space is plentiful right now, and no one in this neighborhood could afford new apartment rates. This is one of those cranes that goes up in stages. A small, five-story crane is used to erect a fifteen-story crane. The fifteen story crane is then used to assemble the stationary crane. These things are colossal, immobile towers, 20 stories high, with a spinning arm at their head. The building goes up right around them. I've never been around to see how they extract them from the structure after the floors are all up. I guess I will soon, since there are two of them within a block of me now. These cranes are like zits. They appear for a while, all greasy and loud. And when they go, they leave a nasty scar of a building behind. Another grayscale building.