Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

On isms.

Over here, James B is talking about race and political correctness.

he’s had a series of posts, in fact, and you should read them all. Because he makes a lot of sense- the inability of people to say things like “the black guy over there” because that would be construed as “racist” is just fucking stupid.

Here’s a fun little fact: Anyone who says “some of my best friends are black” ought to be shot right in the face with a squirt gun filled with juice squeezed from the underwear of fat venetian blind salesmen.

You know what? i got no black friends. I just have friends. I have a lot of people I know who are black, and some people I occasionally correspond with-or blog with, like James, or Baldilocks, are black, but I don’t think of them as black people. I think of them as people. Likewise, I work with people of all race and religion and preference, and frankly, I don’t give two hoots in hell.

I tend to take everyone at face value, and let them earn my respect or disdain on their own merits. The exceptions are these: If you act like an ass around women, or act like your shit doesn’t stink, you begin by earning my disrespect and you’ll have to dig hard to get out of that hole. If you are an overt or covert racist, same thing.

I can’t imagine disliking someone because of their color, creed, or normal sexual preference. By normal, I mean one of the basic seven: Hetero male, hetero female, bi male, bi female, gay male, gay female, asexual. Kids and animals- well, don’t let me find out, if you do that crap.

The idea that I should curb my behavior because someone might be offended if i say “gay” or “black” or “Chinese” or whatever… like James B says, Bite Me.

Passing milestones.

No blood in the urine
300000.jpg

For Gary and Emerson

two of my oldest and dearest friends

A long tiome ago, there was a dog. A beloved and treasured family pet. The dog had puppies. Because she had heartworms, though her owner didn’t know it, the pups were born with heartworms. They were born dying.

The owner crawled into the dog’s kennel to try to see if any of the remaining pups could be saved. There had been five, and by now only two struggled weakly along. The dog had eaten one of the dead ones and was trying to eat another.

The man reached in for one of the remaining live pups and the dog turned on him, suddenly and unexpectedly pinning him to the ground. She was going to kill him, and there wasn’t much time.

The man’s son ran to the garage and grabbed the shotgun that hung there. He ran out to the kennel and aimed at the dog. In a split second he had to make a decision: Kill his own, beloved dog, who he’d watched and cared for from a puppy, who he’d cared for all during her pregnancy, or watch that dog rip his father’s throat out.

Hands trembling, tears streaming down his face, he pulled the trigger. How he managed to take out the dog and not his father too is still a source of some amazement. The last two pups succumbed in hours to the heartworms. The months-long joy of anticipation of a kennel full of pups was dashed in less than a day, and turned to heartwrenching sorrow.

The man is long gone, now. The boy is a man with a child of his own, and he learned a terrible lesson that day: Sometimes life hands you choices, and all of them are bad ones. You must still choose.