"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."

–Jeannette Rankin, 1st woman elected to Congress (1916)

September 16, 2003
Happiness Is A Warm Gun

time 9 :23 pm feeling sad

April 19. April 20. Dates I've forgotten but was alive for and they counted then. 1995. 1999. Oklahoma. Columbine. You know what I'm talking about. You might remember it, too. But I didn't really think about it, remember these things, until now.

Movies never make me cry. OK, maybe once–but more a matter of circumstance than viewership. People always tell me, 'oh this will make you cry' or 'didn't you cry when you saw that?' or whatever but as into it as I may be my mind isn't always 100% there. Plus sappy movies like that tend to be so fluffy that they don't identify with reality one bit. But Bowling For Columbine, which I just saw for the first time tonight, did. It made me cry and it made me ashamed and it made me want to do something else. I don't want to be white. I hate being an American. But this isn't all true, because then why would I still be here? Why wouldn't I do something about it and work for something new?

No, okay, I don't hate being an American. But pretty damn close. The stupid stupid stupid shit we do!! We train everyone else in the world to kill for us so that years later we can cycle back and kill them! We wallow in the tragedy of a school shooting on the day we drop more bombs than any other on Kosovo! We cry 'victim' when planes crash into our towers when we're busy assasinating and murdering and burning and bombing and destroying and wounding all over the place! We have face the claw with the olive branch, but what does that mean if our thorn-crowned heads look away from the one filled with arrows? Why?? And we wonder about the students, we wonder about the kids, we cry 'Marilyn Manson!' and 'shock rock culture!' and anything else we can find. It's anyone else's fault! It's anything else! But it's everything we do and everything we say that makes us what we are, and that does not go unnoticed by those that are young.

The culture of fear, the caricature of freedom...how are you free at all if every day you are pounded with fear?? 'Snakes!' 'Killer bees!' 'The summer of the shark!' 'Attacks!' 'Terror!' 'Y2K!' It's all oh-so-very-scary for us Americans, it's all so threatening. SARS! West Nile! Anthrax! We think we're so special, that our 'unique' brand of 'freedom' and 'equality' places us high, that these things make us undeniably christened and crowned. That anything bad that happens to us is something to automatically fear, because it clearly is an attack on us as Americans!!!. God forbid bad things should just happen because they do. God forbid that God is not involved at all.

But that isn't fair either, because it's a lot of these things that make Americans good for something, and like I can say anyway, because I AM an American and BREATHE the culture of fear, of specialness, of self-righteous bloody glory. Having values and an attempt to believe in freedom is worth something, I can't dare deny that. But how do you resolve this good against the insanity of fear? How do you keep the confidence from turning into arrogance?

168 gun deaths in Canada. 68 in Great Britain. 39 in Japan. And 11,313 in the United States. And still this war against terror. Something has got to shift.

---Lexi