It’s with a half-involved curiosity that I tend to regard most of what goes on around me. To avoid becoming furious at the sheer stupidity of those who tend to act as comes natural to them, I switch off most of my desires for comprehension, empathy, or even arbitrary awareness of the goings-on of other people. To avoid feeling left out and behind the times, however, I keep up on the highlights of what goes on around me. This leaves me in a position to exist as the sort of Sports Center of the normal world that most people claim to be able to participate in, shortly before they short circuit and start quoting the Bible. What I’m trying to say is that I read a newspaper this morning, or more accurately I read an article in SLU’s University News newspaper that made me so incoherently furious that in order to avoid turning things into a grim repeat of the Virginia Tech massacre, I did what any stable-minded, normal person in the twenty-first century does when they are unforgiveably and irrepressibly angry. I decided to blog about it.
Since I haven’t got an intrinsic necessity to quote works of fiction built into me, I’ve come to the realization that it occassionaly becomes necessary to practice this activity in order to continually hone my ability to argue with the sort of fundamentalist jerk-offs that I’m most likely to meet on a day to day basis. So let’s talk about that, because that’ll be fun.
At Saint Louis University, which is the half-maintained/half-conjured school that I attend on a regular basis, there’s a latent indignant air amongst the people you meet that provokes two particular responses as individuals. There are the people who freaked out about existence at an early age (or were conditioned by their parents to freak out about existence at an early age) and went into some sort of a humanitarian stupor centered around a feeling of indebted service to some random deity of childhood indoctrination, and there are the people who realized, apathetically, that there is very little we can do and decided to play the oft-rendered game of chance and just sort of wing it and see where things go from there. The former tend to be a group of people who go to town-hall meetings, supervise groups of like-minded and unoriginal thinkers, and quote scripture at odd and typically inappropriate times. The latter are the sort who enjoy the comfort of being completely uninvolved in almost everything around them, and tend to assert half-assed mission statements that they back up with judicial substantiation built out of circular illogic, or using some sort of borrowed sympatheticism based on a religion or idealogy that they happened to be particularly annoyed with at that particular time.
In other words, every normal person that I see on a daily basis is an idiot.
Luckily in my case, I live in an apartment with two individuals who are so utterly disinvolved with partisan idealogical warfare that I can go home to a room completely devoid of hypocritical nonsense. One roommate could give a rat’s ass about pretty much anything related to popular opinion (though he tends to keep track of elections, which is a shame in our modern day world of disassociative democratic falsity), and the other is usually so stoned out of his mind that the only thing about politics I can usually get out of him is the well-known fact that all the politicians know where to get the best blow.
But what was this all about?! you’re probably wondering as you sift into the latter part of this delitrious article. To be, uncharacteristically, to the point; I read an article in a newspaper printed at a Catholic school with sky-rocketing tuition fees and a penchant for activism that centered around the formation of a gun-oriented special interests group. Or, to be more exact, I spent twenty-five minutes reading and re-reading an article written in protest of a group centered around marksmanship training and gun safety which quoted the ‘Jesuit-Mission’ and St. Ignatius of Loyola as if all who read it were meant to suddenly cease their argument in respect of some inherent indignation that we’re all supposed to suddenly throw down at the mere mention of the word Jesuit and Saint. Instead, what I followed was an incoherent argument of hypocrisy and nonsense that for a moment I forgot that I wasn’t drinking water, but was in fact drinking Doctor Pepper and Cherry Coke mixed together.
But maybe that’s the problem. I’ve had some sugar today and I’m probably not coping that calmly with the prospect of the sheer illogic that some people tend to think with. All of my friends are creative and talented individuals who tend to shy away from the common sense of black and white, and who tend to think with some degree of reason and logic when it comes to anything even vaguely important. I’ve never heard them quote the Bible, and they’ve never tried to argue something on the basis of a law passed by a bunch of religious fundamentalists who compiled a book advocating peace, harmony, and understanding just before they used that book to launch a war of religion on a metric shit-ton of other, smaller Southwest-Asian and Northern-African countries.
Or maybe I’m just irritable because I have a lot of work to do, and instead I’m writing an article about how mad I am. But don’t I have a right to be mad? Are we still so utterly stuck in the Dark Ages? Did we invent the wheel and the plasma television so that we could hang ourselves from a ceiling rafter on the front porch of progress in the name of some confused religious sect that we’ve rethought and rethought over and over again for millenia? Are we so stupid that we’re willing to quote scripture from a book written by a consortium of authors of several centuries about a number of arguably important historical events that many of the authors never even witnessed, and to in turn use that scripture as an argument against something as harmless as a student activies group? Aren’t these thoughtless and herd-mentalitied individuals supposed to be off drinking Kool-Aid or practicing their blood-letting skills or something? I honestly have no idea.
When there’s no more room in Hell, the idiots shall walk the Earth. And they’ll probably bring books and large declarations full of circular logic and they’ll probably have a few guns. And they’ll probably make slaves carry it all for them. And they’ll argue about their Mission statement and tell everyone how it’s for the Greater Glory and all of that. They’ll say it’s for all the men and women that they represent.
And for whatever they’ll do in the end, they’ll probably charge $46,000 a year for it.
- Nicholas “Agent Nick” Freed
Links:
The University News
Forty dumbass faculty protest GAME
GAME as gun education, not just fun with firearms.
