16 Jan 2008

Killing by Justin Lee Brown

When people hate, work themselves up into a fight or flight frenzy, it is possible to justify the most henious, the most barbaric atrocities . Killing the "other" is merely something that one does once we separate and classify, stereotype, and dehumanize the person, or persons, that we target.

In war we annihilate our enemy, rape and humiliate what they hold sacred, we mock their gods, their culture, we raze their homes, flatten their institutions, and then we high-five one another when another one of "them" is successfully dispatched; their red blood spilling out, spiraling into the dust, settling into shiny clumps among the rock. A mothers son, a brother or a sister, a human life that was conceived and brought to term, left to bleed-out alone. A life--life that we claim to hold so sacred. What a joke!

Life is sacred--the lives of the other, and, the lives of ourselves. But the system of wet work that we embrace and support with tax dollars doesn't address the visceral darkness of our mass destruction. It's as though we can wipe the blood of the innocents off of our hands with a lemon-scented towelette handed to us by an Applebees waitress. There is no love, not for life, not for ourselves, and certainly not for the "other!" This must change if we are to survive together.

You people who have never faced the barrel of a gun in your lives, never had a knife at your throat--never been gang raped or sodomized, are so very ready to go to any lenghts to condone killing in the name of your change, your safety, your honor, your oil, and your freedom.

You don't know what freedom is until you've had the chance to take a life, felt that hate and fear and excitement burst through your central and sympathetic nervous system like an incendiary device: Because real freedom comes when you make the choice NOT to kill. You would understand why it is our responsibility to step away from causing the death of another if you could feel a different temperance of discomfort when you were faced with the choice of life or death, to give it or to take it away. Cops understand this, soldiers understand this, and criminals understand this, and it makes them go mad. The average citizen finds it uncomfortable to embrace the reality of death by violence.Yet, we are at the ready to go "fuck 'em up" are we not?? We just send out our youth off to fight and hope for the best, that these infants will go with "god" and therefore be spared.

We have been "fighting for peace" for what seems an eternity to me, it has never achieved any kind of lasting solution. If peace need be based only on the fear of annihilation, then please, allow me to show you how to pull the trigger. If you want to create a lasting peace, you will have to decide what you are willing to die for, and, whether or not you are willing to kill. There is no "grey" area when it comes to life and death.

Life stops in an instant. It ends so much more abruptly than it ever begins. When you hold a dieing person in your arms, watch and feel the life run through them, then drift away, you will start to understand why the struggle to protect one another is so much more valuable than taking someones life.

Death is no joke when you hit the ground--Which side will you fall on? Can you imagin it? Try!

5 comments:

Robert said...

i wont do this too often

this amazing lady writes over on myspace (profile private, though)...i saw it as a bulletin while tinkering at Discharge and was floored by it

i asked her permission, and she was totally JAZZED to have it here

she's a fan :)

enjoy

Inconsequential said...

Buttered side down.

Robert said...

huh?

Russell CJ Duffy said...

the toast always falls butter side down!

Anna Montana said...

Great post even if it was lifted. I saw a sign at a protest against going into Iraq in March 2003 that read: "Fighting for Peace is like fucking for chastity." I'm aware that was lifted too but it's still awesome.