On women, gays, immigrants and others who dared to succeed; calling out the cowards.

Calling out the Cowards

 

You know, the inside of my head is a strange place sometimes, I do understand that.  I am a thoroughly modern man who is deeply and passionately committed to the progress both of our science, and our society.  There is no arguing the fact that the bedrock of my essence would be as home in a water filled slit trench with only my FN at hand and firing arc before me, or telling tales around the fire in a tenth century hall, sword draped on the bench beside me.  Odin forces us to look at ourselves often, and be honest about what we find.  Its a hard habit to break, and causes you to apply the same standards to others.  It makes me look at what people are saying from two distinct points of view.  The modern one hears the words, knows the context and what part of societies dialog each side is spouting.  The ancient one strips away the pretty words, and lays bare the arguments.  Some arguments stand strong, others become farcical, or worse clear lies, when the pretty wrapping and glamour is stripped away, and only the core truths remain.

I look at rhetoric from the left, from the right, from the religious conservatives, from the social activists of so many different stripes and when the glit and glamour is parsed away, there is one common thing left lying on the table, the heart of the majority of all sides arguments.  It lays before me like a turd, and the truth from it rises like a stench.  Fear.

 

Never had I thought there was so much cowardice driving our society.  Cowardice, behind the shouting, behind the screaming, behind the threats.  Not righteous indignation, not a passion for justice, not religious zeal, but pathetic pant-wetting fear.

 

Why?

I look at my dog tags, they mark my service, the honours I have won, the duties I have completed, the traditions I shared with all those generations who served in their time before me.  I try to understand how my dog tags could be changed if another person in uniform was a woman, or gay, transgendered.  I hold the stamped aluminum and stainless chain and note no magical changes.  Just to be sure I check my fathers dog tags, and my grandfathers identity disk, and note they are likewise unchanged.  It seems what others are called to serve has no effect on my service at all.    The tags of the women I served with weighed the same, I imagine a number of those I served with were gay, I don’t really know, or care honestly, we were there to do a hard job well, and could give a rats ass who you relaxed with in your down time.  The tags of the gay’s would, I suspect weigh the same as mine almost as if it made no difference at all, these gender and sexuality issues that are supposed to be such a dire threat.  I know for a fact that we had atheists, heathens, pagans, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikh, and Hindu, as well as Innu and Aboriginal members.  Oddly enough, that didn’t make a difference either.  It is almost like you have nothing to fear from someone being different from you, it will not lessen your honours, your accomplishments, or your duties if those who won the same through the same efforts were in some particulars different than you.  At the end of the day, we got the same terrible coffee, which we sipped in the same Melmac cups, shivering in the same cold and damp, sharing the same stupid grin because somehow we all chose to be here, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

 

I look at my arm, still strong, my bank account…….well a lot less so, but the pay going into it is stronger than ever.  I look at women, immigrants, open homosexuals, people of different races and religions than my own succeeding, and I look again.  Oddly enough, my arm is still as strong, my pay still as healthy, it is almost like no amount of success by another person takes anything away from me at all.

Why then the fear?  Why the howling hatred?

 

A woman attains a position that none of the speakers had sought, or were qualified to hold, and whose previous holder not half of them could name, and now suddenly the manhood of every person in the room is threatened by some woman thinking she can serve in a position of power.
Just to be sure, I took a ruler in to the bathroom for my next leak and assured myself that my penis was not actually diminished in any dimension by a woman achieving a high social, political, or economic position. I checked again later when it was in full deployment, and yes indeed the success or failure of women had zero effect on the might, majesty or general sense of fun of my penis.  What then is the fear that seems to grip so many men that a woman succeeds at something other than looking decorative and raising kids?

 

I took a look at those homosexuals we are supposed to be scandalized about.  Not hard, I have lesbian friends, gay friends, and they fall in the married, unmarried categories about as evenly as the straight friends, with a smaller amount being divorced; most likely due to the lower length of time you could be legally married, so I expect the divorce stats will catch up within a generation.

 

I have carried out exhaustive research, and I can only conclude that two lesbians, or gay men having sex in their own bedroom with their own spouses in no way affects my sex life with my wife.  Not for better or for worse, its almost like its none of anyone’s bloody business, any more than what is going on in the bedrooms of my heterosexual neighbors.

 

Why the fear?  Why the terror that “gays are getting married”.  Unless you are a member of that community and your fear is that you lack formal wear, or dislike having to thumb through the bridal registry to find an appropriate gift, I really can’t see it affecting you at all.

 

I hear the same bile being spewed by the left, quick to attack any person who can’t tick at least six different boxes in the ethnic/linguistic/gender/orientation/raised by bonobo monkey in vegan commune forms.  Again, so terribly threatened that someone who does not self identify as a transgendered Martian wombat with a gluten allergy might succeed and somehow magically take away……honestly nothing from anyone else.

 

Enough with the cowardice.  Be honest.
Those who are screaming “whore” at a woman for the crime of succeeding in a man’s world do not really think she took their job away.  She took away their excuse.  Her success does not take away a single accomplishment of theirs, she simply makes them afraid to look in the mirror and admit that they are not proud of their own accomplishments at all.

 
The bitching about women in the military, gays in the military blah de blah de freaking civilian COWARD bullshit blah.  Here is the thing, we are an ALL VOLUNTEER force, and we go to war.  People who serve for any length of time lose cartilage, gain arthritis, a series of disorders relating to pushing your body beyond its limits for long periods of time exposed to conditions which are unsafe, and materials that are flat out dangerous.  We get people who come back less than whole, and people that come back draped respectfully in flag draped coffins.

One female IDF soldier, one crowd of religious fanatics.  One soldier, and the only possessor of functional gonads in the whole crowd.  Literally, there is NO man there her equal.

What we don’t get?  Volunteers.  No seriously.  Recruitment is never keeping up with demand.  Why are you bitching about should women be serving in the combat arms from your sports/titty bar seat.  Did you get your candy ass down to enlist?  No, then shut up.  That woman/gay/trangendered whatever the adjective SOLDIER chose to serve, made of their body, skills, and time, an offering to the nation of their birth, and you didn’t.  You find that when you look in the mirror you feel that seeing a woman, a homosexual, bisexual, transgendered person to whom you would like to feel superior is actually performing to a level higher than you hold yourself to, now makes you look in the mirror and be less impressed with what you see.
Not their problem.  Your problem.  Deal with it, and leave everyone else out of it.

 

You see a woman rising to levels of career success that you didn’t have the skills, the education, the drive, the follow-through to achieve and you look in the mirror and choose not to ask why you didn’t, because it takes courage to face the fact that you just didn’t want it as badly, or didn’t prepare as well, or honestly never thought about stepping outside your comfort zone long enough to risk everything to try.

 

You see women daring to have the same sexual freedom as men, and expecting to be able to share the same level of consequence as those men (who have a 0% accidental pregnancy rate from casual sex), and what?  Do you think them having birth control pills will raise your chance of getting pregnant?  I was raised in the Bible Thumping capital of farm land but frike nowhere, and we did not hold with sexual education classes, or birth control.  No sir, we lead the country in teen pregnancy and had STD rates that made New York’s club districts look safe.   Sex is a constant, consequences are variable.  Disease is unnecessary, generations of teenage mothers dropping out of school to raise the next generation of teenage mothers who will drop out of school is unnecessary.  Poverty, shame, and the horrible treatment of the resulting children are unnecessary.

 

Having a woman choose to make sexual or reproductive choices other than those you would make does not take anything away from the choices you made, except perhaps in your own eyes.   Children make mistakes, adults should be doing their best to make sure they don’t ruin or lose their lives over it.  Teenagers have adult drives, child level experience in making choices, and no the results should not kill them, nor leave them caring for children before they ever had the chance to find out what kind of life they could have made for themselves.

 

Final note on the whole “sacred motherhood” bullshit; I actually do think motherhood is sacred, and yet I have significant experience with how the good “God Fearing” people react to a breast feeding mother, or someone who has to (god forbid) change a diaper.  The pro life crowd only seem to care about embryo’s; they sneer/jeer and even spit on unwed mothers, and are not exactly supportive of mothers or fathers who actually are caring for their babies on either incoming or outgoing ends.

 

One again, it seems that the reality of the birth control question, abortion question, and indeed sexuality questions (LBGT or even just hetero non-monogomous) all boil down to how threatened people feel that someone can dare to chose other than they did.

Fear.  Outright cowardice.

Someone else’s career success, relationship success, family planning choices, spiritual path, and dietary choices have NO AFFECT on me.  They do not take anything away from me.  I don’t lose my ability to enjoy a steak if my boss down the hall is a vegan.  I do not make any less money if the black guy who was born in Trinadad before coming here makes more than me.  I am just as safe when the hands holding the light machinegun are male, female, gay or straight.  All I care about is that they are trained and motivated.

 

Stop giving in to the fear.  Its time to grow up, nut up, and shut up.  Your life is your own, your choices and consequences are your own.  Some people lucked out into better opportunities, and I wish them the best of luck with them, I will play the card’s I am dealt, and play to win.  Some people got a hell of a lot worse starting hand than I did; I didn’t deal it to them, and wish them the best of luck with it.

 

If you are threatened by the happiness of someone else, I don’t care whether it is personal, professional, spiritual, or whatever, you aren’t actually angry at them, you are angry at how their happiness makes you feel about yourself.  A coward will lash out at the person reminding them that they don’t love themselves.  A brave person will look in the mirror, find out what it is about themselves they can’t love or can’t face, and deal with it.

Stop making your fear of your own failures everyone else’s problem.  You aren’t even being honest about who you hate.  Its not that immigrants succeed that scares you, its that you failed.  Its not that a woman succeeds that scares you, it is the truths about why you either didn’t or couldn’t do the same that scare you.  Stop making your fears everyone else’s problem.

 

Live your life, love your choices, own your struggle and be proud of your own journey.  When we sit around the fires, listen to the tales of others and take pleasure in their tales, knowing that they do not take away anything from your own.  Be ready to tell your own in turn, because you chose to make of your life a story you won’t have to be ashamed to tell to anyone.  Be worthy of pride, and you will not fear that anyone else can say the same.  I wish all of you success in your life. I really do.  Your success costs me nothing, your happiness costs me nothing. I wish you long life, success in love, and no I don’t give a rats ass what you look like, or who you love.  It doesn’t matter.  My beard will be as bushy, my arm as strong, my mead as sweet, and my wife as curvy.  Its all good.

Enough with the cowardice, own your own damned lives and quit whining about other peoples.  They are not your problem, and if you had the balls to admit it, you would be dealing with your own problems not creating unnecessary ones for everyone else.
The world gives us enough real struggle, enough real pain, and few enough chances for anything resembling a good outcome.  Stop screwing up what good we have, just because you are terrified to look in the mirror and find that you might not be proud of what you see.  Fix you, leave everyone else to their own struggle; really, they have enough trouble on their own.

Just a Citizen

 

I will admit to a great deal of embarrassment.  I am about to attend a protest march for the first time, and I admit to a real sense of ambivalence towards the idea.  I am not Antifa, I honestly have always been much more comfortable standing with the Canadian Forces providing security against civil disorder than with anything resembling political activism of any stripe.  I am not a radical political person by any means; I don’t like the far left, their simplistic idealism places ideas above people, and deny the harsh realities that adults have to consider because real leadership, like real parenting requires you to deal with the world as it is, not as it ought to be.  I don’t like the far right because while I would love to be conservative, I find the absolute willingness of the hard right to narrow the question of rights so that only their own rights seem to matter, usually to the point that the rights of others, especially those not as rich, white, straight, or male as their ideal, seem to disappear completely.  Again, the far right, like the far left seems to place ideology above people.  I kind of put people first. I never had an ideology stop to help my family when we needed it, never had an ideology join me in bailing out someone in trouble, never saw an ideology reach across the table and try not to remain strangers; pretty much anything worth doing has been done by people, and the worst things done to people have been in the name of ideologies.

 

In Charlottesville Virginia we saw the “alt-right” march, with the nazi banners flying proudly alongside the Confederate battle flag, and various white power flags incorporating corrupted versions of their national flag, some even with our holy runes on them, polluting our faith symbols as badly as the national flags whose ideals they piss on with their hatred.  It ended with deliberate murder, because that is where hatred usually ends, and violence is the tool by which the minority attempt to coerce the majority into tolerating the will of extremists.  That is the thinking that gave us the Taliban, and Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia; extremist ideology, where human rights and dignity mattered nothing at all, and where the price of remaining silent was illustrated so very well for all who cared to look.

 

I joined the Canadian Armed Forces back in 1988, a young man following in the footsteps of my father and grandfather, who had served in their times and their wars.  I was raised valuing the freedoms of a Canadian citizen, and steeped in the duties of citizenship.

I listen to the anti-immigrant rhetoric of our own alt-right organizers, and I hear the echoes of Gobels.  I see the use of our freedoms to allow the rise and spread of ideologies that seek to attack those freedoms from within, that seek to restrict those freedoms to the right sort (read straight white male sort) of people.  I hear the ideologies that produced the sort of war torn shitholes that the Canadian Forces sent those like me who strove to keep the peace in failed states across this globe, and I know exactly where those pretty sounding ugly words lead, where the tolerance of that kind of intolerance leads.

 

I looked in the mirror and could not believe that I was looking at someone who was going to be a protester.  I have to admit, I have made more jokes than I can count about the people who run around protesting every public decision they disagree with.  I have defended the rights of people to do just that, but always with the understanding that I found it a little silly as a means of deciding public policy.

Then the violence escalated.

Ah.  Well, that changes things.

When Islamic terrorists detonated a bomb in the London Underground system, North Americans were surprised that when it reopened the system was slowed because of record ridership.  The simple fact is, the response of the British people to a terror attack was to simply and quietly show they could not be moved by fear.  In response to an attack on their transit system, people who usually drove chose to use the transit system simply to show they could not be driven by the fear of extremists.  That is the action of a citizenry that deserves the freedoms they inherit.

 

I look at the “alt-right” and their increasing claims to having silent support among average Canadians (that would be me), and I look at the escalation of violence they have chosen to embrace, the descent into street thuggery that was the tactic of the Fascist movements of the thirties, and I remember the point.  The alt right wishes to steal the voice of conservative citizens, and wishes to silence the voice of moderate citizens, wishes to use fear to suppress all dissent.  They wish to tell us who may be and may not be a citizen in this great nation, based on their opinions of race and religion.  This generation they have chosen to demonize the Muslim, as it was the Jew in the 1930’s, because they think that they can get support for their hate filled agenda if they build up an enemy in our minds we will give up our freedoms for protection from.

Not happening.

I was a soldier, so honestly fear doesn’t work on me.  When I was young and had no experience with wounds I was not moved by fear.  At this point I have survived things that generally kill people often enough to have ceased to be all that impressed by them, and have grown to love my country and its culture not like a newlywed with a bride he sees through rose coloured glasses, but like an old man who simply cannot imagine anyone else ever being right for him.  Canada isn’t perfect, but it isn’t shaped by hate or fear, and it won’t be.

 

I will be marching in the counter protest.  I come bearing my first aid kits, working with others who have similar first aid training to make sure that anyone who is injured receives prompt and effective care. I will be there to stand up for the Canada that I believe in, I will be there to show that fear will never rule here, and I will be wearing my Mjolnir, my Hammer of Thor, because while the street gang “Soldiers of Odin” may like to pretend to be heathen, the actual Heathen community has always been about inclusion, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence.

There are hateful people of every race and religion, there are really worthy citizens in every race and religion too; and the latter outnumber the former by a large degree. Muslim extremists no more represent the average Muslim Canadian than those neo-Nazi racists represent the average white Canadian.  Its not enough to say that though, you kind of have to show it.  Its not enough to sit back and shake your head at the marching racists, you kind of have to stand up and take to the streets to show they don’t speak for you, don’t represent you, and most of all, do not intimidate you.

 

The press and the alt right will try to label all of us who march as Antifa activists.  Sorry.  Not true.  We are just ordinary citizens who are tired of the wilful promotion of hatred.  We are tired of fear being used to stir up strife in our communities, tired of the endless attempts to replace peaceful debate with mindless screaming of slogans.

 

When you see the pictures of the event, you will see protesters.  That is funny, I would have as well.  Hard to admit after all these years that I may have been wrong so often, but I have to.  We will be keeping the peace, we will be looking after each other, and even after the racists, should one of them become injured, because that is what good people do.

When you look at the pictures and laugh as you see just another group of protesters you will be just as wrong as I was.  We are not; not really.  We are just citizens.  We are just citizens, and we are taking back our country.

Oppose the Racists in Vancouver

Labels and lasers

Funny title hey?  What is the relation.  You almost have to share my background to see it, but for those of us that wore green in some form (CADPAT, MARPAT whatever your pattern) its hard not to see.  Labels act a lot like lasers from the point of view of those they are used to Target Designate.  You see the one lasing the target is not attacking, they are simply illuminating the target, providing the target point and tracking data the engaging unit will use to guide itself to the target which it will then kill.

We have a Quebec Mosque, a handful of dead, which may or may not grow into a second handful depending on their responses in hospital to their injuries, and we have an angry young college white boy.  Alexandre Bissonnette, 27, of Quebec City, has been charged with six counts of first-degree murder and five counts of attempted murder following a shooting at a mosque in Sainte-Foy Sunday night.

(http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/more-questions-than-answers-was-mosque-shooting-an-act-of-terror-1.3264415?autoPlay=true).

This young man fits the profile of an angry poorly socialized loner who drifted from a left wing (NDP) affiliation to a right wing follower of Donald Trump and French politician Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right National Front.  Both leaders have essentially made acceptable to the public the views of the right wing extremists that had previously been condemned and even banned outright as hate speech.  This young man embraced the anti-feminist, anti-immigrant, dogma of the newly re-branded far right wing and chosen to act.

His choice of action was to walk into a Mosque and only his extreme lack of skill is credited for the low death toll of his prolonged shooting spree.  No one is saying Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen told him to do so.  No order was given.  No command spoken.  Only the targeting laser placed on immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants illuminating them as targets, designating them as threats.  The words are used to demonize, to declare as a clear and present danger the individuals in our society that this young man knew could be found in the Mosque, and painted the Mosque itself as a threat.  With the targeting laser shining brightly on the target, the disturbed young man did what disturbed angry young men do when poisoned by such charged rhetoric, and performed like the good little bomb he was and walked into the Mosque, following his targeting laser onto his target to kill.  Now in the Middle East he would have used a bomb vest, but here in the west it is more typical for such disturbed individuals to use a firearm as did Marc Lepin in the Polytecnic massacre targeting women, rather than immigrants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_L%C3%A9pine).

I am Heathen, or Asatru.  My closest and deepest relationship among the holy gods is with Odin, called the Battle-Glad and Victory Father among his many by-names.  Odin is primarily the god not of skill at arms, nor strength of arm.  Odin is defined by the rune Anzus, which means inspiration.  Odin is the god of poetry, wisdom, inspiration, the words that move people.  Odin is the god of rousing passions, and for this he is the primary god of both hospitality and war.  It is the rousing of passions that either brings people together in community building (hospitality) or sets them against each other (war).  Perhaps it takes an Odin’s man to see our situation right now as it is.  We are seeing just what passions are being whipped up, and just what deeds are being inspired.

We look at the failed Muslim states and see what extremism brings.  The threat of Islamic terrorism is real, worse than the terrorism is the Islamic Extremism, its dehumanizing effect on individuals whereby those who embrace it really do not see women as free and equal beings, and really cannot see those who believe differently than them as being human beings with an intrinsic right to live as they choose either.  These beliefs are incompatable with the Rights and Freedoms guaranteed by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms (http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html).  This is not rhetoric, this is fact.

These failed states are filled with victims, they are as you would expect Muslim victims whose crime was to be born in the wrong state. Many of these people seek a better future and a better life for themselves and their children.  Those who come to Canada to become Canadian, to embrace the Rights and Freedoms of our nation, who learn to value them as those raised with them from birth cannot ever understand, as they understand how truly precious they are.  There are also predators who are seeking richer territories to continue the tactics that rendered their states failed in the first place.  Not simply those ideological terrorists, but the common criminals who do not see others as real people, but prey they can use and abuse because they are stronger.  These have no place in Canada, there is no right for those who are born elsewhere to be Canadian if they do not feel bound by our laws.  We are not obligated to take them.  For this reason we screen potential immigrants, for this reason those we have let in who prove to be not potential citizens but imminent threats forfeit any chance of becoming citizens.

These failed states show the cost of letting the language of hate be accepted.  Now we see people who have escaped these failed states being murdered in the land of freedom itself by our own failure.  We see the cost of the language of hate being condoned by the leaders of western nations that should know better.  The US and France are embracing the language of hate as we have not seen in generations.  We are seeing a war on women, we are seeing the demonizing of other races by all sides.

Let me be utterly clear about this; racism is being openly preached to cheering crowds by ALL of our lovely ethnic extremists.  We see hate crimes by each group against the other, used then to justify more hate that will lead to more crimes.  You need to leave our country I think and travel the world to see exactly how precious what we have here is.  If you had done so, you would feel the real and compelling need to put a bullet into the head of the next person standing on a podium and preaching hate.  Being civilized and respecting the rule of law, we will not do so, but on a deep and fundamental level I must acknowledge that the best use of a bullet is shooting the person holding the targeting laser, the person designating the targets, turning our fellow citizens into nothing more than targets for hatred and violence.

King Henry of England had issues with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church acting against the Royal interests in political and economic affairs.  The King spoke before his knights and barrons, frequently quoted as saying “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”  Four knights, owing loyalty to the cause of the King rode to Canterbury and cut down Thomas Becket in his church.  They were not ordered to, and indeed the King was free to condemn the extreme action, while pointing out that really the clergy for their disloyalty had brought this upon themselves.  The hypocrisy is pretty much standard practice.

We see in the wake of the shooting of Muslims kneeling in prayer by a white Canadian college student the White Hose press secretary use the killing of unarmed Muslims in a Mosque as justification for Trumps ban against immigrants from Muslim nations.

(http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/white-house-spicer-que-mosque-comments-1.3959338)

Those who use labels for target designators do not care about the facts, nor do they care about their own Constitution, their own laws, the words of their own Founding Fathers. They care only about their political agenda, their own narrow vision of who they want to be part of their own “right thinking” nation.  The language of fascism, the one true faith, one permitted belief, single definition of what is a “Real American” or “Real Canadian”.

Understand when you share the memes slapping those labels on those you don’t like.  When you make free in mockery of them, painting them as either threats or undeserving of respect (and therefore protection), you are creating the soil in which these disturbed young men grow into mass killers.  You are creating the problem.  Your hands will be clean, you are only painting the target, you will be free to express your sympathies to the victims, knowing full well you will rush home to share your smirking little memes about “lets see how they like it” or “they brought it on themselves”.  Pro-life supporters are particularly good at this one.  The assassination of a doctor in the middle of his Sunday church service was absolutely acceptable to them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_George_Tiller).

This is how you either show you deserve the rights and freedoms your ancestors fought for, your service folk risk their lives, and too often die for.  This is where you prove you are either a pillar supporting your state, or a parasite leaching off of it.

You will either take a stand against the hatred and stop treating people as labels, or you will continue to indulge in venting whatever emotional reaction makes you feel good, never once connecting your words to the increasing acceptance of hatred, and the deeds that inevitably follow.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a wonderful document.  It enshrines those rights which when shared by us all make us all free. What it also makes clear is that none of our rights give us the right to strip those rights from others.  That is what the language of hate is all about.  At its base the language of hate is about dehumanizing.  Only by making the enemy sub-human can we accept that those rights we hold to be self evident are obviously not intended for THOSE PEOPLE.

Islamic extremists, White Power extremists, clearly they will have a different definition of THOSE PEOPLE who don’t’ deserve human rights, who aren’t real people.  In all other respects they pretty much march in lockstep.  They are not opposite sides of the same coin, they are the same face of the same coin. The opposite face of any extremist is tolerance, not the opposing extreme.

Tear off the labels.  Treat individuals as just that.  Do not excuse the misdeeds of someone because of their label, nor apply the misdeeds of others to someone because they share a label.  Your label does not give you the right to rape or murder.  Your label does not give others the right to target you for abuse either.

Wake up, NOW, while our state is still strong and whole.  Continue to think that the extremist acts have nothing to do with the language you use in your every day life and your social media and you will remain part of the problem, not part of the solution.  There is no right side for extremism.  There is no just cause for extremism.  Extremism or Freedom, you get to have only one of these, I choose Freedom, and that means I must pay for it by every single day working hard to make sure I do not give in to my emotional desire to lash out at someone and contribute to the growth of acceptance of extremist views.  I ask all of you to decide for yourself if you will do the same.