Shelly wrote:  "I agree in this day and age with all the technology available there should be no reason for people to blindly follow where others lead. We also need to understand there are people and I'm sure it isn't a few as we would like to think, who either have no computer or have never learned how to use one. Factors to consider are are, background and financial situations as well as others, there are many who don't even use cell phone features let alone attempt to learn a computer. I understand wanting to encourage people to stand up for themselves, investigate, learn, but we also need to learn tolerance and not cut someone off at the knees just because they aren't at the same level we are." 

Shelly:

Ever seen the movie Network? If you haven’t, I definitely recommend it; an hour+ well spent.

You may have observed, certainly should have, that cutting anyone slack on matters where slack is highly dangerous to our national health just ain’t my style; I'm more a chainsaw to the knees. In this day of mangled policies, mangled strategies, mangled truths, mangled fiscal responsibility, and mangled limbs and psyches . . . ALL 100% the consequence of folks either too lazy or too timid or too stupid to use the only tool that would ostensibly differentiate them from the hairy ape . . . I want folks angry. I want folks pissed off. I don’t want folks too damned frightened of what someone else might think of them to ask a question or posit a possible alternate conclusion.

I am reviled by those too feint to tell a best friend or a parent or sibling, "You're really full of S**T!" That's not getting along with others, that's outright, damnable, yellow-bellied cowardice. And Jim Peterman, when confronted by associates that Barack Obama was "a Muslim," did not counter as I suggest any stand-up person would, he fell back with "I don't know who to believe. These are good people." They are not "good people." They are the simple-minded, subhuman dregs whose attitudes accomodate lynchings, bigotry, and wars of preemption that get hundreds of thousands murdered and mutilated. Continuing to accept them and their attitudes makes of Mr. Peterman their equal, in every way. One doesn't need a computer or the Internet to smell dung, and avoid stepping in it.     

As a vet who has bled, I am in adamant opposition to the National Anthem, and most particularly to the last word that gets sung: “brave.” We are not the “home of the brave,” we are a land of simpering, wimpish, intellectually lazy lemmings, and I will neither attempt tolerance for them nor cut such ilk the first thread of slack.

Those who feel they have to go to church for inspiration are, to me, the sorriest of execrable excuses. That fellow, and once in a while woman, in the pulpit knows not a breath more of life than the sponges in the pews. What’s wrong with taking inspiration in the miracle of a flower, or sunrise, or a child’s laugh? Religion does not teach morality, by definition it demands subservience and a closed-mindedness that makes every atrocity against man or planet doable. It’s as if, whether by god or by evolution, all the effort and millions of years spent on behalf of developing the most magnificent machine was a total waste. Open the mind. Do not merely throw the doors of unfettered exploration open, rip them from their hinges that they may never, ever close again.

Tolerance, slack . . . only when my last breath has slipped from my lungs, only when the last beat of my heart has sounded. I beg folks to get off their knees, and to stand tall, if just for once in their lives, with full conviction shout for all the world to hear, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any longer!”

The Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, was greater than all who fall in supplication and sycophantry when, being taunted and cursed for his physical deformities, he replied, “I am a MAN!”

Slack? Tolerance?

Not in this life, and not from me.

Ed Tubbs