There’s a scene in the TV Miniseries, The Winds of War, where Pug assures his English host that Göring’s decision to begin terror bombing London was a sign that England had actually won the air war. He couldn’t defeat Britain’s air defenses, so now he’s avoiding direct confrontation with the Spitfires, going after the soft target of the large population center, trying to weaken the moral of the people to fight. Yes, it was going to be an ugly few more years, but the fires over London were proof Göring knew he’d lost, said Pug.
That’s one way of looking at it, yes. Another is that the only thing that motivates a thug is the desire to cause as much pain as possible to everyone they hate. Everything else is just excuse making for that desire. They hate, and live to inflict pain on what they hate. Once the rational for inflicting pain is taken away from them that desire to inflict pain is left exposed and bare. They only seem to be doubling-down on it. The fact is it’s all they ever really had in the first place. Göring didn’t so much want to win a war as take pleasure in the agony of the inferior races. The war was a means for doing that, but the desire to dance in the blood and ashes of the hated other was what came first. Even after the war is lost there is still some pleasure left to be taken.
A Huffington Post article came across my Facebook stream just now. In it, a Canadian lawyer write a “Dear America” letter, about the little anti-gay culture war going on here. This part leaped out at me:
I’ve wanted to write this for a while. During the lead up to Proposition 8 and the continued legal battlethat has ensued, as debates over gay marriage spread to other states, you questioned if allowing soldiers to fight and die openly would ruin your military just as teenagers across your country tragically took their own lives after being bullied for who they were.
What finally forced my hand was a heartbreaking and infuriating article in Rolling Stone chronicling how one school district in Minnesota not only condoned but actively promoted the bullying of its LGBT students…
That heartbreaking, profoundly angering, magnificent article in Rolling Stone is waking people up in much the same way as the Proposition 8 trial did. The trail itself will be looked back upon as that milestone that finally, Finally, motivated people to look deeper. All the myths, lies and superstitions that make up the bedrock of the anti-gay argument so completely evaporated in that courtroom it shocked people to discover after all the sound and fury that there really wasn’t anything there after all. You could see it in the slightly astonished tone of voice even mainstream pundits were using to describe the verdict.
That gave people permission to look into it deeper, and now they are seeing the moral crusade for the open sewer that it is, that it always was.
The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin Anderson, “I would hear people calling people ‘fags’ all the time without it being addressed. Teachers just didn’t respond.” In Andover High School, when 10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him a “faggot,” he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a “lesbo” and a “sinner” – in earshot of teachers – that she complained to an associate principal, who counseled her to “lay low”; the girl would later attempt suicide.
I’ve said repeatedly that what will finally tip the balance in our struggle for equality will be the moment people actually see our lives as they really are and thereby the other side for what it really is. All those republican presidential hopefuls, all eager to stroke the cherished prejudices of the bigots, the hate pews whose furious level of hatred just keeps getting worse, even after you’ve thought it can’t get any worse…all this is just the last act in a long struggle to show the world that hate is all they have, all they ever had.
Yes it hurts to have it thrown in our faces, day in and day out. Yes it hurts to see that hate still devastating lives. Yes. But we will endure and prevail and at the end of it, be free to live our lives, love and be loved. And the proof of that is the ever increasing ferocity of the bigots. It isn’t that they’re not bothering to hide it anymore. The excuses have stopped working, the house of cards has collapsed and the open sewer is exposed to the world now. They said if only people saw the truth about homosexuality they’d be sickened. People are seeing the truth of our lives now and of what this struggle has always been, and are becoming at long last sickened, profoundly sickened, not by the behavior of homosexuals but by the behavior of some of their fellow heterosexuals.
