Linguistic cartwheels in the stylings of a rant, these are the thoughts that keep me up at night.
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I am a 20 year old female writer residing in Central New Jersey. My influences include the great Dave Barry, Neil Gaiman, George Carlin, and the two greatest editors in the world, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. My webpage can be found at www.homestead.com/foxfyresden and I can be reached at Foxfyre33@aol.com. Happy reading!
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Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Today I came to an unfortunate realization.
My whole life, I've felt like there's something missing. No cause to fight for that I truly believe in, no passionate fire applied to anything. I was honestly hoping that this whole uproar of anti-war would wake up whatever is sleeping inside me. I longed to be my mother's age - to experience firsthand the fevor of the 60's, of the protests and the do-or-die attitude that people, even peaceful people, seemed to carry around with them the way modern men and women do cell-phones. I wanted that, I wanted to be a part of a movement.
I went to the protest in New York City - the *big* one, before the war started. And to be honest, I only felt one thing - lost. Lost in a sea of people that all looked alike after awhile, hidden behind huge signs that bore oft-misspelled messages meant to stir the spirit, but often had little direct relevence or coherence as to what was going on in our country. I expected to feel caught up, feverish, free - and instead I felt like I was standing in the middle of times square with people streaming around me like a cattle stampede - their ultimate goal unclear, their motives questionable, and their methods useless. It was the spirit of the 60's, making one last lurch in it's death-throes...a new breed of hippies, but with the spiritual equivelent of a degenerative brain disorder. And I even wonder about their parent movement.
I expected to find a kinship with those of my mother's generation - to feel like I was *doing* something. But when I look on these people, these megaphoned, patchwork-bagged, emo-glasses-wearing people, I feel something I dreaded. Contempt.
The phrase "dirty hippie" comes to mind. As does "get a life". I hate the very people I had sought to join ranks with. I really and truly despise them. They spew out hacknyed cliches at the frequency most of us breathe, they will fight diligently for peace while never knowing what it is or could mean, and they do it en masse, which is perhaps the worst crime of all, in my mind. They don't understand that they didn't make a difference in the 60's, they didn't make a difference before the war started, they don't make a difference while the war is going on, and they aren't going to make a difference when it's over. It is a very stupid person that stays aboard a sinking ship, and an even stupider one that holds on when it's sunk, to drown themselves. You know what you are? An interest piece on the news. You provide a number to mumur in polite conversation in order to provide a segueway that allows people to discuss the real matter here - the war. No one cares what you think. You elected an official, either by voting or not voting, that sent us into war. This is your fault, if you're going to point the finger at anyone. That's YOUR elected official you're rallying against. You are, perhaps, the worst hypocrites of all.
If you want to do something, support the god damned troops. They're over there taking on fear, sandstorms, and casualties while you're over here on your day off from barista-ing at starbucks waving around signs that belittle their livelihoods, make light of their fallen comerades, and undermine what should be a reasonable amount of trust in our country's ability to handle itself.
Get your head out of your greatful-dead reject ass and wake up. We're at war and there's nothing you can do about it. Deal.
~Fox
10:13 AM
The first time I've felt like an outsider:
The first time I can recall was at a "rec center dance" - there used to be social dances held at the recreation center in my town where my father worked. There was a group of popular girls doing a dance called the "running man" in a small circle, in synch. It looked like fun, so I joined them, but a few moments later they stopped and stared at me. One girl tossed her head and glared at me, and then she said "You're not doing it right, and we don't want you here. Go away."
~Fox
8:27 AM
Author's note: This is a critical response to a story that I had in my composition class. It is a story by George Orwell, written in 1953, and the full text of it can be found here.
Shooting an Elephant is a brutal story, though, unfortunately, very much truthful for the time it occurred in. A large part of me, the one that longs for the resolve to become vegan and flinches at the sight of mink coats, was utterly disgusted by this story, in particular the end. I am unsure if I am able to draw accurate and logical conclusions from it, given my intense emotional reaction to the subject matter, so I apologize if my expressions are tainted by my contempt for such a senseless death.
We can all, in some distant ways, sympathize with the author on his stance of having his hand forced to do an unnecessary thing. It is a difficult situation when there is a large group of emotionally-frenzied people involved, and to offer one of my favorite quotes, "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.". The villagers were clearly illogical, staying in the path of the elephant. A case in point were the children and the older woman who stayed around the corpse. Clearly, maintaining a position in that place had already gotten one person killed, so why stay there? The elephant clearly did not have a set path of travel (and I cite the fact that its mahout, the only one who could calm it and presumably, therefore, the one who best knew the beast, traveled in the wrong direction for 12 hours trying to find it) in its state of "must", and there was a very real danger it could come back to the same place where the man was killed - and who's sitting there but the two most helpless classes of people - children and the elderly.
As for the author, I do not believe for a second that he didn't initially plan to kill the elephant. I maintain, as he subtly hinted at in the story, that the moment he switched guns was the moment he decided to kill it. How on earth could he plan to defend himself if he didn't even know the proper way to disable an elephant? We've read the end result of what happened when he actually tried to *kill* it - what suffering agonies would it have had to endure if he was only trying to defend himself, and not aiming and shooting like a cold-blooded sniper? He stated that the crowd would have dispersed, had he not killed the elephant, so there was no possibility of them doing him any harm but jeering, in his head. He made not only a living thing suffer completely needlessly, he deprived a man of his potential livelihood in the process. He was selfish, stupid, and overly concerned about his own insecure male pride. He is "man" enough to take down an elephant that posed no immediate threat, but loses his stomach and walks away after shooting it endlessly, leaving others to deal with the suffering elephant that he made his problem in the first place. He hides behind social classes when it comes time to pay the piper, offering no apology or compensation to the owner of the animal, and expresses actual happiness that another human being had died, so as to clear him from retribution.
If this story was meant to illustrate the horrors of having one's hand forced, I do not believe it aptly did so. Rather, I think it speaks for the cruelty and utter pettiness that marks human emotion, and, to deliver a low blow, specifically the male human emotion when it is challenged. My only regret is that over half a century later, reading with modern eyes, the only thing out of place is the elephant.
~Fox
7:59 AM
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