Oh the Joy that is Humanity!

Tuesday, May 30th 2017

So, last night there were two terrorist attacks were carried out in Baghdad, Iraq.  Now, before you get worried the will NOT be a post attacking Muslims in any way shape or form.  More on that bit in a minute.  Anyway, the targets here were an ice cream shop and an pension office.  ISIS claimed responsibility for both.  Clearly the targets were military in nature.  Apparently, their enemies are now arming themselves with weaponized tuti futi and mint chocolate chip while recruiting the elderly.  Wait... What?

So let's look at the targets.  First we have the ice cream shop.  Apparently, during the month of Ramadan, the shop was a popular place for Muslim families to break their fast one of the requirements being fasting from dawn to dusk.  This was a place that they knew there would be children.  Now the goal here is obvious, to cause fear.  That is what terrorists do.  Shocking, I know.  Someone who ascribes to a concept with "terror" right in there in the word wants to cause fear.  Go figure.

The second target was a pension office where people were waiting in line to get in and get their checks.  These were mostly the elderly, people who had worked all there lives and were simply there to get what they had earned.  These people worked to earn their money.  Presumably, they had worked on things more productive than building bombs and blowing up the innocent.

The "reason" for all this bloodshed is ostensibly to advance the cause of the Islamic State in one way or another, even if the advancement is simply punishing people that they don't like.  Now I realize that the details of the situation in general, meaning the history, current political climate, etc, are far more complicated than what I just laid out, but there is one underlying fact that runs through everything.

As I said, I will not be bashing Muslims here for one simple reason, aside from it being a stupid knee-jerk reaction.  The simple fact is that these people are not Muslims.  I will say it again, the people who make up these organizations are not Muslims.  Now I am not going to spew out the other knee-jerk blather of Islam being "the religion of peace".  I am not going to claim that because it isn't.  There is no such thing as a religion of peace, at least in my experience.  All religions have there fair share of violence.  It is one of my many problems with organized religion.  There are many peaceful people within the religion, but the religion it self is no more inherently peaceful than any other.

Now back to my point.  I promise there is one.  These people are not Muslims.  They are bloody minded people looking for an excuse to hurt people and in doing so, make themselves feel more powerful.  In short: bullies.  There actions have absolutely nothing to do with any religion, they simple want to bully people, usually with high explosives.  These people are looking for an excuse to hurt people and they will take whatever they can find.  If it wasn't Islam, it would be another religion, or because they live in a different region, or they speak a different language, or that they don't agree that the sky is plaid on alternate Thursdays.  It doesn't matter.  All that matters is that they have managed to find, or simply say "fuck it" and make one up, a justification to bully others.  These are bloody-minded people doing bloody-minded things.  They have always been here in one form or another and they, sadly, always will.  Just one more part of the barrel of fun we call the human experience.  Yay, us!

Rant Over... for now.

I, (Insert Label Here)

Labels are great.  We all use them and, for better or worse, they are necessary.  The purpose of labels as we all know is generalization.  The trouble with generalizations is that they are always bad for everyone.  See what I did there?  I made a genera... um... yeah.. I'm sorry.

Aaaanyway, Certain types of labels are usually safe.  Those that are, for lack of a better term set in stone (i.e.: a ball is a ball, a tree is a tree and that is that).  A bit more difficult are the ones describing belief or ideology. The trouble starts when the label used becomes more important than the person being described.  When it becomes more important that Barbra is a republican than that she is an individual person, that is when the labels start to hurt us.  When we decide that we know everything about a person by the label we give them. It is encapsulated by that label we don't feel the need  to examine any further.  Why would we?  She is a republican.  We all have a general idea what that is, so why bother.  Unfortunately or fortunately (I am leaning toward the latter) people are just not that simple and the social belief systems they subscribe to is certainly not.  So why to we have this tendency to do this?  That is easy, we, as a species, tend to be lazy.  Aaaand, there is another one of those generalizations, humans equal lazy.

So, Barbra is a republican.  Republicans are against abortions.  I am pro-choice.  I don't like people who try to control others so, therefore I don't like Barbra and I don't have to think about her, she is a republican, not a person.  But wait, did you ever ask her if that is what she believes?  Not all republicans are against abortion.  I have met more than a few people who are pro-choice and still consider themselves republican.  But, Logan, you may be thinking, doesn't someone have to believe in A, B, and C.  Well, yes and no.  One has to subscribe to A, B, and C but who decides what exactly A, B, and C are?  If you ask ten different people to describe what exactly makes someone a whatever you are liable to get ten different answers some wildly so.  Sure there are core beliefs held by this group or that group but that is not all people are.  People are never just one thing.  Every person's mental landscape (personality, thought processes, history, whatnot) consist of many things.  Even the most boring of us (why are you staring at me when I say that) is made up of innumerable thoughts.  But, in all honesty, it is much easier to just look at the label and call it a day.  Doing that, however is unfair to both of us.  It judges her unfairly and deprives me of meeting a richly nuanced and unique individual. 

Here's another example, I consider myself a liberal person.  I have a buddy who's opinions on certain things radically differ from mine.  If pressed, I would say he is a conservative, but that is nowhere near all he is.  He has thoughts and dreams that have nothing to do with that label just as I do.  There are quite a few issues that we can agree on.  Had I judged him by just that label, or he by mine, we both would have missed out on a strong and rewarding friendship, and, let's be honest, those are really hard to come by.

Sure, dealing with labels are easier than dealing with people but the cost of doing so is very high.  It tends to allow us to remain smaller and more judgmental.  While easier to do, that prevents us from growing as a people.  In my opinion the cost far outstrips the benefit.

Rant over... for now.