Gangs & Armies

I was trying to explain this all to my teenage son the other day. Because I have had no small professional acquaintance with gangs.

Its all about fear and belonging, I said. Mostly about fear, but also that intense adolescent wanting to belong. The irony is, that once you belong, you are even more scared. With reason.

Its all about creating a closed world, a safe/dangerous world. And its also alot about dragging the world down, about creating viscious circles. The worse things get, the more you need a gang. Just look at any prison.

There is a reason armies like recruiting young men. Not just or even mainly because young men are fit and healthy. Its because young men can be induced to kill. To Believe. To Hate. To Do Anything for Status. The army is just a sort of more professional type of street gang, writ large.

What's really scary, is that the army has started to aquire a taste for young women (just like street gangs have, actually). Turns out that they have buttons you can push too, and that these days, they are willing to have pushed.

If continued....

Non Compliance

You hear a good deal about this, if you are a parent dealing with the school system and a bright but idiosyncratic child. Non-Compliance is even a recognized psychiatric disorder; how fascist is that?

Famous non-compliers:

Jesus Christ
Muhammad
Hitler
Moses
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther
Genghis Khan
Buddha
Gallileo

and so on.

Pretty much everyone who counts, really.

And many more, so many many more, who don't count. Who were very very brave, and got beaten and forgotten for their troubles. Real heroes, actually.

Anyway, you can shut down the Hitlers, at the price of shutting down the MLKs. I know where I land on that kind of decision. Oh the Hitlers have to be fought all right, those who give up their humanity to thrive on our hatreds, fears, and resentments truly are evil. But you can't fight ideas with laws, let alone rules.

Its as simple as that.

If continued....

Back to the Horns

Saw Kingdom of Heaven the other day. Was struck by how much it actually did track history, I mean it isn't really accurate, but none of the big stuff was wrong really. I mean Balian wasn't sleeping with the princess, so far as we know, and certainly the whole army did not show up at Kerak (I've been there BTW, mostly a pile of stones on a hill). And Palestine is not really a desert. I wish they had shown what happened at and after theHorns of Hattin, it really was a most amazing story (and yes, Saladin really did personally kill Reynauld). Maybe in the dirctor's cut extended edition.

And of course they had to make it Good and Evil, if not between saracens and christians, then within the crusaders. But Reynauld and Guy (who weren't actually buddies) actually had a point. If you are a crusader, you aren't there to make friends. Your job is killing people. In the long term, a losing point, but a valid one none the less, from a crusader point of view.

I wonder how the movie is going down in Isreal?

Oh, and yes, it really did happen on the 4th of July.

If continued....