Sunday, October 14, 2012

Welcome to the Renegade Chapter

By now you've read about the big, brave warriors of the Taliban who in an effort to take on someone they could best, attempted to murder a 14 year old Pakistani girl, Malala Yousufzai, for the crime of attending school and refusing to be cowed into NOT going.

Sitting in the safety of a nation whose high school truancy rate averages nearly thirty thousand students a day every day I am mute in amazement at more than just her courage and sickened and saddened by the people who would have had her forfeit her life for exercising a fundamental right.

It was only one lifetime ago and half a world away that murderous cretins, fueled by a dyspeptic nationalistic fervor bordering on religious zealotry, hunted down and killed another teenage girl. Her crime? Being alive. Nothing more and nothing less, just being alive.



It's a straight line from Anne Frank to Malala Yousufzai and if your religious philosophy allows you to look upon either dastardly deed as anything other than cold-blooded murder and attempted murder, please take your God and His Prophets and all His Signs and Wonders and Amazing Technicolor Dream Coats with you as you seek out a hungry whale and get the hell off this planet.

Somewhere Alfalfa and Spanky must be very proud but also terrified. Their He-Man Women Hater's Club was a joke and a work of cinematic fiction but you, who believe yourselves to be the truest examples of the Crown of Creation, would allow your inchoate rage and animus to destroy the only commodity any society can ever hope to possess, the enthusiasm and idealism of its own young people.

Your day of judgment, the same judgment you hoped to visit upon a courageous innocent, will come soon enough and the doom and gloom you offer as some sort of sick solace to so many will find its way, unbidden and unwelcome to your own door and the rest of us will rejoice and be glad. Chapter meeting adjourned.
-bill kenny

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