Some Thoughts on Orlando

    It’s hard to know what you or I would do if confronted with a gunman in a crowded nightclub. Any decision about where to run or hide would be a complete game of chance. Predicting the trail of a killer, where he will turn and shoot next, would be impossible to gage, so in the end we’d only have our instincts, hoping against hope that where we chose to hide would be the one place the killer would not look.

   In many horrifying accounts of mass murders, there are always reports of people who pretend to be dead in order to fool the killer. But pretending to be dead takes a certain amount of risk. You pick a spot and you stay there, immobile, until the killer passes over you but one false move and it’s over.  

  

   If you run and hide in a bathroom, as many in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub did on the night of the killings, you risk penning yourself in a corner with no way out, hoping somehow that the killer will forget to check the stall where you are hiding. Since bathrooms generally only have one exit, this solution isn’t a good one. When a shooter is shooting there’s no time to debate the pitfalls of various hiding place. 

  

   Of course, if you had a gun, you might get lucky and pick off the killer but a revolver is no match for the Sig Sauer MCX-semi automatic assault rife that killer Omar Mateen used in his slaughter of 50 gay people and the maiming of 50 more in Orlando’s Pulse.  

   

   

        When Mateen began the shooting at Pulse he knew he’d be encountering people at a vulnerable time: at the end of a long drinking night when individual responses would be staggered or slow. As news reports indicate, as the shots rang out, patrons assumed they were a component of the music, a DJ improvisation. During the Paris massacre in 2015 at the Eagles of death Metal concert at the Bataclan, concert goers at first thought that the opening gunfire from the terrorists was fireworks or pyrotechnics. It took a couple of minutes before reality set in. By the end of that slaughter, 130 people had been killed, the largest public massacre death count in France since World War II. 

  The massacre in Orlando got me thinking of a lot of things. I thought of the big gay dance clubs I used to frequent with their erotically charged reverely and music, of jam packed dance floors where thoughts of violence and death were as far away as the Arctic Circle.

  I also thought of sudden death, and why it is that some say that it is the worst kind of death because it takes us unaware without time to pray, meditate or say good-bye to loved ones.   

   St Nicodemus the Hagiorite, an Orthodox saint who died in 1801, wrote that “death shows up like an unexpected thief and we do not know how or when he will visit us. He may appear today, at this hour, at this very moment and you, who woke up feeling fine, will not last until the evening, while you, who have reached the evening, may not wake up…Therefore, my brother, take heed and tell yourself: “If I die suddenly, what will become of the wretched old me? What would be my benefit even if I enjoy all the pleasures of the world?”

   The massacre also made me think of what a (now deceased) friend of mine was fond of saying: “Line them up and mow them down” whenever he talked about his political enemies. He was talking about mowing down members of the religious right, bigots who preached hate in the name of Christ, bigots who should not really call themselves Christian.  “Line them up and mow them down” had an offbeat forbidden ring to it although my friend was far from violent. Saying this for him was a kind of catharsis or personal exorcism.  

    I used to repeat my friend’s line myself line when feeling especially exasperated by certain groups of ignorant people.  Line them up and mow them down.  I’d laugh while saying this to offset the horrible sound of it. After Orlando, however, I’m through saying anything remotely like this again. 

   The aftermath of Orlando set off a series of political fights, of liberal vs. conservative, gun righters vs. 2nd amendment advocates, Trump vs. Sanders and Clinton supporters. Orlando hadn’t been in the news for five minutes before certain people started blaming Christians for the slaughter. The reason? Because two or three crazy ministers announced that they supported the jihadist Marteen who murdered 50 gay men and women at Pulse. Blaming Christians for Orlando is as absurd as blaming Tony Orlando and Dawn for the floods in Paris. 

    We also saw the antigun folks call for a ban on assault weapons as if banning assault weapons would make terrorism disappear. Jihadists, however, can just as easily don a suicide belt or “recycle” household items like gasoline or kerosene into fatal weapons.

  Assault weapons like the Sig Sauer MCX, however, do not belong on the open marketplace. Even Ronald Reagan (a man I do not admire) advocated their banishment except in the hands of the military. Assault weapons do not belong in the dens and kitchen cabinets of ordinary Americans.

    Next up was the Facebook wars over the Orlando massacre. These battles were disheartening to observe, mainly because of the polarizing opinions there.

    Some said that the massacre was caused by the easy access of assault weapons, while others blamed homophobia or radical Islam. It was the rare, intelligent commentator who put the blame on all three.   

     

     God forbid that a card carrying progressive should admit that Fox News might be right when it comes to fighting radical Islam. Just because Fox News is wrong 90 per cent of the time doesn’t mean it can’t score a bull’s eye on one or two issues. Neither the right nor the left are infallible sources when it comes to political solutions.  

     MSNBC, Buzzflash, Alternet and Salon. Com, all progressive news outlets, might be clueless when it comes to President Obma’s or western Europe’s immigration policies, but these sources get my vote every time when it comes to their opposition to tampering with Social Security and programs for the poor.

    

  

    Sadly, the “mow them down” mentality resigns supreme in America. The vitriol against Trump on Facebook is so thick that one can easily imagine an anti-Trumper edging towards violence.

  Obama haters are just as ferocious in their obsessive rage. Some of these postings on Facebook express the wish that some disastrous event would come along and end the Obama presidency. 

 

   As for the Omar Marteen, since the massacre it has come out that he was a frequent visitor to Pulse. There have even been reports that he picked men up there despite his marriage to Noor Salman. Gays are all too familiar with this type of man, the downlow covert guy who lives one life on the outside and a gay one on the inside. As I used to tell people, the numbers of men who live this way are far more numerous than the ordinary person could imagine. It is, in many ways, America’s biggest secret.

   While there’s nothing wrong with a healthy, questioning curious sexuality, in some men this secret life has adverse effects, especially when they hate themselves for what they’re doing.

     This rage, this self hatred of course might at any moment coalesce into violence, especially when fueled by religious fanaticism.

  This is why men who have nagging, persistent secret homosexual thoughts and fantasies they wish to get rid of are the ones who often lash out at gay men who feel comfortable in their own skin. In plain terms, the man who is always yelling “faggot” is somebody to watch out for and take note of. More often than not, this man is fighting repressed homosexual desires and putting on a show so that his friends and family will not suspect his secret desires.

   I experienced this on a Septa bus recently when a passenger, a male, lashed out at me as I pulled the cord for my bus stop. Perhaps I glanced at him too long when I boarded the bus at Front and Girard, but is this any reason to get upset?

    Whatever the reason, he yelled “pervert” as I got off the bus, then said it again. He wasn’t carrying a gun or a knife but he might have well been.

                  I gave him the finger, although even after I got off the bus he was still making hostile gestures through the window.  This fanatic would not stop.

                  He wasn’t Middle Eastern; he was just your run of the mill neighborhood dude in black athletic shorts… with a very bad attitude.  

    

      

The Regressive 'New' Left

   While attending a recent lecture at the Catholic Historical Society, I spoke with a woman professor of religion at Temple University who told me about a book she had just published.

    Since we were both authors scheduled to speak at the Society, we talked for a while before our conversation turned to what it was like to teach college students in 2016. That’s a big subject given the atmosphere on many college campuses.

   That atmosphere is very much like a police state in which certain words and ideas are not allowed a place at the table. Guest speakers with opinions outside the current accepted academic norm—a left of center social justice worldview- are treated as heretical that should be denied a voice. 

    Professors teaching today have to weigh every word uttered in a classroom for fear that it may offend a few students. In the old days, if a student was offended by something a teacher said, they took it on the chin or marked it up as a difference in opinion. Today a college professor risks reprimand from school administrators if the words or ideas they express in class make just one or two students feel “uncomfortable.” 

       

   I asked the professor what it was like to have to walk on egg shells when she speaks before her class.  “Do you introduce so called controversial topics with trigger warning alerts?”

    She answered in the affirmative, adding that whenever she was about to speak about something that might make a student feel uncomfortable, she used the words ‘trigger warning’ before doing so. I thought about this for a moment, picturing a hundred red flag interruptions, like a series of red flags strung along I-95.   

 

     Let’s say our professor wanted to talk about the nation’s rape laws. In that case she’d have to announce “Trigger warning, rape,” before proceeding. This gives anyone in the class who felt an emotional connection to rape a chance to leave, cover their ears with their hands, or suck on a binkie to temper their discomfort. Of course, the few objecting students could also quit college altogether and go home to the ultimate safe space, Mommy and Daddy’s house, but not many would opt to do this.

    Many other topics besides rape would also “require” the professor to issue a trigger warning. 

   “It must be exhausting,” I told her. Much to my surprise, she seemed to defend the trigger warning system although she did hint that there were certain aspects of the system that were less than fortunate. But she didn’t come out and condemn it outright, which was disappointing.   

    In this new world of student pampering, there are also what are termed, microaggressions. 

Microaggressions are defined as “subtle but offensive comments or actions directed at a minority or other nondominant groups that is often unintentional.” In other words, better put a filter in that mouth of yours before speaking. And watch those jokes. A microaggression can also be as benign sounding as, “Where are you from?” or “Where were you born?” This is how crazy the new college world has become.

    

    The professor’s trigger warning system even extended into her teaching of religion. I got a sense of this when she told me that her students had congratulated her on her universal teaching methods in which it was impossible to detect any sort of bias in her presentations. In other words, the students could not tell whether she was Catholic, atheist, Baptist, Muslim or a Mormon. I don’t know about you, but I would rather that professors offer some hint or at least a story or two about their own religious beliefs. This would greatly enhance any discussion on religion. I have to wonder if the professor’s going to great lengths to appear neutral or non-committal when it came to her personal beliefs didn’t have its roots in a trigger-based fear more than a yearning to appear neutral. What’s wrong with a professor sharing personal religious views in order to highlight a discussion on what people believe? Nothing, unless of course saying you’re Catholic, Baptist or Jewish might set off trigger alerts from that odd, unhappy atheist student in the back row.

    

    As someone who came of age during the leftist revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, I know first hand how hard the fight for free speech was fought. My generation protested the war in Vietnam and the draft. We witnessed the shutting down or censorship of editors and writers from underground and alternative newspapers.  We campaigned against unlawful arrests, the freedom to read banned books and poems like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. We hated censorship of any kind and never advocated that Vietnam War proponents be banned from public discourse. Who among us would have thought that 50 years down the line it would be the descendents of the 1960s left progressives (now called regressive leftists) who would become the chieftains of cultural authoritarianism?

  

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    Take the case of conservative pundit, Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos. The 32 year old Yiannopoulos has made an international reputation as a gay man “with the wrong opinions.” This Donald Trump-loving, anti-feminist, and proudly promiscuous gay man (he’s against gay marriage but encourages heterosexuals not to abandon the venerable institution) once told interviewer Dave Rubin that if he could take a pill that would change him into a straight man, he’d do it. Despite the positive changes in society when it comes to the acceptance of homosexuality, Yiannopoulos believes that it is still easier to be straight. When you are gay you are not allowed to say things like this, even though Yiannopoulos is on record as saying that gay people are Mother Nature’s special creation. “Gay people are one of the groups that Mother Nature has given license to go wild. That’s why so many great artists, authors and inventors have been gay, because gays have the ability to push further than ordinary people can.” 

  

   Yiannopoulos, who is Catholic, is currently bringing his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” to 60 US college campuses where he is cheered by mostly straight university students who love his cultural libertarianism, and who don’t mind it at all when he mentions his interest in black penises. 

    “The regressive left believes that words have the power that they don’t have,” he tells audiences.

    He is demonized by groups like Black Lives Matter, feminists and more than a few hard core LGBTQ ideologues.  

      His talks at colleges are often interrupted by so called social justice warriors, feminists and regressive leftists who want opposing ideas to be snuffed out. Some of these SJW’s wear masks that mimic the masks of bank robbers in the 19^th century.  

    Yiannopoulos has problems with modern third wave feminism with its emphasis on man hating, man spreading while these same feminist groups ignore the real oppression of women in Middle Eastern countries. Modern feminism, he says, never comments on the brutal treatment of women in the Middle East because they are afraid of charges of Islamphobia.

    Yiannopoulos insists there’s no wage cap difference between men and women, citing studies done by the American Enterprise Institute. “The wage gap is a feminist myth that will not die,” he says. 

    To me, Yiannopoulos seems like the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde, especially with his flamboyant, outrageous mannerism and his UK accent. He’s a bit of a showman to be sure, but he’s smart and many of his views are spot on. 

   Another “freedom of speech” conservative speaker, the Canadian born Libertarian commentator Lauren Southern, also lectures and debates at college campuses while confronting armies of SJW’s who want to snuff out free speech. 

    Southern has been thrown out of Amber Rose Slut Walk demonstrations because she dares to raise pertinent questions like, “Do you really think that we live in a rape culture?” Just asking the question is reason enough for organizers to call the police. Southern was also once covered in piss in Vancouver when she dared to announce that there were only “two genders.” This was decried as hate speech by the people wearing those cowardly 19^th century bank robber face masks.  

   What I’ve presented here is a short look at America’s new culture war. We will see ample proof of this during the national political conventions this summer, when violence, unrest and total anarchy will take the spotlight.

     But this violence will not come from those “crazy” Trump supporters, but—mark my words-- from social justice warriors (in masks) hot on the warpath.    

   

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