March 31, 1999.
these are uncredited exerpts from a general discussion among my friends about Kosovo. they've taken up so much of my energy lately that I felt I should share. all names have been replaced with colour designations. it is completely unauthorized. warnings: some of the spelling has been cleaned up. some opinions are incomplete. some of the people I know are jackasses. allergy alert: this product may have come into contact with nuts.
proceed with caution.
So there I am, driving to work up university ave, when i happen upon a big'ol cluster fuck. Some guy had kicked a toronto star box out onto the street, and i had to go around the fucking thing. Well, there were people and chaos everywhere, and i was a little anoyed, so i yelled out "go the fuck back to serbia!". Then i heard a kicking noise upon my driver side rear 1/4 pannel, and got out to 'investigate'. A big angry crowd quickly gathered about me and the car (and some other angry motorists), and i decided to make some space. So i goes into my backpack, and pulls out 'Blacky', and makes some space. I looked at the fellow who booted (meakly) at my car and said "kick my car again, mother fucker", and he took off, and everyone else backed off. Little did i realize that a group of cops was already on the way to clear the street out for me. So there i am standing in the street with a 12" black blade in my hand, and a perterbed look upon my face, and the cop simply says "just get in yer car and move along"
stop being so damn rammy. You're lucky not to be in jail. It's hard to leave the war "at home" (where do you think their home is, anyway?) when the country that you "live peacefully, comfortably and lucratively under" decides to go to war against that homeland.
I have serious doubts as to whether a man of colour, who was not driving a luxury automobile, (and of such clean-cut, blonde-haired, blue-eyed appearance), would have been so lucky. I mean really... Black guy dressed like a street person threatens another human being with a 12" blade, in front of a dozen cops, and walks away. Possible... but _so_ not going to happen.
you're also lucky that a mob showed so much restraint that in their inflamed state, they only kicked your car. if a serbian had waved a knife at you, the cops would've taken him down like a steer at the calgary stampede. or to put it another way, [Mr. Green]'s actions were not particularly about maintaining civil order. and while i certainly agree that police should not be victimized in their roles as society's protection, waving a knife at protesters doesn't exactly show respect for law and order either.
On the other hand, there's a right way to get things done and a wrong way. Rioting is not the right way. Should we 'listen to their problems' just because their wrecking public and/or private property and threatening the safety of other citizens? Definitely not. I'm not 100% for what [Mr. Green] did (he could have been arrested, or he could have seriously injured someone and been charged with something more serious), but I'm definitely against pitying bullies.
I think it's really selfish and short-sighted to protest the way the Serbian people are (and the way most other protesters do as well).
The idea of not letting protesters gather peacefully in order to get their message across in a time honoured tradition OFFENDS me to my very core. Very little does this to me. I do not get offended when people call me a "mexican" just because i am Latin American. i do not get offended if someone pisses in my beer. But i get seriously pissed off at the notion of censorship of ANY kind. That is the one freedom i am allowed that I NEVER take for granted. I am prepared to die in order to defend my freedom of speech.
Protesting has some pretty severe drawbacks associated with it. 1) It interferes with the freedoms of others. Most often this occurs as interfering with another's freedom of movement and freedom from nuisances.
you ignorant slut. I mean that in the nicest, friendliest sense, of course. You make the fatal error of ascribing your own pragmatic materialism to a situation that has nothing whatsoever to do with that sentiment. your statement that people that protest things they consider to be wrong are lazy and selfish is the stupidest and most ignorant thing I've ever heard uttered. And to qualify that, I lived with [Mr. Brown] for a year. Maybe what your trying to say is that nothing really matters to you as long as you've got girls and video games to play with?
Interfering with another's freedom of movement can be more harmful than one might think. How do we measure he "harm" of making 25 people late for work. What if one was fired?
Does this make unannounced road construction immoral? Or parades? Or maybe subway repair? Or how about that time U2 did a video shoot on the roof of a liquor store in Vegas? Driving anywhere in Toronto is dicey at best.
Such things as road-repair and construction are conducive to the development of our infrastructure. Protests are not. Parades are advertised, controlled events complete with detours and clowns. Protests are not comparable to these kinds of things.
Without putting a rigorous value judgment on "nice" the following things hold: 1. (a) Milosevic ordering the invasion of Kosovo in and of itself is not a nice thing to do. (b) The Serbians invading Kosovo in and of itself is not a nice thing to do. 2. (a) NATO ordering the bombing of Serbia in and of itself is not a nice thing to do. (b) NATO troops carrying out the bombing of Serbia in and of itself is not a nice thing to do. 3. (a) Canadian Serbs causing damage and inconvenience during protest is not a nice thing to do. (b) [Mr. Green] pulling a knife on a protestor is not a nice thing to do. I am quite sure that most people would agree that all of these things, in and of themselves without positing any degree, are not nice things to do. However, whether or not any of these things in and of themselves or in reaction to each other are "justified" is another question.
The Serb protestors are right to be concerned for their friends and family of course, but why was there not an uproar when Albanians started to die at the hands of that psychotic fuck, Milosevic? Is a Serbian's life more valuable than an Albanian's? Is a Canadian's life more valuable than a Serbian's? Of course not.
another thing about the demonstrations and our reactions to it is its status as property. [Mr. Pink] touched on this, but i don't think he went far enough. nobody has been hurt, just some property. big goddamn deal. I find it ironic...if [Mr. Green]'s family was bombed by foreigners, would he not smash things? wouldn't you? fuck, i just about destroyed a public bathroom at my cousin's wedding, and my trauma isn't even on the serbian scale. it's just a building. people are dying. that is the important thing, not being "inconvenienced" by humans taking their right of expression into their own hands.
I don't know about the rest of you, but "people are dying" is about the weakest argument I can think of to do anything. People are always dying. That is the nature of life.
Yes, people die every day. That is a fact of life. In fact it is the only real fact of life. Eventually life will end. But you tell that to any Jew out there. Tell them that the fact that 6 million of them died in extermination camps during World War II was just the natural course of things, and perfectly acceptable. You essentially don't care. It doesn't matter that its your family or not. These are human beings being systematically exterminated simply because they are Albanian and not Serbian.
and finally...
You are all dupes of the clandestine totalitarion state that we live in. See 1984 & Starship Troopers & many others...These 'wars' will never end, it is not in anyones best interest.
1) take me off this little mailing list or I will kill you all 2)Anyone writing more than 5 lines needs a life +/- a hobby +/- a job 3) no one care about your feelings about these topics. Refer to 1. 4) Wrecking shit is fun. 5) Blowin up shit is fun too.
