Below are tidbits from a fun conversation I (Amelie Lillith) recently had with an acquaintance that Aisling would likely be good friends with. I feel that these excerpts truly illustrate the problem that I have with most right-wing conservatives. I have changed the screen names in order to protect those in the conversation. This all sprung up from my status message saying: In 1492 Native Americans found Columbus lost at sea.
Conserve-Ative: The point is, you’re lucky that we exploited the Native Americans as much as we did (as bad as that sounds).
me: No I’m not.
Conserve-Ative: Why’s that?
me: I’d take still living in any of the places my ancestors were from over living here if it meant we didn’t destroy one of the greatest groups of people ever to live.
Conserve-Ative: You DO realize none of those places would be as they are today without America.
Conserve-Ative: Who did we destroy?
me: The Native Americans, their culture, their lands, their language, their laws, and their history.
Conserve-Ative: Sure, to a certain extent, they still exist though. It worked out well for us.
me: No it didn’t. Soon, the whole destroying the land thing is going to come back to haunt us big time.
Conserve-Ative: Oh come on “Global warming” ridic.
me: There is already a global food shortage and I am not even talking about global warming. The food issue would exist with or without global warming..
Conserve-Ative: Yeah, in countries where they suck at agriculture i.e. Africa. and the dictators that take all the supply.
me: America would have been corrupted by Europe with or without Columbus getting lost. That is what the western culture does; it takes over, destroys, and calls anyone crazy that doesn’t adopt their ways of thinking. Western culture REFUSES to see that other cultures often work JUST FINE if not better than the western one
Conserve-Ative: Do they work just fine? Was Iraq working great?
me: Does our system?
Conserve-Ative: No system is perfect, but ours works the best.
me: I think western culture is evil. Not just the governments, but the culture that spawned them: the greedy consumerist culture that refuses to even MENTION the fact that horrible things are happening we instead choose to ignore it. We are taught from a young age to turn a blind eye: genocide, starvation, how our food is really grown/harvested, how our clothes are made, how our meat is slaughtered…
Conserve-Ative: We defend/attack what benefits us, really? Bovine rights? Come on. They’re freakin’ cows.
me: I am not talking about rights AT ALL. I am talking about the fact that the average American has NO IDEA what a meat plant is like. AND THAT IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICE BURG. Animals are typically tortured there, but the media doesn’t cover it, doesn’t cover genocide or anything grotesque or bad. It is something that should be worried about, because a society that doesn’t flinch about torturing an animal to death is one that calls accidentally bombing a school collateral damage.
Conserve-Ative: No correlation you can’t say that we don’t care about other people because we don’t care about animals.
me: I can definitely say that, we don’t consider most humans people (not non western people).Western culture is in a constant struggle to eradicate any other culture. They do what they need to do and kill who they need to kill in order to do that. Many soldiers have said that when they kill other people in combat they cannot think of them as human, because if they do–they can’t handle it (they have to think of it as an objective).
me: Do you think that as many people would eat beef if they had to shock the cattle on the head, hook them up to chains while they are screaming in pain and then slit their throats?
Conserve-Ative: Probably not no, but again, that’s the beauty of the system: we can disconnect from it
me: Right, we disconnect ourselves from animals.We think of them as beings with no feelings all the while being disgusted when other cultures eat cats. There are no news reports on things that make us uncomfortable.
Conserve-Ative: But you think non-western cultures aren’t biased either?
me: I think that many cultures had a lot of things right…mostly ones that don’t exist anymore. For instance a tribe in British Columbia when discovered, had no word or concept for rape, or child abuse. They had no idea what people were talking about because it didn’t exist in their culture.
Conserve-Ative: b.s.
me: It is convenient how people reject facts that don’t line up with the way they think, they just pretend they are not real or it will throw their established worlds into turmoil. Consumerism and greed are evil things and our country thinks they are its life blood. People in this damn country are so bombarded by advertisements that they worry more about a new freaking iphone than the fact that their own soldiers are dying or the fact that children made the clothes they are wearing in sweat shops.
Conserve-Ative: you miss the beauty of it. WE GET to think like that.
Me: I’d rather not be brainwashed, thanks.
Conserve-Ative: see, i disagree, it’s the whole Matrix argument.
me: The Matrix argument is much older than the Matrix. Plato wrote of it, it’s called The Allegory of the Cave and I’d leave the cave… Hell I already am halfway out. I guess that is the difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are content watching the shadows in the cave, and liberals see the opening to the actual world, and want to go explore it.
~Amelie~