perils of censorship:
Image: WUNOC.jpgre: #63 Naso Tang

The question though, is why do they hate us when many more of their own are being killed daily by the same people they pretend they hate us to kill? Or would they hate us even if we didn’t do that? Same question.

Imagine for a minute that America, while gliding along its current track, loses its shit entirely. Sherrif Arpaio declares himself the sovereign lord of Maricopa County. Civil war breaks out in Texas, pitting the majority Tea Party secessionists (“The Liptoneers”) led by General Rick Perry against the Shitty Texas Weather Underground of Austin, who are aided by the shadowy Fort Worth Creative Consortium. Nobody is safe. Your neighbor might be an assassin, or someone paid to pick targets for assassins, or an uninvolved innocent person, or even one of your own. Just as in Rwanda, talk radio hosts begin openly beseeching their listeners to slaughter their political opponents. And it gets worse. People you can’t keep track of go off and do all sorts of crazy shit. Possibly even in countries other than your own.

But lo and behold, into the midst of all this steps President Jin Sun Choi leading an army hundreds of thousands strong. They don’t speak your language, and they have only the most superficial understanding of you, your history, and the nuances of your daily life. In fact, an awful lot of them get really belligerent at the very idea of “nuances”. It’s a dirty word to them. You can see that their perception of you is derived primarily from their own proudly ignorant TV shows and movies. You barely register as human.

They have interjected themselves into your reality without your invitation or consent. They have taken control of your town and are now dictating how you are going to live, OR ELSE. They perceive any resistance to their efforts as evidence that the person doing the resisting is the enemy worthy of no less than torture and death, and it does not escape your notice that a large portion of their people back home agree with this idea. They arrest, torture, and indefinitely imprison your mom, dad, brother, sister, uncle. They threaten that you’re next unless you tell them exactly what they want to hear.

Meanwhile, they insist that they have made you free, and seem genuinely unable to figure out why these magnanimous efforts still result in people being pissed off at them. Nothing can convince them that they are anything other than The Good Guys.

Use your imagination and put yourself in those shoes.

Why *wouldn’t* you hate them?