extremism sucks, regardless of origin: cross, star, or crescent
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Showing posts with label cross. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cross. Show all posts
03 July 2018
19 November 2012
Grigovians welcome winter
In the past, when greater Europe was wallowing in the cruel injustices of medieval depravity, winter in Grigovia was a time of communal sharing, a period of cooperative productivity. Even under the Soviet juggernaut's yoke, the people of this landlocked little republic managed to help one another out in times of scarcity, through diligent effort and clandestine communication maintaining a vast network of charity-driven black markets.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the old traditions still hold, that, when the first snows begin to fall in the dizzying mountain passes, the older high-valley denizens seal up their homes and hop buses into town while their younger counterparts break out snow-shoes and cross-country skis. “One learns to go without,” said ten year old Rathma Eroyip as she was carrying an armload of seasoned burning wood to an elderly neighbor's house. “I, for example, have come to terms with no longer being able to bicycle to school, and I know I must soon learn to ski so that I might continue attending classes in Grissend, which lies three kilometers to the east of here.” Rathma allowed us to escort her for the rest of the morning, during which she helped shovel out someone's back door, assisted in the manufacture of a thick woolen quilt, and learned how to attach and adjust the bindings on her first pair of cross-country skis. (The young lady's family had just recently moved up into the hills, to: “toughen these kids up a bit, and prepare them for life's exertions,” according to their mother.)
Wherever this news team went, Grigovians appeared to be contributing to the communal good in meaningful ways. We saw citizens handing out thick woolen blankets by the truckload, distributing baskets of hard cheeses and pickled vegetables in primarily immigrant neighborhoods, holding canned food drives and generally going out of their way to live up the notion that “Twigs in bundles become pillars”, Grigovia's unofficial national motto. “Instead of spending tax dollars on fleets of vehicles to plow the roads and contaminate the land with salts, we buried all power and telecommunications lines and created in even the smallest high-valley village satellite nodes for essential services where citizens can obtain medical care, educational materials, access to the national Wi-Fi network, and the materials needed to craft warm items for sharing with their elderly and disadvantaged neighbors,” said Qutomar Rastoyend, spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior's Winter Division. “Furthermore, we have added new buildings and installed new beds to the network of Care & Comfort facilities that stretches from Grig in the south to Pyltagrad in the north-west, where old and infirm alike can bed down for the winter, if they should so choose.” So it goes all across this fine little land: people bettering themselves by first bettering others.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
It should come as no surprise, then, that the old traditions still hold, that, when the first snows begin to fall in the dizzying mountain passes, the older high-valley denizens seal up their homes and hop buses into town while their younger counterparts break out snow-shoes and cross-country skis. “One learns to go without,” said ten year old Rathma Eroyip as she was carrying an armload of seasoned burning wood to an elderly neighbor's house. “I, for example, have come to terms with no longer being able to bicycle to school, and I know I must soon learn to ski so that I might continue attending classes in Grissend, which lies three kilometers to the east of here.” Rathma allowed us to escort her for the rest of the morning, during which she helped shovel out someone's back door, assisted in the manufacture of a thick woolen quilt, and learned how to attach and adjust the bindings on her first pair of cross-country skis. (The young lady's family had just recently moved up into the hills, to: “toughen these kids up a bit, and prepare them for life's exertions,” according to their mother.)
Wherever this news team went, Grigovians appeared to be contributing to the communal good in meaningful ways. We saw citizens handing out thick woolen blankets by the truckload, distributing baskets of hard cheeses and pickled vegetables in primarily immigrant neighborhoods, holding canned food drives and generally going out of their way to live up the notion that “Twigs in bundles become pillars”, Grigovia's unofficial national motto. “Instead of spending tax dollars on fleets of vehicles to plow the roads and contaminate the land with salts, we buried all power and telecommunications lines and created in even the smallest high-valley village satellite nodes for essential services where citizens can obtain medical care, educational materials, access to the national Wi-Fi network, and the materials needed to craft warm items for sharing with their elderly and disadvantaged neighbors,” said Qutomar Rastoyend, spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior's Winter Division. “Furthermore, we have added new buildings and installed new beds to the network of Care & Comfort facilities that stretches from Grig in the south to Pyltagrad in the north-west, where old and infirm alike can bed down for the winter, if they should so choose.” So it goes all across this fine little land: people bettering themselves by first bettering others.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
02 November 2012
candidates postpone election
Citing the need to visit affected areas and have their pictures taken in emergency shelters and amidst the rubble of homes and businesses destroyed by one-time hurricane Sandy, contenders Mitt Romney and Barack Obama agreed in a session closed to the public to postpone the election until after their campaigns had gathered enough disaster-related footage to make them appear worthy of the presidency. Rather than use his massive personal fortune to help make a difference in the lives of persons affected by the frankenstorm, Romney held a canned food drive in towns not affected too severely by the tropical depression, exploiting the generosity of middle class American stranger so as to make himself appear as if he were a man of the people. Meanwhile, the sitting president was kicking butt and taking names in states all up and down the eastern seaboard, handing out tax dollars in the form of emergency assistance and not even flinching when New York's mayor Bloomberg told him haughtily to stay away from the island of Manhattan.
Unbenownst to both Democrat fear-mongers and Republican war-mongers, the 2012 election proceeded as scheduled, the American people deeming it unnecessary to remind the political duopoly that the date for elections is defined in the Constitution. “Postpone the election?” said Morris Plains, New Jersey, resident Samwell Gupta-Smith, whose house was still power three days after the storm had passed “Are they that fucking stupid?” “We heard that Obama and Romney wanted to push this thing back,” said underemployed materials specialist Egon Valorbound Goldsmied, of New York's Lower East Side. “Which would be all well and good if – and only if – we all happened to live in whatever fantasy land those two seem to inhabit. But we don't, so, on November 6th, my wife and I will walk through the mud and the muck to our neighborhood polling station and vote for a third-party candidate.”
Mr. Goldsmied's sentiments were echoed by nearly everyone with whom we spoke: a women's group in Connecticut showed us a letter they had written to their former political overlords in Washington in which the corrupt officials were kindly told to go fuck themselves and to not let the door hit their posteriors on the way out; a group of freshly-minted teenage voters in Indiana – after realizing that neither ass nor pachyderm would address the real problems facing our nation – celebrated the candidacy of Dr. Jill Stein by occupying an abandoned lot, planting therein a community garden, and turning their cardboard Romney signs into compost; a men's bridge club in Florida dismantled the enormous “O” (for Obama) that they had helped bolt to the entrance sign of their nursing home, replacing it with a recyclable banner supporting governor Gary Johnson, the candidate for the Libertarian party. From the shores of the Great Lakes to the tasseled fringes of the bible belt, citizens from all walks of life shrugged off the stifling mantle of politics-as-usual and made the first cautious steps in the lifelong effort of taking their country back – by smashing their TV sets to pieces and bravely casting their ballots for a third-party.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
Unbenownst to both Democrat fear-mongers and Republican war-mongers, the 2012 election proceeded as scheduled, the American people deeming it unnecessary to remind the political duopoly that the date for elections is defined in the Constitution. “Postpone the election?” said Morris Plains, New Jersey, resident Samwell Gupta-Smith, whose house was still power three days after the storm had passed “Are they that fucking stupid?” “We heard that Obama and Romney wanted to push this thing back,” said underemployed materials specialist Egon Valorbound Goldsmied, of New York's Lower East Side. “Which would be all well and good if – and only if – we all happened to live in whatever fantasy land those two seem to inhabit. But we don't, so, on November 6th, my wife and I will walk through the mud and the muck to our neighborhood polling station and vote for a third-party candidate.”
Mr. Goldsmied's sentiments were echoed by nearly everyone with whom we spoke: a women's group in Connecticut showed us a letter they had written to their former political overlords in Washington in which the corrupt officials were kindly told to go fuck themselves and to not let the door hit their posteriors on the way out; a group of freshly-minted teenage voters in Indiana – after realizing that neither ass nor pachyderm would address the real problems facing our nation – celebrated the candidacy of Dr. Jill Stein by occupying an abandoned lot, planting therein a community garden, and turning their cardboard Romney signs into compost; a men's bridge club in Florida dismantled the enormous “O” (for Obama) that they had helped bolt to the entrance sign of their nursing home, replacing it with a recyclable banner supporting governor Gary Johnson, the candidate for the Libertarian party. From the shores of the Great Lakes to the tasseled fringes of the bible belt, citizens from all walks of life shrugged off the stifling mantle of politics-as-usual and made the first cautious steps in the lifelong effort of taking their country back – by smashing their TV sets to pieces and bravely casting their ballots for a third-party.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
06 April 2011
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