(part1)
(part 2)
(part 3)
(part 4)
(part 5)
(part 6)
Clearly decades-long friend Spartacus was not in the least interested even in my direct answers to his coldly hostile questions... let alone the reasoning that undergirds my perspective.
He didn't want a dialog. He wanted only to attack, to beat his chest and bellow as king of the hill... while standing in a cesspit. His lifelong open-mindedness was gone; his patient manner had evaporated; his respect for others wrenched into a whip, a goad, a dagger in the back, a sickening fecal firehose on full power.
He responded the next morning to my long, sincere note, where I'd outlined areas I both in fact agreed with him on, and where his vaunted stance was weak, deficient, and unsustainable... and he would have none of it. The admirable open door of his heart and spirit was slammed and soldered shut; and there he stood, arms tightly folded, chin arrogantly thrust out, Mussolini... not the mature man of moderate mind.
From: "Spark" le Klaus
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2020 8:34 AM
To: Aging Child
Subject: Re: Tar Nation
So the short answer to my question is yes you would. Theoretical
life trumps ALL other considerations. A perfect example of the utter stupidity
of religion.
Hitler was against abortion too...
From: Aging Child
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2020 10:52 PM
To: Spartacus
Subject: RE: Tarbrushing Only
Spartacus,
my friend, I don't know for certain where you've suddenly broken down inside,
or how you've let it happen to you, but in more than twenty years of email,
phone calls, visits together, music and laughs and hurts shared, and so much
more, you have never attacked my faith, let alone called me a Nazi.
Your
determined, relentless, righteous, superficial crusade directed against me is
utterly out of keeping with the rare character of the man I've long admired.
Your strengths and skills and knowledge I've appreciated and envied and grown
from; your experience and perspective have counseled and helped direct many of
my more-troubled steps.
Of
late your maturity is seemingly out the window, your deep incisive intellect
looks to be silted up to a tiny trickle through a flattened gully, and your
gentlemanly acceptance that many people do not follow your roadmap… appears
utterly snuffed out. Right now you're coming across as a righteous, arrogant,
crybaby know-it-all, uninterested in anyone else's perspective than your own,
certain of all the quick, easy, pat solutions to the world's array of immense
problems, and are utterly disdainful of any other answers to be offered.
Maybe
out of your justifiable anger, frustration, and outrage at the course this
president has taken, you've grown genuinely frightened; are feeling yourself
impotent in the face of a great unconquerable threat. And so, finding yourself
in a tight corner, you have to lash out and attack. That's reptile-brain
reaction and fear moving you, and guiding your keyboard into vitriol, where for
so much of your life there has instead been patience, grown-up reason, and
level-headedness. Your commendable restraint and acceptance are devolving badly
and alarmingly into juvenile cowardice, arms folded, pout on lips, and choosing
personalized tantrum where a deep breath and greater thought and
self-reflection are so truly needed. That's il Duce's pose to threats and fear. It was
never yours.
Here
where you might wisely seize this time of crisis as an opportunity, say, for
patient persuasion, you are persuading only a profoundly troubling perception
that you are not the least interested in a dialog; that you are unconcerned
with a comparison of viewpoints; that your sole focus is the sound of your
breast-beating and righteous posturing. I must posit that you're not reading
anything that I've written because it runs counter to the mantle you've now
chosen to wrap yourself in, and from which you're moved only to take cheap, low-brow potshots.
Right now you are choosing to read and see only what you want to see, and
nothing else is of worth in your little red book. Come on.
I say
that you're much, much better than that. That you're choosing such a low course
tears at my heart, and claws deeply and bloodily at my lifelong respect for
you. That type of closed-minded self-obsession belongs at the far-far right of
the social spectrum, where one finds tea parties, and rifle-toters, and conspiracists, and unyielding hands
clutching unacceptable tokens, such as dixie-flags and hooked crosses. The left-of-center, where you've always stood, is
about open minds, healing, learning, growth, compassion, conciliation,
consensus, common goals and vision — ideals that at the moment you look to have
turned your back on; none of them are evident in the cold, unreasoned words and
stabs you've been mercilessly taking at me from out of the blue.
This
is not the Spartacus I've known and admired and warmly appreciated all these
years. He was never shallow, never self-focused, never narrow of mind, never
brutal, never vicious, never cruel, never demeaning, never sadistic, never
arrogant, never unthinking. What has become of him?
So.
Having once again laid out difficult, yet genuinely respectful, words to stake
out my parcel of parkland, and certain it'll again be bombarded by further
gas-laden shells and jets of flame devouring any waving white flag, let me try once
more to address some things you've said. I know you won't read them because of
who you unaccountably choose to be at this moment; yet respect for you (and for
myself) requires what you've said not be ignored. I challenge you to try the
same.
One.
Life
in the womb is not "theoretical". It is alive now,
today, growing. The child — zygote, embryo, fetus — is not a potential human,
but a human with full potential; from day one, its DNA is fully human and is
neither the mother's nor the father's. Tearing the child out, dismembering her,
decapitating him, because the mother (or/and father) wants to continue living
their shallow self-serving life, is every bit as much murder as choking a baby
in its crib because it's crying in the wee hours; the difference is one of
locale only.
It's
not a religious matter. It's pure, raw, demonstrable science: read an
embryonics textbook. Religion is simply recognition of the value of life. But it's science that tells us that this, the child in the womb, is alive, is life itself.
Having
so easy an out as abortion in a challenging personal situation cheapens the value of life,
and of responsibility, and encourages self-service, rather than devotion to and
love of others. Being okay with still-warm baby body parts, being fine about a
newborn drowned in a bucket in a Planned Parenthood procedure room, means that
some essential part of an adult's heart is dead as well. That's inhuman, and
inhumane. It poisons our entire culture and species. It is monstrous. It has to
end. It brooks no compromise.
Two.
A
common trope is that more wars have been caused, more people have died, because
of religion than from any other cause. Simple, stark counterpoint: which religion was
Hitler pushing? What spiritual faith was Stalin extolling? Which church did Pol Pot fight on behalf of? Which deity commanded those millions upon millions of
deaths? Name the religion. Now name original great Western universities and
hospital systems that were not founded by religious organizations.
"Utter stupidity" in fact lies
demonstrably in the closed mind and unflexing agenda — and it sincerely
troubles me to point out to you that this is the thickest vein coming through
your most recent emails. I repeat, and will keep repeating: you are far better
than that.
Three.
Your
disgust and horror and outrage at the lousy leadership implicit in tens of
thousands of American deaths this year is something I share with you. You're
attacking me because you've personalized your disgust, and thus I
myself must be fully to blame for all those dead countrymen/women, through my
agonized choice behind a closed curtain one November. If mine had been the one
tiebreaking vote that had kept the president's main opponent out of office,
you'd have a case to come at me personally. Since mine wasn't, then you are
honor-bound to track down every person who did not vote for that opponent, and
berate them every bit as rudely and harshly and immaturely as you've been
attacking me; anything less would make a fool and hypocrite out of you…
something else my dear friend Sparks has never been.
Is it
that the only thing you value in someone today is how much they think and act
like you? Where is the mature adult mind in that? Where is the big heart that
embraces the differences in all your fellow humans, inside and out? Since when
were undifferentiated clones your lone company of choice?
If I
am to follow your role model, then, and hold someone solely and unmeritedly,
directly responsible for our present great ills — which is what your latest
very rude and shallow words have been implying — then you must accept that
there is a whole suite of things I am required to coldly and brutally hold you
accountable for, or you are embracing a lousy double standard.
Total
guilt by clear association:
- Other husbands have knocked their
wives' teeth out; you're just as guilty as they, even though you've only
been loving and nurturing to your wife, whom I also respect and regard
highly; you're still guilty for those other women's batterings because
you, too, are a husband, and some husbands see their wives as
punching-bags.
- Every bit of woodworking machinery
used to tear apart a fresh corpse has your fingerprints on it.
- As a man, you're complicit in the rape
of every child.
- As a half-Sicilian, you're also responsible
for every bloody machine-gunning by the Cosa Nostra; and as a half-German, the blood and
ovens of Buchenwald are under your name.
- As a Caucasian, your knee also was on
struggling George Floyd's dying neck.
- As a former-USAF man, you must answer
for every American bomb and cruise missile that leveled a hospital and
took out a school and apartment block.
- As a resident of a super-big metropolitan
area, you're responsible as well for all polluted waters, for stench in
the air, for the dead wilds.
- As a man with a beard, that's you
sitting on a park bench, eying little girls with bad intent.
Please
tell me that the total absurdity of this line of personalized unhelpful
response to evil is coming through.
That
I have to repeat myself about something so basic and obvious underscores, again, that
you're not reading what I've been writing, nor care to. Yet out of love for
you, and of unyielding appreciation for all our years, I'll say it again. I did
not put this man into office so that he could kill tens of thousands of
Americans. The virus that took them was all but nonexistent three and a half
years ago; the lousy decisions and nondecisions that exacerbated the plague had
not been made. A vote for any candidate is never carte blanche for them to run
roughshod over their people.
You
have set yourself on a crusade; stop battering your lance and sword on this
weathered windmill that is me. What are you personally doing to actually solve
this problem? How does shamefully kicking into pitiable ruins a long and deep
friendship… redress all the flu-dead? How does that shallow, immature, cowardly
betrayal put Trump and his cronies in their proper, deserved places?
I
repeat as well: you've personalized your outrage and fear, and are taking
repeated aim at an easy target. That's part of why I regretfully have to assert
"cowardly" of you, even though till now you've never been a coward.
Get
in your car and drive your roiling sense of injustice to Washington DC, to 1500
Pennsylvania Avenue, and raise a placard so big and bright that Agent Orange
himself can see it, and don't stop until he's on a rail, in tar and feathers,
being held down under the waters of the Tidal Basin. Engage your legislators
and local electorate to tear them out of office, to sell off all his holdings
in full recompense to the parents and children and brothers and sisters of all
the dead. Put on some scrubs and volunteer in a hospital, a testing center, a
funeral home, and stick with it until the virus and the president are dead and
gone.
All
those would be worthwhile and honorable, positive channels for you to leverage
your great anger and justifiable sense of absolute mission, and sensibly put
them toward righting what's badly awry. To instead take the easy, lazy, arrogant,
cowardly path of visiting it all on an aging child here at his dilapidated
desk, is immensely dishonorable, shameful, unmanly, immature, and disgusting.
It is being a pompous, self-righteous playground bully. That's not Spartacus.
Make a real difference, not the futile, fruitless,
whining, bitter, baby's tantrum you're veering into.
You
are far, far better than that… or used to be. I hold you to a much higher
standard, one that long inspired and encouraged me. That's Spartacus: hope, not
hatred; hand out, not fist drawn; peace, not petty pugilism.
Be
your best. That is the man to admire and emulate.
Regards,
Agïng
Child
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