"it takes so long to saw the chains off your mind."

Maxims and Reflections has a wonderful post on the everyday moral insanity manifested in reactions to the attack on Lebanon :

Anyway, Carroll is wrong, he himself is all fucked up and twisted, probably by stuff he's been hearing since he was a kid. I'm still half fucked up myself; it takes so long to saw the chains off your mind. But, you know, one day it's going to happen. People will throw off this shit, nationalities and religions and all the other stickers we put on each other's kids saying it's okay to kill them, and we'll realize that there's only one enemy, the kllers. The killers secure our allegiance by pretending to be enemies to each other. But the killers are playing on one team and we are playing on the other and we are losing. But, in the absence of worldwide anarchist revolution, it's important to keep score, especially if you are a taxpaying citizen in the country that's paying for all this carnage, without which it would not be taking place.

The worst thing I think I saw on TV was last week, on C-Span's morning call-in show, where you think you would hear the voices of people somewhat knowledgable about international affairs, about history, about anything, if they're bothering to call this relatively highbrow show. But there you could hear the result of the U.S. educational system, of the media, of the barbarism of popular culture. The calls alternated from "left" to "right" and practically everyone was a racist. Someone started going on about the Jews controlling the media, etc., then the next one said that the previous caller's racism was unconscionable and doesn't he know that Israel has to destroy these Arab animals, and it went on in that vein. People are being butchered, nobody knows anything, nobody has anything to offer but miles and miles of hate...

- From Maxims and Reflections