It should
be pretty obvious to you by now why a person with a die-hard Conservative
temperament would go bug-eyed about the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment
to the Constitution actually has to do with well-regulated militias
- 'well-regulated' being a portion of the wording that doesn't get
a whole lot of attention when people talk about gun issues, but that's
really beside the point as far as the Conservative temperament is
concerned. Almost nothing in the whole world could be more self-evident
to the Conservative temperament than that guns are about the
power to protect and defend yourself! DUH! Liberals are so stupid,
they think guns are about pain!
Liberals do
think guns are about pain, that's what they perceive when they see
guns and why they want to control them. Little (and sometimes big)
bringers of pain in fiery bursts of more and more pain in an obvious
moral affront to all of humanity. What could be worse than a piece
of equipment that exists solely to inflict pain and death and more
pain because death causes pain and my god, these gun nuts are monsters!
And so on.
What a Conservative
sees when he or she sees a gun is protection. The
precious human right, the sacred human right, the only human right
really worth thinking about - that of defending yourself and
your loved ones against the ever-present danger lurking in
the world as a result of all those other immoral, sinning, selfish
people who want to commit harm to those same loved ones for the same
immoral, sinning, selfish reasons you would commit harm to theirs
if it furthered your interests and you weren't kind of scared of God
and jail and stuff. Nothing in the whole world could be more
obvious.
There
is no issue that makes a person with a Conservative temperament see
red and get all dizzy with rage faster than talking about taking away
their goddamn guns. It violates a moral principle so profound,
so deep, so important to the very core of human experienc that it
cannot be explained. In fact, Conservatives can't explain it; they've
never been able to explain it to Liberals. The principle is
that defending yourself and your loved ones against danger is so central
to the very wellspring of human life that talking about taking away
that right is like tearing the heart out of someone. It's
incomprehensible. There's no way to understand life if half the people
on the planet want to cut away at the very first principle of existence.
Liberals understand
pain. They should understand that if anything is painful to a Conservative,
it's the thought of not being able to defend themselves and their
loved ones. Talking about gun control is like torture to a person
with a strongly Conservative temperament. Remember this when
you want to torture a Conservative!
We have a serious
clash of the temperaments on an issue like this. Because both are
right. Guns do cause pain. Needless, unjustifiable,
overwhelming pain - day in, day out. Defending oneself and one's loved
ones in indeed a primal right and a primal necessity - perhaps the
first imperative of human survival. Guns are indeed a method
of defense, as well as attack.
Both are wrong
as well. Half the time a gun is a piss-poor fucking method of defense
and half the time these days it does more harm than good to the gun-owner.
Gun-owners are their own worst victims and their occasional success
in taking out a criminal does not statistically stack up with the
reality that most are more likely to take out their own children by
accident than any crazed dope-fiend menacing their womenfolk. Guns
are a great idea that doesn't work as well as the Conservative temperament
would like to believe. And liberals are wrong too - in that
guns are needed for defense - if only against the American government.
This is a principle true Conservatives understand - that when you
take away that right, you are kissing a fundamental part of America
goodbye. This ain't Sweden. We're not all happy, homogenous folks
of one ethnic and religious group who get along and can trust their
government. We're a culture who has traded away harmony for the right
to do pretty much whatever the hell we want. It's a serious
trade-off, with serious consequences. It's not a pretty trade-off.
One of the implications is that all Americans have to live with a
greater amount of Conservative-style fear than those nestled in a
more liberally based culture would have to endure.
This is
the trade-off of all Conservative cultures. You have to deal with
fear. You give up your right to bitch about pain, you choose
to endure it, so that fear can be dealt with. America, as it turns
out, is only half conservative and there is always tension between
the two approaches. But the people who exerted the most influence
on our early development as a nation were definitely God-fearing conservative
types. The Founding Fathers were of a more liberal bent, but the populace
itself was good old-fashioned, drown her, she's a witch, Conservative
fear-based, who the hell gives a damn about pain, would I have come
to such a God-forsaken spot to endure so many horrific hardships if
I cared about that kind of people. America was built
by the pain-insensitive and given its form of government by the danger-insensitive.
The crafters of the Consitution were so liberal as be downright
reckless - no Conservative of any true temperament could have condoned
such an absurdly dangerous experiment if he'd thought things through.
But, in true conservative style, many of the population's conservatives
at the time didn't really think things through and just signed up
with wild enthusiasm for the thought of defending themselves against
King George and killing some Tories. It was an odd, uneasy
marriage and it still is.
To put
it another way, America's most ferocious, loyal, and effective defenders
will always be people who don't have any real biological affinity
with the principles it was founded on. America will always
need its Conservatives for protection and its Conservatives will never
really be comfortable with what they're defending. In short - we all
hate each other! The liberal shakes his or her head in painful despair
at the stupidity and hypocrisy of Conservatives to whom America
always has to be explained - and Conservatives point out
with justified indignance and scorn for the soft-underbelly of Liberalism
that all Liberal asses would be grass without Conservatives to do
the dirty work of defense, protection, structure, and yes - conservative
social values.
Liberals make
things better - that's their job. If they didn't do that - and in
some places they don't - nothing in the entire world would get better.
Conservatives are so, ahem, stupid, that they would jealousy guard
a tradition of placing venomous ants on their eyeballs until the very
corneas were eaten away in an extravaganza of searing agony and lifelong
blindness - because they'd be afraid to change
in case, like you know, God wanted them to place venomous ants on
their eyeballs or something. They'd never check. They'd go to their
graves, and send their children's children to their graves, blind
and ignorant because they don't pay enough attention to pain.
It takes a liberal to point out that ants in your eyeballs don't do
any damn good and we'd all be better off if we stopped torturing ourselves
this way. Conservatives never figure out that we'd
all be better off if we stopped torturing ourselves and each other
in the ways we do. Society will not collapse under the weight of gay
marriage and worrying about it is both more irrelevant and more useless
than it appears.
Conservatives,
on the other hand, make things the same. And that's a worthwhile
attribute Liberals often fail to appreciate. Conservatives
actually do the vast majority of the work that keeps a place the same
- day in, day out. They endure the pain, tedium, boredom, and everything
else that goes with actually living in a society and making it go.
They don't try to fix it - they try to do the same old stuff well.
They care for their families, their homes, their communities, their
churches, their companies, their lawns, and their world with devoted
attentiveness and if it weren't for them, nothing would work and nothing
would get done. A world without Conservatives might just as well shoot
itself in the head cuz it ain't gonna last long anyway.
Okay, now that
we know the principles it's time to take the Liberal/Conservative
quiz! Run down this list of handy issues and guess what the correct
answer is for either a) Liberals or b) Conservatives! It's fun!
Oh
goody, a quiz! That's always easier than reading lots of text!
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