In light of another sibilant, covetous and self-serving State of the Union Address from Glorious Leader Obama, it is worth considering the most significant scandal of the Obama administration. This is inarguably the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms' "Fast and Furious" program, in which Obama's corrupt federal government ran illegal guns to Mexico in order to foment support for further "gun control" legislation.
Democrats, progressives and libs of every stripe despise guns, because while they adore violence, these would-be tyrants hate resistance. Your ability to defend yourself and to fight back threatens their desire to control every facet of your waking life. Because they hold heavy sway in popular culture, they have worked long and hard to make sure that those around you – your fellow citizens – will abhor civilian ownership of firearms even in the absence of legal firearms restrictions. This attitude and this phenomenon are central to Obama's often-professed desire to wreak "fundamental change" in our nation and its culture. Libs hate and fear guns, and, by all the false gods they worship, they want your neighbors to hate and fear guns, too.
To this end, the scions of lib-dominated popular culture regularly enlist the assistance of useful idiots, individually and in groups. One such group is the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, whose website proclaims Coca Cola the "drink of the death squads," preaches "socially engaged Buddhism," supports the juvenile-terrorist "Occupy" movement, and advocates for a laundry list of other liberal causes. The group does all this in the name of its interpretation of Buddhism. It has a long history of propagating progressive nonsense in this guise; its support for civilian disarmament is no exception.
Back in 2005, the BPF dedicated an entire issue of its publication, "Turning Wheel," to the theme of disarmament. Make no mistake: The members of the BPF would see your firearms confiscated and destroyed. In the absence of government force to produce this end, they will agitate for you to do the same voluntarily. After all, you want to be "socially engaged," don't you?
In the issue, editor Colette DeDonato quotes Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, who she says opined that there is "no reason to kill our ordinary enemies" because "death will come to them naturally anyway." Gyatso asserts, and DeDonato agrees, that we should strive instead to destroy "the delusions that are the cause of all suffering." Buddhism holds at its core, you see, the notion that attachment – to the world, to our possessions, to notions about our physical health, to other people – leads to suffering. It further holds that all life is suffering. To achieve Buddhist enlightenment, its adherents assert, is to free yourself from such attachments and thus to free yourself from suffering. This makes perfect sense. What could be more noble than simply lying down and dying? What could be more moral than being voluntarily helpless?
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The rest of this old issue of "Turning Wheel" contains several articles that are disturbing to varying degrees. While the tone of most of the articles is smugly self-congratulatory, very few of the authors seem to understand the philosophical problems they are raising for themselves. They move blissfully through their narratives, telling us how proud they are of their pacifism and the ways in which they have chosen to apply it to their lives, while ignorant – willfully or otherwise – of the contradictions they ought to be confronting.
One gem is Gary Lark's "Breaking the Chain: Getting Guns Out of My Life." It seems Gary, back in 1979, spent a spring morning destroying several hunting rifles. They hardly constituted an arsenal, but to Gary (who seems still to be shaking off the effects of the marijuana he admits to smoking during his National Guard days) they were the embodiment of all violent horror.
"That day in 1979," Gary proudly tells us, "in the process of finding myself, I destroyed all my guns. I quit alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and caffeine. ..." In the years that followed, Gary glimpsed "the open door of compassion," and who among us would not be grateful that a dope-smoking, boozing, caffeinated ex-hippie who spent the Vietnam War in the National Guard and admits to plotting something close to (but not quite) premeditated murder took the time to disassemble a handful of hunting guns and target plinkers? Thank heavens for Buddhist enlightenment. Pass the weed, man.
If that is disturbing, the next article is even more so. Billy Tyler, writing from High Desert State Prison in Calipatria, Calif., describes how he has given up knives (improvised shivs and shanks) in prison thanks to his Buddhist devotion to pacifism. Oh, he'll still use his fists to defend himself, but he won't use a knife, so that means he's following the path of Enlightenment ... right?
Self-preservation is not an illusion. It is a necessary fact of life, for there can be no life without it. Human beings are born with a survival instinct for this very reason. No amount of high-minded ideals and flowery poetry will change that. The Buddhist Peace Fellowship, in engaging in political activism for what it sees as right and good, is instead acting for everything that is wrong and evil in the world. Its members are not alone.
The libs' script hasn't changed in the last several years. What has changed is that men and women who share the Buddhist Peace Fellowship's warped ideals now hold the highest positions of power. Worse, those in power are corrupt hypocrites who have no qualms about the authoritarian use of deadly force when it serves their needs. They just don't believe you, the individual, should ever have that option.
Obama, his sick and twisted BATF, his attorney general and, yes, even his hectoring wife, are tyrants who want you disarmed so they can better push you around. If Obama gains four more years in power, they will work even harder to disarm us and subjugate us, thus making us all suffer.
No amount of detachment from that suffering will alter it.