Brutally Honest Rant - 12/12/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Final Rant for 2007 and Final Unacceptable Truth
Audio Transcripts
12/12/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

And welcome to the LAST Brutally Honest Rant of 2007. It’s hard to believe that we’ve made it through another whole year. Most of the time it seems like it takes forever to get to this point, and then suddenly we’re here. That’s just how it all works out sometimes.

Anyway, this is it until January, and while I was prepared to make this HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT about next year… unfortunately I can’t right now. We had a few things pop up, not to mention a huge winter storm that really hosed things for a certain part of the country.

BUT here’s what I’m going to do. While the Brutally Honest Command Center will be down for the holiday season, I’ll still be doing my regular segments over at ShockNetRadio.com every Friday Night. So what you guys need to do is you tune in every Friday Night at 9:15pm Eastern Time for the News Pundit Report and once we get the details finalized, I’ll make the announcement then. And of course I’ll post it on the blog site, but I think you’d rather want to HEAR it instead of reading it.

NOW… I’m going to try to get a few last words in on a variety of subjects, so bear with me on this.

First, by the time the Brutally Honest Command Center is back up and running in January 2008, we will already be in the middle of the REAL Presidential Election season. Everything up until the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary has been nothing but theoretical HORSECRAP.

I mean it! Everything that has been going on in 2007 regarding each and EVERY single one of the wannabes has been pretty much no different that a political version of a FANTASY LEAGUE. All of these polls? That and a buck and some change will get you a cup of coffee. It’s only really good for bragging rights, and even that is still nothing more than mindless theoretical crap.

But once the caucuses and primaries start up, THAT is when the REAL game-playing begins!

I want to bring up a few names of people who were supposed to be these populist system-changing mavericks in their days: Howard Dean, Pat Buchannan, John McCain… in their time they were supposed to be these hell-raisers that were going to shake things up in the election! That’s what the hype was at first. And it was even more so for Howard Dean because that was really when the Internet took off as a campaign tool! What happened? They each fizzled after the first caucuses and primaries.

You know why? Because all of the people who claimed that they WANTED to vote for the mavericks COWERED OUT! They either didn’t vote, or they threw their vote away and voted for the “SAFE” candidate… the one that they believed that their party needed to win in the November election.

Listen, people, THIS IS YOUR CHANCE! This is pretty much one of the FEW CHANCES that you will EVER GET to actually vote for the kind of candidate that YOU WANT in that party! The kind of candidate that stands up for what YOU believe in.

You know, I once believed that you couldn’t really throw your vote away, but I was wrong! YOU CAN throw your vote away if you betray yourself and you betray what you believe in! And that is what a lot of voters do! THEY THROW THEIR VOTES AWAY by choosing the “SAFE” candidate. Or else they don’t vote, thinking that their vote would be wasted anyway.

And I’m going to tell you this right now, and this comes from YEARS of watching the political system at work, the two “SAFE” candidates right now are Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Rodham-Clinton! THOSE are the people that the party bosses and their friends in the special interest groups want on the November ticket! Those are the people that are getting endless press time, but for much different reasons. FoxNews wants Hillary to be the Democratic candidate and CNN wants Rudy to be the GOP Candidate. And if you think about it, it all makes perfect sense why they’re doing it that way.

Now, if you don’t like it… if you don’t think that either of them reflect what you believe in, then these primaries and caucuses are really your ONLY CHANCE within the party to let them know it! If you don’t take part now and vote according to YOUR beliefs and according to YOUR ideas, then you really have no excuse when the November elections come.

Think about that… but think too long about it, because the primaries and caucuses have been bumped up so early on in the year that they’ll be on you before you know it!

Okay… next…

There have been several shootings not only this past year but also right now, almost back-to-back. And while the media – especially the cable news media, because they have nothing better to do – sift through every single bit of minutia and pretend to offer some kind of explanation as to whey these guy flipped out and went on their homicide-suicide sprees, there’s something that you need to keep in mind: these things DID NOT simply happen in a vacuum.

Neither the 19-year old who opened fire in a mall nor the 24-year old who murdered four people at a missionary dorm and a megachurch decided out of the blue to throw their lives away like that. They planned and orchestrated their attacks because something PRODDED them to! Something in their lives snapped, and just like the people who used to “go postal” in the 1980’s, they felt that the system screwed them over, so they struck back. This is going to sound crazy to most of you… but in their minds, they saw this as a form of revenge, or even – in some twisted manner – self-defense.

The 19-year old who opened fire in a crowded shopping mall had a messed-up life. He was living in a room in someone else’s home, brought in like a stray puppy. He lost his job AND he lost his girlfriend all in just the span of a week. Not exactly the kind of warm and fuzzy view of adult life that you see on MTV, is it? And the weapon he used? He didn’t BUY it like the anti-gun people would try to spin it to be. Nobody would GIVE him a weapon like that. HE HAD TO STEAL IT! He stole it from his stepfather; from the home that he was kicked out of.

And the 24-year old? Here’s someone who spent his life in a strict religious family, being brought up all of his life to believe that his religion is the only thing that matters in this screwed-up world. He tried to play by the rules. He tried to follow what he was told his life was supposed to be about and he gets SCREWED OVER. He sees hypocrisy and self-righteousness and outright FRAUD dressed up as FAITH, and THAT gets promoted. THAT gets advanced. THAT brings in the money and the fame. Ted Haggard gets forgiven for his hypocrisy. His own brother attends Oral Roberts University, which is right now weathering charges of corruption, abuse of university resources, and allegations of fooling around with underage boys.

And here was this shooter, supposedly following “the rules”, and what happens? He gets kicked out of the missionary – his supposed end-all-be-all in life – because he apparently didn’t fit the mold of the “perfect people”. The ones he saw that were hypocrites. He was bitter, and that was even before he turned his anger into something worse.

Now I’m not EXCUSING their actions, folks, nor am I condoning them. I’m just pointing it out so you can understand it all.

This is something that the air-fluffed ego-driven media will refuse to do. This is something that the political and religious leaders don’t want you to dwell about, because it takes the power of these tragedies away from them. Even now the bible-thumpers are using this latest tragedy as their literal smoking gun to claim that they are supposedly being “PERSECUTED”. Trust me, I could spend two whole hours talking about that subject alone... and, you know, I may just do that in 2008.

Anyway, the point is this. These things are happening because too many people and too many institutions are letting us down. In short, there’s something Rotten in Denmark, and it’s going to continue to stink up the place until something substantive is done to fix it.

Okay… now… the last point I want to make tonight…

All this year I was giving you a series of “Unacceptable Truths”. Things that are painfully true, but we the people, in general, simply REFUSE to recognize it as such. For instance, what I just talked about just a moment ago was one of those “Unacceptable Truths”. Saturation by the media is not the same as information. These tragedies simply don’t happen out of the blue, and that they are all a symptom of a much LARGER problem that we refuse to deal with. There are plenty of these “Unacceptable Truths” that I’ve been bringing out this year. Some deal with politics, others with taxes, and still more with religion and the media.

But through it all, there was one that I was DYING to get out. One that I was DYING to bring up and expose and really talk about… but I wanted it to count. And what better time than now… at the VERY LAST audio rant for 2007… to wrap up this whole series called “Unacceptable Truths” to bring you the final, and probably biggest, unacceptable truth.

So here it is folks:

FREEDOM is an INDIVIDUAL CONCEPT!

Let’s get brutally honest here folks… you CANNOT tell a whole group of people that they are free without being able to tell that to each and every individual in that group. You can’t give freedom to a whole group of people without giving that freedom to each individual in it!

Think about the whole thing with slavery. We fight a bloody Civil War over it… and for a few other issues of course… but it’s over and the slaves as a group were free. Or… at least they were on paper. As a GROUP, they were supposedly free, but not on an INDIVIDUAL basis. As individuals, they were still subject to blatant restrictions and discrimination. Segmented and pushed aside and zoned away into little out-of-the-way districts. Oh you can work, provided it’s the same kind of work that you would have been doing beforehand. Advancement? Well that’s only for so far. Education? You’ll take what we give you and you’ll like it. As a GROUP, African-Americans were free. But as individuals, they sure as hell weren’t. And it would take almost an entire CENTURY after the Civil War before people began to realize that difference and fight to make significant changes to that effect.

This is where the civil rights struggle fails. It starts off where it needs to be… on an INDIVIDUAL basis. A woman arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus. A man refused service because he showed up in “the wrong” diner. A child wanting to attend a school closer to where she lived. INDIVIDUAL rights. INDIVIDUAL freedoms. But once the argument goes into any kind of GROUP discussion, that’s when they start losing it.

Race, gender, sexual orientation, age… as long as the argument is on an INDIVIDUAL level, then you have strength. But as soon as you turn it into a GROUP thing, then all discussion of rights goes down the toilet. Now you’re not fighting for freedom. You’re fighting for POWER… and usually for yourself, not for others.

Freedom of religion. The SECOND freedom specifically mentioned in the First Amendment (the first being the prohibition of Congress from passing any kind of law RESPECITNG the establishment of religion). What people don’t realize is that freedom of religion is NOT about the freedom of churches or about the freedom of religious institutions, but rather it is about the freedom of INDIVIDUALS to believe how they wish. It’s the freedom of INDIVIDUALS to decide if they want to follow Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, or to follow their own beliefs, whether those are based on any of those religions, or none at all. It is an INDIVIDUAL concept!

Freedom of speech – to say what you want. The freedom of the press – to print what you want. The freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures. The prohibition against forced self-incrimination. The freedom of association – to hang around with whomever you wish. These are all INDIVIDUAL FREEDOMS!

So now the $64,000 question is this: why is it an UNACCEPTABLE TRUTH? After all, this is what our country’s founding fathers WANTED for us, isn’t it? Freedom?

And the answer to that is simple: the reason why we REFUSE to accept the fact that freedom is an INDIVIDUAL concept is because we have been thoroughly surrounded in and indoctrinated into a groupthink mentality! We have been taught to believe – without question – that the GROUP is more important than the individual.

We have been conditioned like Pavlovian DOGS to accept that “family values” and “public decency” trump the freedom of speech. That is what they used to impose dictatorial censorship rules on radio and television and even the movies. The “Legion of Decency”, the Comstock Acts, the Meese Commission… and now of course the FCC, all of which telling us all that the freedom of speech is IRRELEVANT compared to the DEMANDS of the GROUP!

We have been BRAINWASHED to accept that the DOMINANT religion gets to decide what laws get enacted and enforced. That’s why they have been running around telling you that the Separation of Church and State NEVER EXISTED, even though the language is CLEARLY THERE if you bother to actually READ EVERY SINGLE WORD in the First Amendment and not read the neo-con Cliff Notes. And when their own hypocrisy in these matters are exposed, not only are there actually NO CHARGES filed for violating the very laws they champion, but they categorically REFUSE to get rid of the laws they weasel out of, claiming that society NEEDS those laws or else we will all degrade into anarchy.

We have been PROGRAMMED to accept that some communal sense of “property values” override our freedom of association. Zoning laws and so-called “Covenant neighborhoods” dictate to us what can go on in our homes. Eminent Domain is invoked anytime some developer lusts for property, telling you that YOUR property is subject to forfeiture at any time for some mythical “collective gain”. You can lose your property at any time even on the mere SUSPICION that it was involved in some political “war on” hoax such as the fraudulent “War on Drugs” or “War on DUI” or “War on Sex”. And once gone, you can’t get it back, because it gets auctioned off “for the good of society”.

We are DELUGED with groupthink from the moment we are born until the moment we die. We are taught to see ourselves NOT as individuals, but as part of the greater collective whole.

And where does that lead us? To people who can’t think for themselves. To people who have to EMERSE themselves into whatever collectivist program they are a part of just so they can feel like they actually MATTER. To people who will wait in line for a day-and-a-half just so they can be the first one in the store on the day after Thanksgiving so they can buy that so-called “IT” present. To people who actually cannot tell you the difference between DEMOCRACY and FREEDOM. To people who believe that their end-all-be-all purpose in this world is to be a breeding machine and bring into this world as many babies as possible. To people who will sacrifice honor, integrity, morals, even their very SOULS just to sustain the group when it has done wrong. To people who think that supporting a sports team is more important than getting an education. And it leads to people who end up being so marginalized, so shunned from the rest of the groupthink, that they convince themselves that the only way that they can actually matter in this world is to do something so shocking, so reprehensible, and so unforgivable that they will be damned in the history books, and that their actions would be used as the justification for even MORE groupthink!

I wasn’t kidding when I said that this was the BIGGEST unacceptable truth there is! This pretty much encompasses a whole bunch of social ills. And ALL of them can be resolved in a matter of time if we simply accept this truth and recognize that we CANNOT claim to support freedom if we first do not support the INDIVIDUAL.

John Stewart Mill said it best when he said that “Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.” But perhaps it was a World War II correspondent and 1930’s writer named John Dos Passos that pretty much summed up this unacceptable truth quite well. He said that “Individuality is freedom lived”.

Now if we were to use that as an indication of the amount of freedom we enjoy in the United States, then it’s safe to say that we would ALL be in some serious trouble.

(Computer – some final fun stuff)
(Fade Music In – “Mythodea” by Vangelis)

Well my friends that does it for 2007. I would like to thank each and every person who has sounded off over on the Brutally Honest blog page, either in support or criticism of the things I’ve said this past year. Also thank you to everyone on the Brutally Honest transcript list. Unfortunately, because of the various things I have in store for 2008, I won’t be able to continue doing transcripts, so thank you for those of you who have been on the list for all this time. I know some of you have been there since I was doing online radio, and trust me when I say that you’ll really like what I have in store for next year.

For everyone else, thank you for an interesting year! Thank you for listening or for reading my rants, and I hope you will come back next year!

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, have a GREAT HOLIDAY SEASON and I’ll see everyone in 2008!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

[End of program]
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