#noninterventionist

[go3dprinting]

(via An Economist's Case for a Noninterventionist Foreign Policy - YouTube)

[ktylerg]

#ronpaul #drronpaul #libertarian #noninterventionist

[demonprincex]

Passivist.

This goes out to the world's Leo Blooms and Darls and Billy Pilgrims and Hal Incandenzas. This goes out to the folks who said nothing. To the tongue-holders, the good listeners, the strong silent types, the placid, the removed, the zen, the alienated, the people frozen in pension. To the people we shame for doing nothing. To the heros of nonaction. The catatonic, the indecisive, the really really devoted to not impugning others' soveriegnty. The watchers of people and bodies of moving water, the gutter-layers with heads lifted to stars, the quite useless, the torn between two points of equal distance. To the frozen and the frieze. To the languid lazy ones. To the types with unfulfilled dreams of bombast and success. To the political apathetics! The writers'-bloc'd! To the sleepy, the constantly fatigued, the fibromialgaed. To the guys and gals who feed the ducks and hummingbirds. The languid; the maligned for being lazy. Those of us who always have something great, no doubt, on the tips of our tongues. The reserved. The shy. The socially anxious. The vulnerables encased in the armor of nihilism. The distractable. The ones who are made of pure trepidation incarnate. The people who truly really have no preference they can access. The ones who are cool with whatever, really, you decide. The cloud-counting imagineers. The audience. The audience. The critic who does not speak his vitriol. The devotee who does not speak her worship. The muse that does not realize she's amusing. The extras. The NPCs. The lawful neutrals. The depressed, the bearers of great steeping mugs of ennui. The navel-gazers. The Ansel Adams wannabes who take really derivative photographs. The unmotivated. The listless with no lists of plans. The people with no allegiances, no agendas, no campaigns, no bloodlusts and no sharpened ears and claws ready at once to pounce on big threats to their big ideas. To the kids who have no ideas and nothing to do. To the teens and twenties who spend cumulative months circling mall parking lots. To my favorites, the tortured boring bored. This is not at call to arms! This is not a meeting announcement! The revolution will not be organized in a basement classroom on the nearest campus, amid dusty chairs and desks left unopened, stuck closed with gum since 1976. You will be able to tune out, brother. This is no revolt. This is an all-embracing detente. Perestroika. Moloch! No mystical calls and lurid visions lifted here. Acid flashbackers and political prisoners need not apply, unless they don't care anymore. Anyone with ears or eyes or arms open and mouths closed can dig this. If you have no arms or ears or eyes, so much the better. You are, you know, absolved. You all have gotten serious flak for eons. You get snapped up by toothy maws when you pause to survey. You are struck with four-inch hailstones when you daydream. You starve in the colorless cold when you can't start a fire. You are used as examples of the importance of initiative. You are blamed for letting Holocausts happen. You don't feel great about your stillness, but you think it's hardly as though you stoked the coals in the engines. You really must bear the brunt for not tearing wicked limbs from trunks in a further festival of violence? Really? You think, but don't say, Really? It's all MY fault? You think, if everyone was like me we'd never have these brash hulaballoos, revenge compounding revenge begeting rubble on rubble. You quietly extrapolate what you cause. You fold your napkin up and put it in your pantspocket and never think to throw it on the ground. A proper receptacle for rubbish and detritus always eventually shows itself. No incinerator is necessary for the patient. You keep a lot of clumped-up tissues in your pockets. They say all that needs to happen for evil to flourish is for there to be a whole bunch of people like you. You think, that's bullshit. For evil to flourish there has to be people who act like pushy, interventionist know-it-alls, dicks. You are decidedly not part of this equation. A world full of you's would be a stiller place, and less grand. Brooks would still babble through thin wisps of tall prarie grasses where bison and silken foxes lay. The great monuments and tomes of history would not have happened, mostly, and what existed of people would be poor, small, and fragile. No confident medicinemen and hucksters would exist to lead us all to physical and spiritual salvation. There would be no money and no markets, probably, but also no one to fleece the wild sheep. A world with just passivists like you would lack tributes and tributaries; we'd probably still wander from cropland to cropland over the years, never daring to plant and uproot by our selves; much better to upend ourselves, instead. So no great pillars and walls- what a pity! No ruins to be turned into museums of destruction and hate. No grievances to Never Forget. No matter- no way to record and remember, anyway. Just the quiet murmur of fingers pointed across the water or the sky, to muse on something but make nothing of it. It would be mediocre. Feckless, harmless, lasting, great. Tenable for ten times ten thousand years, until some cold snap or savvier species pushed us away. We'd not die in bangs or whispers, but in one collective doze: whew. Ok. Let you have your way. All it brings is stress and storms and pinched nerves all over your beautiful face. You cast your big plans, schemes of men, like mice, running mazes and spinning wheels going nowhere signifying nothing until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Tomorrow, the machine you made and imposed will be struck by the wrench of someone who was caught in your cogs. And he will vow to make a better, smoother machine that works for him, and he'll set out to impose it on everyone. And so it goes. Do you still think we are the worst? How many men and women carried us all to see when they've strolled with open arms to their own green light? How many have tried to fix the old order by making a new order soon in need of newness, and fixing? How many dewey-eyed idealists with type-A coursing blood have turned back upon their kingdoms, their Eurydice, their pillar of salt, and found they've lost the way? Was it their mistakenness that doomed them (and us)? No! It was their fervor! And how many quiet, sand-stroking water-watchers, with feet like roots to the land and methods they know, have done such things to their surroundings? How many frozen nymphs, Echoes in the reeds, have hurt a fly or whipped a horselike people into a fury? None. You will have your own take, reader, on which is worse. You may say this is a false choice. All humanity has active and passive, and ones for good and ill each. You may have the passion to say how wrong I am. I promise I will listen. I will listen and listen and listen. Sure. Whatever you think.