Je Suis Charlie Hebdo

BBC News: "At least 12 people have been shot dead in Paris - 2 of them police officers - after masked men stormed the offices of a French magazine. 10 others have been wounded - several critically - at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly which has printed cartoons deriding the prophet mohammed. Gunmen burst into the magazine's offices in the centre of Paris."

"JE SUIS CHARLIE." 

My sympathy is strong for the deaths of the humorists and editorialists in Paris, France, last week. My emotion is also strong as I share a major commonality with the murdered in this horrific event. It is an offense to my normally good-feeling empathy. Empathy because it is the expression of opinion we shared, and mutually loved. So, to a lesser degree than their survivors, I feel the loss and the veritable stabbing of the heart as I can only imagine the reality. Living in America as I do, the stabbing is dull for me, detached.

I'll save my many quarrels with religion in general and Islam in specific for a better article. This essay is opinion about the offense to the world's freedom to communicate.

My empathy is greatly offended by this attack because many of us practice free expression also. Many of us also satirizing the culture around us. Some were not expecting to have to have pay with their lives, or by any physical harm. But the passions of individuals can not be policed. Because when distributing our opinions, it can not be known when and how to what degree others will react to our expressions. We who publish edgy opinion, humor and such, walk a tight-rope submerged just below the water level of our heads. We bob up out of the water as we breathe the freedom of each publication, hoping not to get shot at in these periodically occurring times. In the U.S., we have become accustomed to offending others with our speech and not expectant of retribution, for the most part.

Guess what most of America? It is not the American Constitution that protects Americans' speech. That document only informs the government that IT may never infringe on our speech and in particular our religious and political published speech. It is just us that protects our free speech. It is a community standard that is all. Apparently, among radical Islamist, the community standard in westernized nations is frustrating to a strong degree as its' standard is far below their own religiously inspired morality, and they can stand it no longer.

Writers, cartoonists, and all those expressing opinion should acknowledge and keep a couple of important concepts in mind: That first, knowledge of our fragile cultural condition and the nuts that lay within must be realistically understood. Secondly we combine this understanding with a very careful measure of the risk in each instance of publishing. Because there is now more than ever, to allow us to function safely in this modern day as artists and opinion communicators, reason to be worried.

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Free speech warrior credentials earned: Myself, the author (left) at Radio Free Monterey, circa 1999, It was a Low Power FM radio, community, and worldwide FM radio and internet "netcasting" station. Built from scratch, owned
and operated by myself, mentioned in Who's Who in the United States, 1999, for community radio advocacy. The station was progressive and activist and advocating for FM radio freedom from corporate take-over in the United States.
Successful, an LPFM license can now be legally obtained by economically small stations, as RFM was.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

January, 2015:


Thanks a lot "Americans." 
Read the damn First Amendment. Then think about it.

Timely: ABC News, January, 16, 2015.

Copyright Reserved. James G. Mason, January, 2015. JamesGMason.com


#‎RADICALISLAM‬ ‪#‎ISIS‬ ‪#‎ISSL‬ ‪#‎terrorism‬ ‪#‎jesuischarlie‬ #charliehebdo

He Has Become His Own Imagined Enemy

I was pumping gas and leaning on the side my car as my wife sat cooling in the car, on a Friday evening around six o'clock. As I watched the numbers rolling by on the pump's gauge a mumbling and low voice occurred behind me, I glanced back over my shoulder. It was a man in his mid-fifties reading my bumper stickers. "Keep Church and State Separate," and "I'm Too Poor to Vote Republican," my chrome plated Darwin fish and "One Nation Undereducated," and the clencher, much smaller, on the lower right of the bumper "Attack Iraq? NO!"

"Figures!" He then said loudly enough for me to hear, "A commie, pinko, liberal, bunch of liberal crap!" He then huffed off to his truck. I stayed silent – trying to stay cool – and letting him be. But he wasn't through yet. He backed up his truck to within inches of my front bumper and then leaned out to see me while he added more angry diatribe from the comfort zone of his own front seat. "See that tag I got! See that license plate! "I got that in combat fighting for you to have the right to put that communist crap on your car! "Asshole! Pinko!"

I nodded for him to show him I acknowledged his Purple Heart that was displayed on his commemorative license plate that the state of Georgia was kind enough to make available. But I stayed silent and he finally drove off while the sound of words of disdain for me grew quieter has he left the parking lot.

Was he saying that he fought for my freedom, more specifically my freedom to political speech? I think he was. It was a reach, a long reach for reason, teetering on excuse for disagreeing with someone who is disagreeing with the status quo. Kind of like "Jesus died for your sins!" Essentially disagreeing with the wing of the status quo that had supported you – or said they had, seemed they had.

The gas station, mouth wielding vigilante was Vietnam age and I'll assume his Purple Heart comes from that theatre. A war based on a lie that accomplished nothing. What incredible disappointment it must be, the type that weighs like a brick in the chest, like a feeling of pressure on the brain, to return from that invasion and occupation considering yourself a patriot. A patriot so long as the mind stays closed, the brain stays shallow, and selective acceptance of news and of hear-say. Another veteran of that occupation might be a disdainful dissenter when the truth is known, having to deal with his anger, his reality. One man realizes he fought and was wounded in Vietnam for nothing and eventually is cool with the geo-political of it. The other is stubbornly insistent that he did something about communism, that the world is better off for what he did. He is sick of being the minority, so he may become a recluse, hiding himself and his family from the dissenters for the rest of his life. When faced with a dissenter and his bumper stickers, a button is pushed, a rage boils up, reality is hitting him the face, an affront to so much that he personally exalts about god and country.
For the veteran, in confronting the dissenter, with hostility and belligerence, in the gas station parking lot, he has violated the civil rights of the dissenter with the harmless bumper-stickers. He has become the freedom grabbing enemy he imagined he was fighting against. His own personal imagined enemy.