Opinions

It doesn't matter who expresses them... opinions are like porn to me.
Sometimes it's cheap, low-budget porn- the kind you download for free and erase almost immediately afterward coz it makes you feel a little sick inside.
Sometimes it's high quality porn, with lavish costumes and and an actual script (well, as much of a script as you can hope for) and stars that don't look like they'll never see thirty again (or aren't old enough to legally smoke)...
Either way, I live for opinions. Giving them, receiving them... even if they piss me off I'm always glad I know more than I did before.
So, it annoys me that people get so irked at me for simply expressing a damn opinion!!! Why do we have to live with secrecy and disingenuity? Why are we so much more concerned with not offending people and therefore live in terror of speaking the truth and having it spoken to us? Why is conflict so much shinier and more attractive then lies?
I am mad as HELL, and I'm not putting up with it anymore.
I have decided to enter a kinder, gentler era of just not speaking my mind AT ALL. I'm tired of the criticism, I'm tired of the resentment, I'm tired of feeling like I am offending people when I'm just being true to my nature.
So, from now on, I'm blogging. I'm putting my opinions here. If you give a frick what I have to say and promise not to give me unneccesary attitude for simply letting a little of the chaos out of my head, then welcome! And don't ever hesitate to leave your opinions, too...
I'm so close to putting this era of shallowness behind me... thank God.
First opinion- so, I'm currently glurging on literature involving eugenics, and I'm mad as hell.
Preface- I tutor once a week at a community college, in the Basic Skills department in which my mom serves. So, we're there on Friday, and a lad with obvious (but clearly not prohibitive) developmental disabilities approaches us and tells us excitedly that the "cheerleaders" are performing in the gym at 1. Mom tells him we'll be there like shareware, and he bounds off excitedly to invite another member of the staff.
My mom goes on to explain that the CompEd class had mastered a cheerleading routine and was taking it to some competitions, and that she wanted to go to their performance and cheer them on. Of course I agreed, and at 1, they performed a highly entertaining cheer and dance to an enthusiastic crowd. Did it matter to the cheering fans that these kids were developmentally disabled? Hells, no. They were enthusiastic, and they were having fun so infectiously that we all laughed along with them. Afterwards, they hugged all of the spectators and a girl excitedly told us that they were going to the beach! For two days! And there was a pool! At the hotel!
It would have melted a heart of ice. One like mine, actually. They held my icy, dead heart like a shiny, rustly pompom in the palms of their hands.
So, I went to collect my belongings to leave, and as I held my tome on the history of eugenics, I was suddenly hit with kind of a rush of emotions. I was nauseous, I was angry, and I just wanted to shield every last one of those kids from anyone who would be heartless and evil enough to ever trouble them.
A brief explanation- eugenics was a medical and philosophical study in the late 1800's-early 1900's. Eugenicists posited that detrimental traits- such as learning disabilities, handicaps, homosexuality, alcoholism, feeblemindedness, inferior racial status, etc- were hereditary deformities and could be, quite simply, bred out of civilization given aggressive tactics. Eugenicists in the United States forcibly sterilized about 60,000 people legally (supported by legislation in 30 different states) in the heyday of eugenics. Then, the Nazis took the movement as their baby and wiped out the handicapped communities of occupied Europe, Wiped them out. Euthanized them, if you will... these "undesirables" in no way furthered a superior Aryan race and therefore were exterminated, like so many ants or mice or cockroaches. No matter that each one of these people had a story, and special gifts, and a heart, and a right to live given by their simply being on this earth... no, they were inferior, and had to go.
Turns out, euthanasia was pondered by American eugenicists as a "humane" method of eliminating these non-flowering branches from the healthy, stately tree of American life. Thankfully, the full extent of Nazi atrocities at last came to light, and eugenics advocates in America quickly hush-hushed any damning evidence that America lit the match that made the Holocaust burn so brightly in Europe.
It makes me a little sick, honestly, that these sweet, kindhearted innocents, enthusiastically swinging their pompoms and jiving along with Metro Station, would have been crammed into buses and gassed, or submitted to anaestheticless vasectomies, or been cut open awake and laid there in pain while their tubes were tied because they were simply not good enough to be allowed to procreate. Why is that? Why is a girl with her hearing more deserving to be a mother than a deaf girl? Why is someone with Huntington's chorea forced to be the last to bear their family's name, because of a condition they're born with?
It seems like the distant past, but we're entering an age where genetic engineering is the Newgenics. Why are we suddenly given the superiority to determine what will make a child more appealing to the race? It makes me crazy. And angry.
As I was sitting there, waiting for the cheerleaders to shake shake, shake shake a-shake it, a woman who was on crutches struggled by me. A young man with Down's Syndrome got to his feet and, in a friendly and non-intrusive way, helped her to a bleacher, plopped down beside her and chatted with her animatedly until the show started. It occurred to me that there I was- blond-haired... blue-eyed... built like a German hausfrau... in good condition and rather sharp of intellect... I wouldn't be the eugenecists' ideal but I would certainly be encouraged by them to breed, breed, breed. But for all my genetic cleanliness, did it ever occur to me to hop up and help that girl to her seat, let alone have a cozy chat with her? No. But a "disabled" kid served with distinction where I would never have the courage.
And we, the genetically pure, want to breed that out.
Anyway, I could say more but I'm so angry... I just need to wind down and stop thinking for one night. That's my opinion! What's yours?