please take a moment to read

[wwjdftw]

with thanks giving coming up please take a moment...

A man who showed extreme bravery in the face of great danger, just to keep his rights
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/11/mexican-marines-reconstruct-death-of.html

watch please
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OlTTi9y5Lk

look down your knees under your desk, and think of how easy is to you to get up, make a cup of coffee, eat cookies and watch a shitty sitcom on TV. think that tomorrow, you have to go to work, but you don't HAVE to. think about your house. think about every corner of it, every shadow their walls cast, how they protect you from the cold, the rain and the sun. think that you could move your chair in front of the window and watch out of it into your quiet yard doing absolutely nothing if you wanted to. that's your freedom. as banal and unimpressive it sounds, it is your most valuable right, and this man fought and died for his, just like millions have done in our history.

 

[wwjdftw]

I also ask that you bump this up, so people who are not online at this late hour can see it.

 

[Tekkawarrior]

Pretty cool stuff I have to admit, I'll bump this if there is a discussion.

For the sake of argument, was it a good strategy to fight an army? or should he
have lived to fight another day?

 

[Danish rage]

At some point you simply need to draw a line.

 

[Daniel_Rosamilia]

Wow......
God bless this man.
Someone that truly stood up to the evil, stared it in the eye, and fought to the death for what he believed in.
I salute you, Mr Garza.
RIP.

 

[DemonicVixen]

There are probably many out there, who have probably been covered up so that no-one knows about them or remembers them. I praise these people, but its not just 1 individual that has and will do this sort of thing, there are hundreds all around the world.

 

[Gigathrash]

This is just one point that doesn't even begin to fully illustrate the atrocity that is the majority of Mexico and Central America. It is frightening and sad to think about, to know that there are places, literal right across the southern border, where the law is decided by who has the most guns. This is a topic particularly painful to me in that I am the son of a Mexican Immigrant, and I know people, hell, I am RELATED to people like this man.

If you want to know more about this, go read Dreamland, or if you're not of tougher stuff, Enrique's Journey.

Aw, and now I'm all depressed D:.

 

[BonsaiK]

with thanks giving coming up please take a moment...

A man who showed extreme bravery in the face of great danger, just to keep his rights
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/11/mexican-marines-reconstruct-death-of.html

watch please
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OlTTi9y5Lk

look down your knees under your desk, and think of how easy is to you to get up, make a cup of coffee, eat cookies and watch a shitty sitcom on TV. think that tomorrow, you have to go to work, but you don't HAVE to. think about your house. think about every corner of it, every shadow their walls cast, how they protect you from the cold, the rain and the sun. think that you could move your chair in front of the window and watch out of it into your quiet yard doing absolutely nothing if you wanted to. that's your freedom. as banal and unimpressive it sounds, it is your most valuable right, and this man fought and died for his, just like millions have done in our history.

I thought the article was absolutely horrible and banal. Rather than go into the actual reasons for the incident, or discuss the actual underlying problem with any depth or insight, they just played the melodrama of it to the hilt, placing the victim on a ludicrous pedestal with no character flaws whatsoever, which I'm sure isn't true.

I know about this type of reporting because I've seen it in action very, very close to home. Many years ago, a guy I went to school with and knew well was shot and killed in a nightclub. The newspapers did the same thing, they idealised him and portrayed him as some kind of hero and saint, waxing lyrical about how he courageously stood up to his assailants, also mentioning that he listened to Beethoven, fed the ducks by the pond, and was basically a nice young man who could do no wrong. In the meantime they glossed over the real reason for the violence (that he himself instigated), and also neglected to mention anything about his character that didn't fit into the squeaky-clean profile they wanted to portray of him, such as his membership in a death metal band, or his reputation as a violent, belligerent, racist shit-stirrer. Not saying the Mexican guy was like that, just saying that reporters rarely let the truth or any kind of valuable/accurate analysis get in the way of a good morality tale.

Whenever I see this kind of morally simplified, lowest-common-denominator black-and-white reporting, alarm bells ring. The only moral lesson I can gain from this is that while freedom is certainly important, it often comes hand-in-hand with the freedom of the press to dribble mounds of utter nonsense. I guess that's the price of a free society.