{"id":42479,"date":"2014-03-18T06:00:45","date_gmt":"2014-03-18T11:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=42479"},"modified":"2014-03-18T06:12:53","modified_gmt":"2014-03-18T11:12:53","slug":"dont-turn-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=42479","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Turn Around"},"content":{"rendered":"

SCENE:\u00a0 Mitch BERG is sitting at a stoplight when his car is jolted from behind.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Wearily, BERG gets out of his car and walks to the car that has bumped his rear bumper.\u00a0 Avery LIBRELLE sits at the driver’s seat, still furiously typing on a mobile device<\/em>.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 (Recognizes LIBRELLE<\/em>):\u00a0 Oh, jeez.\u00a0\u00a0 You know you slid into my…<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Wait!\u00a0 (furiously finishes typing comment onto news website).\u00a0 OK.\u00a0 What now?<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 Well, you sorta slid into my back bumper.\u00a0 (Checks bumper).\u00a0 Not much damage, but still…<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Yeah, well, I had to comment on this Ukraine thing.\u00a0 The Administration is doing a heck of a job.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 The Administration is doing nothing at all.<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Well, we only have so much we can <\/em>do.\u00a0 We have no credibility.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0\u00a0 I’ll say.\u00a0 Obama has pretty much…<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0\u00a0 No, you racist, it’s not Obama.\u00a0 It’s the US.\u00a0 We have no credibility on human rights issues.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 What now?<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Look at slavery!\u00a0 Look at what we did with the Indians.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 Wait.\u00a0 Slavery – which we fought a civil war to abolish 150 years ago – and the wars against the Native Americans, which ended 120 years ago, destroy our credibility today?<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Absolutely.\u00a0 And the people of the Crimea just voted, 93% of them, to rejoin Russia.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0In an election in which they were surrounded by Russian troops.<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 So that invalidates the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, then?<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0(slowly shakes head<\/em>).\u00a0 You do realize that justifying a larger, aggressive nation swallowing up parts of smaller nations based purely on ethnicity is how the west rationalized Germany taking the Sudetenland, don’t you?<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Bla bla bla.\u00a0 Russia is liberating Crimea from the Ukrainitarians, who unlawfully stole it from them.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0\u00a0 OK, about that.\u00a0 Let’s run, for sake of argument,\u00a0with the idea that slavery and the conquest of the American Indians invalidates America’s claim to being a moral player.<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 It does.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0\u00a0 Even though it happened over 110 years ago, and our society has spent the better part of the past 40-50 years atoning for both, which is something no other society on earth haseverdone for societies they previously conquered and enslaved.<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0\u00a0 Bla bla bla.\u00a0 Do you have a point?<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0\u00a0 I always have a point.\u00a0 You do realize that the reason the Crimea is ethnically Russian is that the Russians murdered, starved and deported the vast majority of the non-Russian natives of the region back in the twenties through the forties, and shipped in ethnic Russians to replace them, don’t you?\u00a0 That is to say, within the past seventy to ninety years, they either murdered the people who lived there at the time – the Tatars, the Turks, the German-Russians and all other other ethnic groups that used to live there – in an ethnic cleansing no less brutal than Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears, but within living memory<\/em>, as they were also starving Ukraine into submission –\u00a0or shipped them off to the steppes and a fate not one iota less horrible than slavery?<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Your point?<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 You deny the US has any moral weight, but ignore vastly worse and more recent crimes to fit your narrative.<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0\u00a0 Bla bla bla.\u00a0 Hey, you have insurance, right?\u00a0 Could you get this one?<\/p>\n

(And SCENE<\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SCENE:\u00a0 Mitch BERG is sitting at a stoplight when his car is jolted from behind.\u00a0 Wearily, BERG gets out of his car and walks to the car that has bumped his rear bumper.\u00a0 Avery LIBRELLE sits at the driver’s seat, still furiously typing on a mobile device. BERG:\u00a0 (Recognizes LIBRELLE):\u00a0 Oh, jeez.\u00a0\u00a0 You know you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[131,73,11],"tags":[236],"class_list":["post-42479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-and-peace","category-western-civilization","category-world","tag-dramatization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42479"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42502,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42479\/revisions\/42502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}