Are You "Right-Wing Fringe", or "Left-Wing Fringe" and How Will They Push You

Originally posted by redoubt
reply to post by SpartanKingLeonidas

 

This thread is asking if you are "right-wing fringe" or "left-wing fringe".

I am an extreme centrist. I dislike most all politics and hold that the vast majority of politicians from either side are crooks.

From there, I like this quote:

"The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

...

Lesson One : When I was a teenager, and I am going to use these examples as a “group” trying to provoke me into an action, so bear with me, I had a really big mouth, imagine that if you will, and when I went to school, I spoke my mind, which tended to get other people upset with me, I wonder why.

When I entered seventh grade, I was living out in the boondocks, way out of the city proper, and I had just moved the year prior, and knew no one on this bus route because Junior High School was a whole new animal I had to learn to tackle. Well, day upon day, I got on the bus and seemingly survived it, other teenagers ignoring me, some taunting me because I was quiet, and yet other looking at me strangely because I never talked to other people and I always carried books like The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Murder on the Orient Express, or Sherlock Holmes, so them, I was weird. Imagine that, a teenager who likes to exercise his brain instead of his mouth all the time with stupid gossip and whatnot.

Well, being the resilient young man I was, I would ignore them, and continue reading my books, fascinated by the stories they told of intrigue, guise, and mystery of the “who-done-it” variety. This is a lot easier than I am letting on, because there’s the other kids who jostle you with their backpacks while getting off the bus, other kids who flick your ear to agitate you, or kick the seat because of some 80’s rock band is screaming over the buses radio about ”Come on feel the noise…”, but I got pretty good at ignoring those types of things because I was caught up in some book where I literally became the character, and ignored all outside input.

Day after day of this went by, and I was in Heaven because I could shut out these rude interruptions, and figure out what the Gaijin was with the hero when he was called that in Shogun, or sailing a ship fighting pirates in the Caribbean (no, none of this Disney nonsense, I was reading about historical pirates, or Long John Silver on Treasure Island), or even imagine I was casting magic spells with Gandalf against Orc’s to save Bilbo. Little did I realize, but I was being watched, evaluated, and plotted against by teenager’s who deserved to go to school in a detention center, not in the public school environment. One fine day, when I was between books because I had soaked up all the interesting stories to me in that particular library, I decided to listen to the conversations around me, and unfortunately for me, I longed for warm environment of my books instead, because the topics whizzing by me were about other students sneaking cigarettes in the girls bathroom, other students getting in trouble because they said a foul word and the teacher sent them to the principle, and still other students gossiping about sex and how they would love for their boyfriend to go to second base, instead of being such a pansy.
Well, for those of you who have not had the privilege of knowing me long here on ATS, or have never come across a post in the past, as a teenager, I was a devout Christian, right-wing conservative to the max. Yes, I did mentioning imagining casting magic a bit ago, but I was a teenager who understood that magic was only fantasy or an illusionist like Harry Houdini or David Copperfield pulling slight of hand, so it did not bother me to read about that, although my parents were absolutely against it because it was “of the Devil…”. Gentle reader, can you sense me rolling my eyes, even now, just like back then when I was a teenager when my mom or stepfather would say something like that which I thought was batty as Hell? Well, I am, so let me carry on with my story, please.

What did I do, which caused me so much headaches I take Excedrin as I tell this story, to these other teenagers? I voice my opinion, loud enough to be heard, and it was contrary to what they wanted to hear, of course. Remember, I had a big mouth, and still do, so bite me and let me carry on with the gist of the predicament I walked my way into, okay? Okay. I spoke up to little Suzy Smoker (I forget her name, but this is after all a re-telling of a story) and told her she wasn’t eighteen and it was against the law that she was smoking in girls bathroom, and she should be suspended for her actions. Oh yeah, did I mention my righteousness was more than sufficient to judge others on the entire bus?

Well, little Suzy smoker and her friends lit into me, telling me what kind of tool I was, that just because she was thirteen and her mom and dad would eviscerate her if she got caught, that who the Hell was I to tell her she was wrong, and what was wrong with me for not doing like her.

Like, Oh Ma God, I think I’m just gonna die, he talked to me like that (this is me, imitating the bubble-headed Barbie).

Laughing? Good, because so am I.

Then, silently I brooded, receiving nasty looks from little Suzy Smoker and her Barbiettes, and then I heard little Billy Potty-Mouth talking about how he was in so much trouble because he said crapola (I cleaned it up for you,

) and how his parents were going hit the ceiling when he handed them the note. Again, my tongue licked across my lips, and I spoke up. Kind of silly, aren’t I? I told him he should quite whining about it, and be grateful his stepfather didn’t have a paddle an inch thick with Whale of A Wallop written on it and beat him senseless (I am exaggerating at the re-telling of this, but to a teenager who still got his butt beat, it was pure torture). Oh, this did not bode well for me, he told me to mind my own business, and called me a freak because I always seemed like a Boy Scout, so how the Hell did I ever get beaten. Actually, I was a Cub Scout for a while, my parents dropped it because of the uniform costs, but he didn’t know that, and for those of you reading this now, I’m an adult leader in the Boy Scouts currently, and after this incident I was a Police Explorer in homeschool for High School, but I digress, back to the story at hand.

Boy, I was two for two, on a fast losing streak. Should I really share my thoughts and the encounter of the other individuals? Sure, why not. You’re not bored yet, and my fingers haven’t tired out from typing.

Remember the next one? I sure do. Well, I turned to the other set of teenagers and chastised the one for talking about having sex before she was married, and her and her friends shouldn’t be discussing that type of thing, it made me uncomfortable, because I was a Christian.

Yes, I realize, I am a glutton for punishment, sue me.

Oh, this went better than expected, because not only did the one group of sexually depraved young teens light into me about being too nosey, but they lit into me about being weird, because I didn’t talk about sex, and then, to make matter even more furious for these teens, the boys behind me who I had ignored lit into me, asking if I was a virgin, if I knew what “nookie” was, and poking and prodding me verbally (I would have broken them apart while Martial Arts if they had laid a finger on me) about being a “goodie goodie” and a nark because I would tell on them for doing and saying things on the school bus. Were these other teens just stupid, did they not know I knew what happened to nark’s by watching the example of other kids who were stupid enough to ratfink out their fellow students?

This, my fine feathered friends, is why I never talked, was always the quiet kid, and always buried my nose in my books, they did not judge you. And, you could guess the outcome easier, because after a while you get good at guessing the end of the stories, whereas fellow humans are hard to read, well at that time in my life they were.

So, after this all calmed down, yeah I’m laughing too here, the other kids turned back to me, and began asking me questions, ones that made me even more uncomfortable, like why I was still a virgin (I had dodged that answer before, but they were good guesses, especially when my face turned beet red and I squirmed in my seat), or if I liked to smoke pot, or even did I think I was better than them or something. Oh yes, can you see the building crescendo of ”She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes, she’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes…”?

I opened, my big fat mouth, yet again, and blurted out several things that set them off.

I told them the following, follow with me through this discourse, if you will.

I don’t have sex, because I’m a Christian and you’re not supposed to do that because God said it was wrong

Smoking pot is wrong, and you’re lucky the Cops don’t lock you up.

Yes, I am better than you, all of you, because I’m not going to burn in the Hellfires of brimstone and ash, like all of you idiots.

Remember I said I had a big mouth? Yes? I told you so, and I was only a teenager, and it only got bigger with age and vocabulary. Oh this got all sorts of laughs, guffaws, screaming at me, you name it. Then, it got worse, yes, you heard me right, it got worse. They teased, taunted, and twisted my thoughts around on me, stuck their middle finger (yes, in that rude gesture) through their other hands index finger and thumb imitating sexual acts, or worse yet, their tongue, kicked the back of my seat, or tripped me when I moved seats or got off the bus, and this last for the next year and a half, this kind of sheer stupidity, because I was “right-wing conservative” and believed in my right to sharing my thoughts in a verbal manner spouting off laws, Christian ideology, or worse that I was better than them.

This type of nonsense kept up off and on until the last six months of eighth grade, yet somehow, I was stupid enough to keep on opening my mouth. Remember, it was big, and for some unknown reason no one had stapled it shut for me at the time. One fine day, standing at the school bus stop, waiting for Steve, the substitute driver to come along and pick us up for another fun filled and exciting day of Junior High (please, note the sarcasm). And low and behold, what do I see, but the two brothers that usually stay at the back of the bus, with the “cool kids”. On the way to the bus stop they decided to be rather ambitiously stupid and leap up and down on one of those car counting devices that the local Police puts out across several lanes of traffic.

Being that I wasn’t particularly impressed with this stupidity, and thinking the bus driver would laugh, I mentioned it to him on the way to school. He was after all the same man who ignored my pleas for assistance and always was telling semi-naughty jokes. Anyway, the bus driver was not necessarily impressed with their actions and the end result was them getting suspended for multiple days, which got them also punished by their Corvette driving parents. I swear that was not my intention but the end result still made me smile devilishly. Once the brothers got back to school, the threats of violence and their stupid attempts of brutality and intimidation began to get worse than they already had been, but they multiplied even further and were compounded by the fact that they essentially rounded up all the individuals on the bus who really weren’t that fond of me.

Now the fact that this was six months before the last day of school these geniuses (read tactically less intelligent than myself) decided to begin to tell me every single day that they were going to get permission to get off the bus together, this being a group of fifteen boys, to go “play football” together (read kick the ever living crap out of my butt). For six months, I attempted to tell the Principle, gee he didn’t like me, the Dean, the boys were watching me and my actions and always got there first, or to other teachers I thought might help. You think it’s difficult to find an adult in school, and you’d be wrong but ones you felt you could trust when half of them were people who thought your problems were stupidly less than theirs. I thought adults were supposed to care about kids and their problems in school, but guess what gentle reader; you’re wrong and so was I.

On the last day of school, having not told my parents about any of this since I was taught to handle my own problems (read my parents were busy working multiple jobs, and essentially I was on my own) I took it upon myself to take a four foot chain and sneak it into school. Well, long story short, I snuck it throughout the school where all the other kids had knives and an assortment of worse weaponry than I was toting around. Locker to locker or class to class, hiding it behind my school books in my pocket or wrapping it around my waist under my belt line, I had learned from the year and a half of these other teens nonsense to not let them know what I was doing if I could help it. It didn’t exactly sit right in my gut, but I did it nonetheless, and got away with it I might add. When the school bus stopped, the driver being the nice guy he was, called me up to the front of the bus first and gave me some sage advice. He said “Jason, you better run like Hell and not look back”, to which I replied…”Steve, I’m not running this time, I’ve had it with running” and I proceeded to pull the chain out of my pocket just a few inches. You know in the cartoons where some big bad wolf’s eye bug out and get the size of dinner plates? Well, Steve’s eyes did exactly that and he told me not to hurt them. I told him I had no intention of hurting anyone, unless they got within my four foot radius, then I’d trash them pretty good.

I proceeded to get off of the bus, walking backwards since knowing you never turn your back on the enemy, and pulled the chain out of my pocket. I began swinging it around like Conan the Barbarian on steroids, oh wait that was Arnie with the steroids, with a sword. Now if you’ll remember what I said before about the bus driver, you can imagine the reactions of the rest of the school buses kid’s reactions. The bus driver stopped the bus and looked out of the door, screaming at me to drop the chain and to run. Was he stupid? Drop my weapon of defense? No way was I going to do that. I began backing away slowly step by step from these other boys with chants from the school bus that I should kill the boys along with other mixed reactions from, “Holy crap, Jason’s standing up to them”, to “Oh My God!” I was ignoring all of that though and keeping my eyes focused on the trouble right in front of me, those other boys.

They didn’t exactly expect this of me of course since up until that point they had always been able to scare me, intimidate me, or trip me when I was walking away, etc. You get the drift. This is of course that moment in my life, when I stepped over the line from being the bullied to being the bully buster and stopped people like these dead in their tracks. That dead in their tracks part, is of course a just a saying and not a reference to any actual crime of murder.

You know I knew these boys were chicken’s, but I never thought I’d prove it. Boy did I ever, huh? Oh yeah, I have to tell you that part still. About half the boys ran as fast as they could away from me in the general reverse direction they had been heading, which was towards me. The other half stopped dead in their tracks. The bus driver began driving the bus away with teenager’s faces plastered against the windows and I began back away slowly still swinging the chain around like mad man, er mad teenager. From learning a lot of things between that day and now as I sit in my apartment writing this I can tell you honestly that this was what they call a FUBAR situation. Go to Wikipedia and look FUBAR up. And Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame was pretty close by too. The boys decided to try to fake me out but I saw that coming too. When in a situation like this, which is similar to a combat situation you go through what is called an adrenaline dump and your senses go into overload. I literally went into what I now call a three tier sensory situation. That would be where I heard things up close to me like normal, things within twenty feet like someone was talking very, very loud, and someone fifty feet away sounds like their yelling their heads off, even if their whispering.

If you’ve never been in combat or a hostile and hazardous situation then you will never learn to appreciate this knowledge, so sit down, shut up, and listen and learn. Remember my big mouth?

The boys were all at different areas in front of me, about six of them within ten to fifteen feet asking between themselves what they were going to do, and the rest of them were about thirty-five feet away and were whispering amongst themselves about running down the block and cutting me off from getting to my house out of the site of the bus driver who was driving away. My friends this was a bad situation, turning into an even worse one. The boys who had been whispering over yonder began yelling at their friends that they were all “going to go play football” like the original “plan” had been.

This is one of those times when you know that people are flat out lying because they did that all the time and weren’t very good at it. I continued walking slowly backwards and one stupid teenager, kept walking towards me. Now you’d think he’d go away but since he began yelling at me that he was demon possessed and that he was going to kill me and Jesus didn’t love me, I was not inclined to think what you’re thinking right now. Remember, I mentioned I was Christian before, well I still am. Yes, violence is not a part of church but then again, I’m not in church and if you’re reading this while sitting in a pew when you should be listening to a preacher and it didn’t go up in flames or you yourself didn’t spontaneously combust, well I guess God has forgiven me, so shut up.

Once I saw that they were far enough away from me that I could successfully turn around to run, I did just that. Chain tightly gripped in my hand, my little legs pumping as fast as they could, I got about halfway to my house when things when from FUBAR to Mr. Murphy and his Laws jumping on my back and straight into BOHICA (look it up) and making things worse. Not only were there stupid teenagers coming crashing through the woods to attempt to cut me off, but I had reached to my necklace and get my house keys out in order to be prepared to get into my house quickly. You know I really hate forgetting things and today sure as Hell was not one of those days to do that sort of silly thing. I had forgotten my house keys since I had been so worried about this situation as I walked out the door to the bus stop that morning. Talk about out of the pan and into the fire, huh? I got to the house and decided to try and check to see if one of my parents had figured out I had forgotten my keys and maybe, just maybe left the front door unlocked. No such luck. Was this a bad day, or what? I took off like a bat out of Hell with those boys still chasing me, getting another half block with only two or three of them still keeping up to my faster than light speed at this point when I ran past the stop sign on the street corner trying to figure out where to go and it hit me. No, nothing actually hit me, that’s a saying. It hit me like a ton of bricks to run to the nearest kids house I knew had already gotten out of school and ran to his front yard, leaping over the fence and running into his yard screaming for his mom to call the Police, and that these kids were going to kill me.

This fine friends, was my kill zone, or rather ambush time. What you say is a “kill zone” or an “ambush?” I had led these boys to a friends house, whose mom was a prickly Christian and just like every mom in America she was ready for action. I heard her asking question upon question, and me being winded and tired as Hell repeated my mantra, call the Cops, they’re going to kill me. My friends out there, there’s one thing you never mess with, a prickly Christian mommy. I know that, hopefully you knew that, but the baddies, those idiots from the bus stop did not know such things, or they didn’t exactly know whose yard I had run into so they proceeded to run into Kathy’s yard, that’s pissed off mommy on overload, to come after me. I had according to Roger’s Rangers tactics, set up a classic ambush.

Okay, okay, who’s Roger, why’s he a Ranger, how’s a boy like me back then know these things? Well, that’s another story. The short version here for those of you impatient readers is that Roger’s Rangers classic text reads for a hasty ambush, gee me running my butt off not wanting to stop in order to get my butt beaten down, was for the bushwhacker, that’s me, to lead the enemy into a concealed position, nothing concealed about the house as the garage door was wide open which is where I had run to and dropped my chain in there…oh you want know what was concealed here, oh that would be those facts I already told you that the teen’s didn’t know about, Kathy’s inclination towards the pucker factor of twenty-five when it came to violence and anyone she knew, namely at that exact minute, me. The next thing that ole Roger says is the ambush is not initiated until the majority of the ambushed, those idiots there coming through the gate, were within the “kill zone”, there’s that word phrase again. The kill zone was of course, was Momma Kathy’s pucker factor of a driveway. Me, being out of breath here had been directed by mommy of my friend to go into the house, with her having at that time one those well known wireless phones that were brand new.