Watch out for the pious
April 16, 2003 ~ 1:03 p.m.
I remember once telling someone over a round of drinks, just when the conversation started to take on a life of its own, �watch out for the pious.�
Now what did I mean? It refers to members from across a wide swath of society � do-gooders, if you will � who will tell you with a straight face that you are not to do anything because they disapprove. They may not necessarily agree with each other, but the strain of thought is always, thou shall NOT. H.L. Mencken called them �the uplifters�; I call them the pious. I can think of many examples for which this scenario could apply:
Patriotism:
The pious in our society are turned off by displays of hand-on-heart renditions of the Pledge of Allegiance, flag-waving or pro-American rhetoric of any sort. They�ve decided that you can only be a good American if you question every single move of the government (but, of course, only while a Republican is in charge), decry �imperalist� American aggression, oppose America�s �illegal� wars (and never mind about being totally bereft of sound, convincing arguments � a �Bush is Hitler� sign is all you need), burn American flags, and indoctrinate your children through public-school sponsored revisionist history that America is a nefarious place full of glowering �angry white men.� The poor bastard who actually loves and has faith in his country is thus marginalized and ostracized because the pious are offended by him..
Guns:
The pious in our society are very good at laying all the blame for society�s ills on an inanimate object. To those responsible souls who want a fully registered gun and have been thoroughly trained in the use of a firearm, the message is tough shit, we�ve decided that these are dangerous things and that you cannot have one. Guns kill people, you know. **haughty sniff** The pious honestly believe the model society is one in which only the criminals are armed.
Euthanasia:
The wife previously wrote about this, and I must back her up. The pious will shout and scream that all life is sacred and then, curiously, insist that lives that are terminally ill must keep living. Right to life, or right to pain? Hey, don�t put your 17-year-old cat with kidney failure and glaucoma down; if nature wants Fluffy, she�ll come to collect. Just like you. Only, as humans, we have the ability to extend the same mercy to ourselves and trump cruel nature at her own game. But the pro-life pious stand in the way of society ever having a set of strictly regulated standards in which a terminally ill life can be ended. That would be the humane thing; but the pious are not in the position of being humane.
Cannabis:
Here�s what really gets me � in the 1930s, a movement called Prohibition tried to ban one of the most dangerous drugs known to man: alcohol. Kegs of beer and cases of wine were dumped down sewers in an orgy of puritanical righteousness. Around this same time, propaganda with titles like �Reefer Madness!� were released to the public warning against the evils of marijuana. Since one of the drugs had previously been legal and therefore almost impossible to ban from society, the pious focused their attention on cannabis instead. Ever since then, the argument has been, if you legalize marijuana, all the other drugs will follow in short order. Apparently, law enforcement would just knuckle under if expected to tell the difference between cannabis and other drugs such as cocaine, heroin or hallucinogens. Having lost the battle against alcohol, the pious have been beating anti-pot rhetoric into our heads � and beating us up if caught with the offending drug. It never occurs to the pious that you can simply continue the war against hard drugs while contributing to a significant drop in drug crime if you legalized marijuana. Slap a Surgeon-General warning on joints and tax them up the wazoo as with cigarettes. But no, the pious won�t ever allow even that because of the morbid puritanical fear that smoking the shit is fun. So this silly, pointless war against marijuana will likely continue simply because the stuffed-shirt pious are offended by it.
There are other examples, but these are the ones that leapt to mind. If I think of anymore, I will share them. But in the meantime, watch out for the pious. Or simply bitch-slap them.
� M.E.M.
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Copyright � 2001-2007 by M.E. Manning. All material is written by me, unless explicitly stated otherwise by use of footnotes or bylines. Do not copy or redistribute without my permission.
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