NO, WE CAN'T ALL JUST GET ALONG, BUT THANKS FOR ASKING

Can't we all just get along? That's a question a lot of people ask when they look at this world and observe all the misunderstanding, distrust and outright hostility that exists between people. And so we wring our hands and lament at how we all share this planet and people basically have the same motivations, wants and needs and ought to love and cherish one another despite our superficial differences. Sounds good on paper, but getting along with everybody requires that we overlook some pretty strange attitudes and heinous behavior. How about people who enslave half their population, the female half? Can we "just get along" with assholes like that?

Oh, but they are Muslims, you say, and that's a cultural difference we should respect? Bullshit! Why would anyone do that? Fuck idiots like that, whatever excuse they use to exonerate themselves from evil. Doesn't it always seem that the worse the offense, the louder one attributes it to "God's will." They're cowards, butchers and monsters and there's no other way to describe their behavior. It used to be a "cultural difference" to own slaves too. Was cutting out that evil crap a mistake? Might as well say that the morons in Tanzania who kill and dismember albinos for good luck potions are simply exercising their cultural prerogatives and that the albinos are a bunch of intolerant whiners for not wanting to get murdered and chopped up by witch doctors.

Muslims certainly don't have a monopoly on hiding the evil they do behind God's skirts. Christians have been doing that for centuries, from Crusaders to Inquisitors to today's Christian Fascists. The Catholic Church has gotten away with even more violent and repressive bullshit than even Islam has, and all the other various Christian denominations have also done themselves proud in the butchery, oppression and intolerance departments. So while it's proper and right to condemn assholes like the Taliban for wanting to ban music, dancing and thinking out loud, don't go thumping your chest about your own religion if you only want to use it to force others to believe and behave like yourself. No one has to get along with your dopey ass either! When it comes to not tolerating people like the Taliban, the issue is not their religion, it's them personally. To say otherwise would be Talibanism.

When people learn to leave each other the hell alone and let the next person live the way they feel like living as long as they're not hurting anybody else, well, then maybe we can all get along. If someone wants to fall on their face and pray five times a day, that's their business, as long as they don't feel like they can force their neighbors to do the same. If they want to whimper about being "born again" and that Jesus only loves people like them well, fine, just so long as they don't seek to make their ideas mandatory. You can be all the fool you want in this world, its your damned life to use or squander as you please. Just don't think about forcing anyone else to play. And don't ask everyone to "just get along" when there's so many people around who make that impossible.

You don't need to justify your way of life by forcing it on others. If it's such a good deal, people will grab in a flash like it was their idea. Good ideas sell themselves. Any belief that needs to be spread at the point of a gun or under the threat of getting whipped, beheaded or socially ostracized doesn't exactly sound like the greatest thing since ice cream. And any idea that can't stand up to the light of open debate is by definition unreasonable nonsense. If the only way to silence your critics is to silence them for good, odds are you're not a good person and your ideas are absurd and serve only yourself. If you can be who you are and not care who goes along with you, then you are a true believer. And if we can all let such a person exist unmolested, then we can all get along. Until then, it's a nice dream and an amusing thing to say..