On Being Offended: A Rant

choose [chooz] : verb, chose; cho·sen or (Obsolete) chose; choos·ing. -verb (used with object)
1. To select from a number of possibilities; pick by preference: She chose Sunday for her departure.
2. To prefer or decide (to do something): He chose to run for election.
3. To want; desire.

We make many choices in life. Most we do not even think about, but make as a matter of course, habit, or instinct. Some, such as our choices in cuisine are based on personal preference. I enjoy spinach but find Brussels Sprouts abhorrent; I enjoy Rum Raisin or Coffee Ice Cream, but Vanilla leaves me yawning with boredom. Choices are what we do in our lives.

Most of us have made choices that we regret. All of our choices have led us to this point in our lives, where we no longer have the freedom of range we once had. But that’s what happens when we choose one course over another; one direction rather than another. The things we choose to do make us what are. Who we are.

When we are offended we have made a choice. For most of us some things are absolutely offensive in a deep-in-the-belly way. Abuse of animals offends most civilized people, despite the continuing popularity of Dog Fighting, Cock Fighting, and so on, in some parts of this country.

Sexual abuse of children may well top the list of those things offensive to our hearts and souls. Unthinkable to most of us. And yet that offense is a choice we make. It doesn’t matter if we feel disgust instinctively, rather than as a well thought-out stance. Either way it’s a choice. And we make it.

When enough people make the same choice, to wit: we are offended by action/activity “X”, we often pass a law to ban, restrict, or regulate such actions/activities.

But all of this is a choice. No matter how right or wrong we may be we are making a choice to be offended.

For far too many years those who wish to silence the majority have announced in aggrieved tones how they are offended. Offended by speech, offended by images, offended by music, offended by anything and everything. And the weak-willed who pretend to govern us - a fiction since they have no authority to “govern” us but instead to administer our public affairs - have fallen all over themselves in their attempts to stamp out the cited offense.

In Europe today, should you happen to oppose the actions of Muslim immigrants as they create their own encapsulated neighborhoods, and make it dangerous for a non-Muslim to intrude, you run the very real risk of being arrested. Someone will take offense, be it a Muslim ‘leader’ or a committed Leftist. And you will be arrested for merely reciting the facts. Or sued into insolvency and ruined. Recitation of facts regarding Islam and its followers is considered "Incitement to Racial or Religious Hatred". Virulent speeches demanding the deaths of Jews and Christians in these same countries garners only a shrug from the authorities.

It’s as if the Socialist/Leftist governments of these nations look upon the angry, violent Muslims within their border as merely unruly children, and those who report on their activities as dangerous Child Abusers. And they treat them in just such a fashion.

And yet, when you come right down to it, it’s a matter of choice. The Muslims ‘choose’ to be offended and their response is riot, rape, and vicious murder. The Leftist governments ‘choose’ to ignore the realities of Islamic Culture and ‘choose’ to harass their own citizens to prevent them from raising the Red Flags of warning.

And why not? To acknowledge that there is a very real and dangerous problem means one must act. Act to prevent or act to stop. That also means you must stir yourself from your comfy seat and do. And the Left prefers to maintain its power, not by actions that work for the betterment of their citizens and the nation at large, but through coercion, legal fictions, manipulation of the MSM, and very real threats to its own people, rather than deal with a problem they cannot understand.

And they ‘choose’ not to understand. To understand would mean the Left would have to agree that faithful Christians and Jews have a worthwhile opinion, and that simply cannot be. That would mean that the Left has to grasp Faith as something other than a mild delusion. And that cannot be. The Left cannot accept Religion or Faith as anything other than an illness, otherwise the tenets of the Left fall to pieces. The Left ‘chooses’ to not believe. The Left ‘chooses’ to see both Radical Islam and active Christianity and active Judaism as the same mentally unhinged philosophies.

If we ‘choose’ to remain quiet and quiescent while the Muslims agitate for more protection under the Law, at the cost of a weakened Constitution, if we ‘choose’ to shrug as the Muslims demand their own special apartheid of Shari’a Laws apart from the Law of the Land, then we ‘choose’ to be subjugated by an inferior culture. We ‘choose’ to be threatened by a radical, violent religion. And we ‘choose’ to leave to our offspring, not the land of opportunity our fathers left us, but a bloody tyranny that will extract from them any semblance of good and prosperity, and leave them Slaves to an alien god.

Offended? Who cares? That’s your choice, not mine. Maybe it’s time to stand up, be an adult, and see what it is that I’m writing about. If not, then buzz off! I’m offended by you! And I so choose!