
Most sane people don’t condone the burning of any religious text, but due to what seems to be periodically inevitable, some idiot will appear out of nowhere to burn a Holy Book like the Quran and purposely draw attention to themselves. For example, the glory-hound pastor from Florida named Terry Jones who caused an international uproar after he boasted about his intentions to burn the Quran before he actually went through with his meaningless, inflammatory plans. But based on reports, this current Quran burning at a NATO base was allegedly an “inadvertent mistake.” Nevertheless, it did not stop more international outrage from Muslims, especially in Afghanistan where over 20 people have been killed, including 2 American soldiers.
Just as President Obama issued a written apology for these most recent Quran burnings, when Pastor Terry Jones went on his religious, witch-hunt to burn the Quran, the United States strongly condemned Jones’ actions and his rhetoric, which included a significant number of writers and journalists. And when the unsightly video of U.S. Marines urinating on what appeared to be dead Taliban fighters surfaced, the United States once again strongly condemned the actions, along with most writers and journalists, which is not bad for a bunch of westernized infidels.
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Most sane people just don’t go around stirring up hornet’s nests through some misguided attempt to form a better appreciation of the agony of a sting, despite presidential nominee Rick Santorum’s decree that President Obama should not have apologized. If people used their common sense half as much as they like to parade around on their religious high-horses, it would become brazenly apparent that the United States does not encourage this Quran burning type of behavior. Otherwise, there would be Quran burnings all throughout the country, because the mere size of the U.S. makes it very difficult to keep these kinds of activities under wraps, especially within this YouTube/social media world that we now live in. In all likelihood, there could be Quran burnings in the streets everyday here in the U.S., and the fact that there are not should tell the Islamic world that most sane people have decided to leave well-enough alone, and that should count for something. The fact that it obviously does not says more about the ideologue than the skeptic!
And as for apologizing, it never hurts to try to take the high-road whenever possible, even if the low-road is all that you’ll probably get in return. That’s politics, and Santorum knows that better than anyone. After all, he’s the one who just talked about taking one for the team during this past Republican debate in Arizona, when he was asked about some of his questionable, supportive, voting tendencies in regards to Planned Parenthood and No Child Left Behind. Well Santorum, sometimes apologies have to be issued for the team.
Based on the worldwide protests and the mindless killings that always follows, retaliatory fear usually plays a major role in the extreme hesitancy to burn religious texts, specifically the Quran, and it is that same fear that also causes any kind of criticism, constructive or otherwise, to be timidly whispered at best, especially when laid at the feet of Islam, but not this time, at least not by me, because no one is above criticism, not even angry, protesting Muslims.
So to the bungling acts that allowed for the Quran to be burned, even if it was inadvertent, my advice would be to keep your eyes on whatever you have in mind of striking a match to or pouring gasoline on, because fire does not discriminate, and the results are almost always fatally final. Now to the protesting Muslims and other religious fanatics around the world, my advice would be to hold your horses for a change, and refocus and redistribute your anger more evenly. It’s easy to go out into the streets and act like fools based on the popularity momentum of Islam, but it requires a more meaningful effort to step up to the genocidal plate and protest with that same passionate fury for the essence of Islam.
In other words, protesting the burning of the Quran is easy, but protesting the non-discriminatory slaughtering of human lives in Syria by the Bashar al-Assad regime is a tad bit more strenuous politically and theoretically. If there was a plethora of pictures of Middle-Eastern children found shot to death, burned alive, chopped up with their genitals sliced off at the hands of the United States, the Islamic cry to fight the westernized infidels would be deafening—not to mention the fact that public outcry here in the U.S. would be just as deafening!
What the al-Assad regime has done and is doing to the Syrian people, most of them probably Muslims, is unacceptable. It’s worse than any cartoon about Muhammad, and it’s worse than any Quran burning. If Bashar al-Assad has not graduated into infidelity at this point, then what will have to happen for that realization to finally be reached to the point where that same cartoon Muhammad anger and all of the Quran burning anger is matched by the fiery anger that should be inflaming the actions of his bloody regime?
Any organization that would consistently and blindly put the politics of its ideology ahead of the welfare of its people deserves to be criticized and is no club that will ever gain my membership, and that goes for Christianity, Islam, political parties or any other groupings. People burn; ideologies do not! It’s easier to protect the one that doesn’t burn even when it is burned, because the path of least resistance is usually the path with the most traffic, because in the end the power lies in the ideology, and that’s why it is so vehemently defended.
And if you don’t believe that, just ask yourself why the ideology/book sparks so much more outrage than these vicious, sometimes genocidal crackdowns, whether it was the Moammar Gadhafi regime, the Ahmadinejad regime, the Hosni Mubarak regime, or the current Bashar al-Assad regime! Shouldn’t the burning of actual Muslims be just as disheartening as the burning of the Quran, or is it that people just don’t care as long as it’s not their ass that’s on fire or being riddled by shelling? And if that’s not an infidel caricature, it most definitely should be!
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Author: Bryian Revoner
Welcome to the ideology of the Realacrats, where the anticipation of the future defeats the reminiscence of the past, where the dreams of one can change the lives of all, where understanding is a gift that can only be understood when it is applied, where we realistically search for what we will realistically find, and where the narrative you write will be penned in the ink of your own individuality. We will not ask that you believe in God, but we will ask that you believe in yourself, because many of the treasures we seek lie hidden in plain sight, but blinded eyes led by filtered ears will prevent many from finding them. Realacrats will ensure that it does not prevent all, for the fear of being challenged will not go unchallenged by what will come to be known as the Realacrat ideology! I am Independently Democratic, and I am Democratically Independent. I am the Realacrat, and this is the Realacratic mission statement!
~The Fear of Being Challenged
This is the website, www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore, where The Fear of Being Challenged is on sale now as an E-book for $9.99, and I implore everyone who is interested to go the E-book route, because the actual book is much higher in price. All you have to do is go to that website and enter the title or my name in the iUniverse search engine, and you will be able to see or buy the book. Again, I suggest the E-book.
The Fear of Being Challenged, Democratically Independent; I Am the Realacrat! That is the title of the book in my profile picture. The actual book is not yet completed, but the E-Book is available through iUniverse, just in case there is anyone out there who wants to know about this. As many of you know, I wrote a few articles and essays on Facebook. I was splitting time between writing my articles, and writing my book. Sometimes I would work on both projects simultaneously. I was forced to do all of this independently, because none of the publishers liked what I had to offer. Many of them said that I was too radical, too controversial, too naïve, too hopeful, too political, not political enough, too liberal, not liberal enough, too conservative, not conservative enough, too pro-Black, not pro-Black enough, too anti-White, too welcoming to Whites, too inclusive, not inclusive enough, to pro-Democratic, not Democratic enough, too anti-Republican, not critical enough of Republicans, too partisan, not partisan enough, too ideologically simplistic, too ideologically complex, too rudimentary in sentence structure and thought progression, and too multidimensional in sentence structure and thought progression.
So if I had to summarize the entire body of work; based on all of these different elements of assessment, I’d theorize that the prodigious sentiment connecting them all would have to be the intrinsic polarization of the differentiations of a highly-induced opinionatedness that cannot be collectively avoided by the reader, which means that in all likelihood; this venture will not be a boring one under any stretch of the imagination! I can’t sit here and convince you that I am able to solve all of the world’s problems within the confines of this book, but I will attempt to convince you that the cognitive absorption of this material will stir the emotional stew that boils within you. I’ll admit that this is not a "Kum Ba Yah" moment, and I’ll admit that this is not a Bryian R., feel-good, fan club convention either. I didn’t write it to keep you as a friend, and I didn’t write it transform you into an enemy, but I did write it to inspire you to think about your dreams and to coax you into re-evaluating your fears of being challenged, because no matter how much of a bad ass we all would like to be; everyone has feared the challenged on some level!
Outside of the Facebook world, I was continuously confronted with this mass confusion regarding the ideology of my subject matter, from the numerous publishers that I submitted it to, to the many editors who stated how they just didn’t like the way that I write or the way that I idealize. I had publishers and editors who loved me and published many of my articles, but I also had the same number of publishers and editors who despised me and eventually overrode other publishers and editors and even yanked many of my already published articles.
For example, I was writing for this organization as an Op-Ed, and I had a couple of articles published through that organization. After about the third article, one of the higher ranking editors sends me an email explaining why he yanked my articles. He said to me: “I’ve got news for you buddy! Just because you’ve been given the nod of approval by our editing staff, it does not mean that you’ve been given the nod of approval by me! They accepted your material, but I am now rejecting it, and I have the power to overrule the entire editing staff. So your little run here is done! I suggest that you create a diary for the kind of work that you do, because it’s too personal! No one cares about your personal ideologies, your personal views, or your personal experiences. You simply are not that important to anyone outside of yourself.”
And for the record, the subject matter that was in question was entitled “Conversation with a Tea Bagger,” which was published on Facebook and is in The Fear of Being Challenged. Ironically, there were other book publishers, who eventually turned me down about the Fear of Being Challenged, who voiced similar complaints about what I do in a writing capacity. Like many of my Op-Ed critiques, book publishers that I attempted to woo were also highly-uncomfortable about what they referred to as my ‘over-the-top, narcissism’ of my own self-worth. One of the publishers said to me: “Who in the hell are you to be espousing such rhetoric? Who do you think you are? You’re not Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin. You not Obama! Your rhetoric speaks as if it’s coming from somebody who’s significantly boisterous, but the lack of recognition surrounding your bland name speaks to the exact opposite! You have achieved nothing that would afford you the luxury of trying to conjure up such leadership qualities, and you certainly have no legitimate reasons to believe that you deserve any form of an audience. You’re, sir, are a nobody! You’re not Malcolm X, and you’re no Dr. King. Those guys were famous. You are not. You think you have an ideology, but trust me, my friend, when I say this to you. You will never end up sitting on Oprah’s couch with these unrealistic, yet honorable, ideas you’ve concocted. It’s obvious that you’ve put a lot of thought into this project, but surely you weren’t gullible enough to actually believe that you could be heard,” and then they laughed at me, and hung up on me.
This is precisely why I sub-titled this book “Democratically Independent; I Am the Realacrat,” because in my view; the power of realism allows anyone to be a Democratically Independent Realacrat; meaning, the realities of our existences affords all of us the right to engage the freedoms of our democracy through the paths that we choose and the right to individually and independently question and theorize the universe that surrounds us on those paths. And in my opinion, you don’t have to be anyone, outside of the person that you are, to be a part of a genuine, authentic participation, because I don’t believe that worldly possessions, abstract or physical, are tangible enhancers of the human perception. I think the potential character of the human DNA is priceless; regardless of the number of followers who get behind it. If there is one thing that I have learned from all of this, it’s that everyone has a voice that deserves to be heard, but the availability of the megaphones tend to be more elitist, but the absence of a megaphone should not mean the absence of your voice. It might not be as loud, but that in no way means that it is any less important, whether you’re a truck driver, a ditch digger, the Governor of Alaska, or the President of United States. If the Constitution or the Founding Fathers intended to imply anything at all, that notion has to be it, because there is nothing American or Democratic about the selectiveness/elitism of opportunistic distribution through genetic or ideological entitlements.
I haven’t done anything in this book that all of you are not capable of doing on your own, which is seeing the world through my eyes, and describing the possibilities of that world in my words. It’s a process that I would like to see more people get involved with on a major level. Some of the best things in our lives have often arisen from those unlikely contenders and contestants who weren’t lucky enough or popular enough to be awarded a pageant crown or a megaphone. When we allow ourselves to become mesmerized by the proverbial Red Herring, we can easily become blinded to the undecorated usefulness of common sense. As a Realacrat, I try hard not to fall into that trap.
Now politically, I touch on everything that’s underneath the political sun, from Israel and Palestine to Rush Limbaugh and President Obama. I talk about Women’s Rights, American jobs, Democrats and Republicans, green technology, religion, racism, sexism, homosexuality, poverty, street gangs, abortion, the failing education system, immigration reform, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the size and relevance of government as a whole, September 11th, China, the middle-class, the media, all-around hypocrisy, and the Fear of Being Challenged on many levels.
This was only intended for my friends on Facebook. I never had any intentions of going national or worldly with this Realacrat ideology. I only had in mind to share my views with all of you, not necessarily the entire world. So no, I haven’t had any hopes of ever sitting on Oprah’s couch. I’m not Sarah Palin, and I’m not Glenn Beck. I’m just an obscure individual from Facebook, and I’m realistic enough to accept that. Unfortunately, it’s not the relevance of the ideology held by the individual. It’s the relevance of the individual that holds the ideology, and that’s just the world that we live in. I’m not naive enough to believe that I can change it, but I’m also not naïve enough to allow it to change me, by convincing me that I have to accompany it, and that is the crux of being a Realacrat and the antithesis of the Fear of Being Challenged! In the end, you will leave with more than you arrived with if you decide to challenge the Fear of Being Challenged if you decide to read this book. It’s not perfectly done, but it’s ideologically as good as I could make it as an independent author.
The fear of being challenged was really the fear of someone else’s success, the fear of my own possible defeat, and the fear of losing my influential grip. As long as I had the entire world playing from my rigged deck of cards, I was always in complete control of who won and who lost, which is actually a fear of the freedoms of democracy and the fear of being challenged! Scripted-Capitalism is a very lucrative venture for the person who writes the script, but it crumbles like the Berlin Wall when a new script is introduced, because someone dared to seek change!
~The Fear of Being Challenged
Bryian R.
I’d rather learn about all of the things that I fear, instead of fearing all of the things that I could learn! ~The Revoner
I’d rather walk alone with the truth, as opposed to leading the crowd with a lie! ~The Revoner
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