when hooligans believe they are annointed
Callan Williams Copyright © 1/26/00
Is there a difference between a transgender warrior and a transgender brawler?
There is a difference between a warrior and a brawler in the wider world. A warrior has discipline and honor, has grace and respect, and is focused on attaining their objective. A brawler has a chip on their shoulder and an urge to fight, as rough and as dirty as they like. There is a difference between a foot-soldier in the fight to change the view of transgender and a brutish hooligan acting as a vengeful angel, slashing at a world they blame for hurting them.
It's a class thing, this distinction, as I was told by someone who loves the hooligans. If they feel confronted, many in the working class are as likely to smash you on the back of the head with a beer bottle as to engage in discussion. They use their fists and not their wits, even when those fists are verbal ones. Rather than working to heal the deep and festering wounds, they act out of them, viciously attacking others from the well of their own pain.
If you want to see a brawl, turn on the TV. The staged brawls of commercial wrestling offer soap operas for the blue collar crowd, but the real action is over at The Jerry Springer Show where white trash brawl for fun as an audience enjoys the circus. Show them the gladiators & the lions, and they will be happy as long as there is plenty of beer and the brawl goes on forever.
That may all be well and good as long as the brawlers understand what they are, hooligans out for a good head-bangin' time. It's when they begin to believe that they are paladins, white knights, that they are true & sainted warriors whose God given mission is to bloody anyone challenging -- a mission to keep purity when things turn ugly. They fight for racial purity, doctrinal purity, moral purity -- any purity they define as being the reason they can pound & intimidate challenging voices into silence.
All too often, it's their patrons, those who enjoy seeing some battering, seeing the fur fly -- and who often have an ulterior motive -- who encourage those delusions in their own pet attack pit-bulls because they enjoy watching lives and characters beaten to a bloody pulp, find it satisfying, invigorating and comforting. They take advantage of the unstable personalities and use them as thugs and enforcers, keeping them like prize fighting cocks.
Look at the neo-nazi skinheads. We wouldn't much care if they beat each other up in drunken brawls, but when they choose to drag a black man behind a pickup, then it's time to get scared. Brawlers who see themselves as sanctified, as a law unto themselves, become the mob, and enforce a baldly anti-intellectual platform, ruling by force and not by consensus, erasing the challenging and enforcing the reactionary. They become a lynch mob, hanging the offenders high without benefit of thoughtful judgment or human compassion. They dehumanize their oppoents by calling them names, then destroy them to remove the challenges inherent in diversity.
This pattern is visible through out history, from the crusades to the cultural revolution -- brawlers think they have a right, a duty and an obligation to purge the sinners, and society suffers for it. The will of the mob to cleanse and purify flames up, destroying the balance that comes from natural conflict.
I don't mind brawlers. If they want to go on Jerry Springer and tear each other's wigs off, so be it. I do mind brawlers who smugly believe they are doing the lord's work in beating up, harassing and chasing out -- erasing -- any punk they see as contrary.
These are not transgender warriors, they are common criminals, imposing their will by intimidation and force. They are the destructive mob, be they many or one.
Warriors have honor, respect and civility. Brawlers destroy all those things, and must be called out every time we see them, or the little bully will become the big despot. Letting hooligans believe they are winning, a wrenched grin on their snarling face, is to encourage them to push the boundaries of decency even farther, to try to enforce their own limited vision in an even stronger and nastier way.
It would be great to touch the heart of a brawler, to help them face their own feelings of pain and abuse, but they growl when people get too close. People need love the most when they are at their most unlovable, and its all too easy to try to respond in kind to a the nasty, brutal, oppressive attack of a mob, even a one person mob.
Hooligans, brawlers, vigilantes and avengers are not warriors, fighting for right, because fighting for right always demands being open, respectful, honorable and discipline. They are just poor pathetic people, oozing out their own pain and wreaking it on others.