My Lunch-Date With Lunacy:
The ongoing exploits and insights of Occupy The WBC
The many thousands of miles we've traveled while road tripping through the midsection of the country these past few months has imparted one severe and now obvious fact never truly comprehended before. Above the many other excellent moments and realizations one routinely experiences whilst driving long distances, this particular observation stands alone as primarily the most significant and illuminating truth; OF COURSE the Westboro Baptists are bat-shit crazy - have you ever driven through Kansas?
This is not meant to be a slight on the whole state and its greater populace. I'm speaking specifically about the terrain. Starting along the northern border of Texas and essentially going upward a few states (stopping in South Dakota), it becomes unmistakably evident that Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska exist in almost an exact-center-of-the-Pacific Ocean style emptiness and desolation. To put it mildly, Kansas is like my date for the sixth grade junior high school dance; a flat, harsh unmanageable succubus, vacant of all life and vibrancy. They call Montana "big sky country," so it would stand to reason Kansas should be called "ONLY sky country" because, seriously, it's just earth and air in every direction for further expanses than one would hope for.
When you understand that topographically, Kansas is vapid and vacuous, it becomes easier, more plausible as to how some of its citizens can suffer the same fate intellectually. We are all affected by the nature of our surroundings. The children of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, whether they acknowledge it or not, are a prime example. Raised in a Branch Davidian style compound, what was really there, beyond those wooden fences, had any of them actually attempted an escape? The answer is nothing. Total and absolute nothingness, for as far as the eye can see. And the situation would remain this way until the tender teenage years, when the onslaught of puberty leads to rash decision making, dismantling of established guidelines, and ultimately the cessation of other previously-valued indoctrinations, at which point the desire to experience all that is on the other side of that fence becomes too great a prospect to continue to ignore. If the parenting is relentlessly strict enough, much of this significant transformation can be quelled, but never entirely or categorically in all cases. So it should come as no surprise that even the hardcore, fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church continues to shed membership like a sickly cat shedding on your favorite duvet cover. And if the rate at which their children leave the church appears to be ascending, that's because it most certainly is.
There has been roughly three times the number of people fleeing the WBC in just the last eight years as compared to the number that left over the previous 30 years. Playing the role of devil's advocate, what could possibly account for this uptick? I'm no detective, but thankfully the conclusion remains so obvious, even an untrained sleuth such as myself could understand it. For centuries, the unforgivingly hellish environment of Kansas and its daily celebration of the devoid and barren persisted mostly uninterrupted. But then, tragically (at least from the indoctrinator's viewpoint), there came about the technological age, bringing with it not just cool new gadgets, but devices of pure symbolic freedom at the touch of a button. It is one thing to be stuck in Kansas in the 1950's and read about the Eifel tower or see a grainy black and white photograph next to a caption. It is an entirely different thing to be able to call up a live-streaming, high definition video image of the actual Eifel tower over the Internet on a small hand held device in literally a matter of seconds. The resulting effect has been nothing short of constant connectivity and perpetual consumption of stimuli, a new way of living better and smarter for many, while conversely for its opponents, a frightening unpleasantness, responsible for exposing to the youth everything that could once be excluded or considered unattainable. The seemingly infinite, unoccupied rolling horizons of Kansas, proudly designed in the image of isolationism, have now been reduced to its opposite. The greater technological explosion of the last few decades is the real "Great Equalizer", turning a once remote and cut-off environment into one where any piece of information from around the world can and does become conveniently accessed. In the simplest terms, Fred Phelps effortlessly exuded control over his own children back in the day, but his children's children, through no fault other than the forward progression and advancement of time and space, find it increasingly impossible to shelter, manipulate, and indoctrinate their offspring.
Innumerable hours of well intentioned training and preparation to serve their church takes a back seat to ideas, interests and concepts now in the forefront of their lives thanks to the digital age. And it will only get worse. The beauty of the WBC is in their flagrant idiocy. Sure, family elders must traverse the country with the children actively participating, shouting and singing at strangers on busy street corners - but at what cost? Had you kept them like human veal calves, entombed and motionless forever inside the fences of the Topeka compound, you might have had a chance at keeping them engaged and blissfully ignorant. But then, that's the trouble with ignorance; it's only blissful up to the point when you realize there's an alternative. The Amish choose not to live amongst what they call "the English" in our vast cities, rather, they occupy small corners of rural America, so as to not be influenced or tempted by mainstream society. Pastor Phelps and his followers HAD one part of this equation locked down through living in Kansas. However, by constantly engaging the public, on their own turf no less, they lose the larger argument, and expose their sanitized progenies to the very elements they claim to abhor and defend against. Imagine if the Amish traveled by wagonload year-round, witnessing with extremity in every small to enormous community in our nation? The end result would be a mass exodus from that faith, not unlike a raging kegger during an already wild Rumspringa. Kids want to live, love, learn and grow. This has been unaltered throughout history. What has changed are the societal conditions, and so, like the Amish, if you don't like what we're selling, you don't have to subscribe. The children of the WBC are in danger of discarding their faith, and will remain in danger every day they are ferried into the "English world" and made to dance and perform for the unwashed masses, who, as they are preached to, carry the fowl stench of sin and depravity. Have their parents no fear that the stench may waft, infecting and transforming their precious kin?
I will only aide to hasten this transformation. The work of Occupy the WBC, and the untold, incalculable number of counter-demonstrators all around our nation will only serve to enhance and facilitate this drastic change they fear and work so hard to combat against. Shirley Phelps and the other pathetic parental units of the WBC will have to deal with our shit, metaphorically speaking. Crazy religious fundamentalists are a dime a dozen in this country sadly (I'm looking at you, Utah) yet the good thing about the vast 99% of them is their refusal to interact regularly with secular society. But make no mistake, some of them would become little Phelps's, so to speak, and go on whirlwind tours of cities and towns hyperbolically evangelizing to everyone, were it not for their overwhelming fear they may somehow risk exposing their young to the temptation of modern American life, and jeopardize losing them to godlessness in the process. This is what I love about the Westboro jerks; they are too stupid to realize the truth. They are that glorious 1%, so hell-bent and motivated by irrational rhetoric that they recklessly gamble their most priceless assets, the next generation. And so it is because of this gross miscalculation, the reliance on formerly safe, sterilized, secluded living situations, and the sheer ignorance that impressionable minds thrown into the lions den time and again won't come out with even a smudge of barbarism, we at Occupy the WBC will ALWAYS have the upper hand. We hit 'em with sleaze, kill 'em with kinkiness, we expose these narrow-minded mouth breathers to the very essence of freedom, of uncensored, unbridled, raw, and sometimes offensive artistic expression they otherwise try urgently but futilely to avoid. In doing so, we will always be victorious. How do I know this for certain? The younger members started engaging me at our counter protests months ago, almost from the beginning. Hell, I'm even chummy with a few of them. Jael Phelps always blushes, and a tall young man I nicknamed "Seacrest" (for his douchey similarity to the reality television icon of the same last name) and I are practically buds. He gave me a nickname too: "JewFag."Priceless. So right there, in just the primordial act of engaging in my antagonisms, the youth simply cannot help themselves. If we keep up this level of intensity on a consistent basis, there's a real shot at getting one or more of them to crack. For this is genuinely what Occupy the WBC hopes to accomplish. By chipping away slowly at the barrier their families have created, the opposition can undoubtedly seep in. After all, "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree'"?
Yours considerably,
AB
