I don't usually resort to this sort of crassness, but the time for kid gloves clearly has gone.
Where are your balls? I direct this question to the new wave of right-wingers, the extremists, the Trump supporters. Those who do everything they can to curb other people’s human and civil rights, because they are lucky enough to find themselves in a comfortable status quo.
I direct it to the holier-than-thou conservatives, who claim to be pro-life while turning their gaze away from child poverty, child negligence and the very real probability of a child migrant starving/being tortured to death/drowning.
So, where are your balls? Fighting to maintain the status quo is easy. It doesn't require you to stick out your neck by defending minorities. It doesn't require you to be unpopular by going against the common grain of a state that is anything but secular. It doesn't require you to open up your life view and to learn to live with multi-culturalism.
And it sure as hell doesn't require you to make any actual sacrifices within your lifestyle.
Being a right-winger is the easiest thing to be. You hide under a false veil of patriotism (whatever that is) and behind so-called traditional values in order to appear selfless, as though you're fighting for the common good.
The real liberals are those who are not scared to fight for what they believe in
The truth is that you don't want your comfortable status quo toppled. You don't want everything you got used to, to change. You don't want to entertain the possibility that hey, maybe you can do some actual good if you stop talking hyperbole and actually look at what's happening around you.
Where are your balls? You claim that you are in favour of religion and the country. The infamous pro deo et patria. Very convenient ideologies to hide behind, because few will risk questioning them and making themselves unpopular.
It is people like you who get Marmalade Mussolinis like Trump (a friend of mine alerted me to this one – thank you Eleanor) in power. Because people like Trump have a very shrewd idea about how to use people's insecurities in their favour.
So, where are your balls, all you right-wing extremists who would be happy to take the world back to the dark ages when it was every man for himself and civil rights had not yet been invented?
The word liberal has taken on a dirty hue, but it's time to give it back its original meaning. The real liberals are not politically-correct hipsters whose favourite pastime is sitting on the fence. The real liberals are those who are not scared to fight for what they believe in.
The real liberals are people like the late Ramon Casha, known for his tireless work against the status quo. Sure, Ramon wasn't always nice in his methods. He made countless enemies, was made fun of mercilessly in certain quarters and his views certainly didn't make him popular with the majority. And Ramon knew this, but he also knew that niceness and safety get you nowhere when you’re trying to fight for what you believe is right.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call real balls. Not closing your borders so as not to share your food and lodging; denying other people their civil rights; and supporting a modern-day dictator.