Carrie...you ignorant slut.

[MorganGrayson]

Sin... ...someday, when this is all over, you, WT, Red and I will all do lunch.
Delivered by room service, of course.

Now, once all of you stop picturing that...I'd like you all to take a deep breath. This thread desperately needs a collective deep fucking breath.

Absolutely nobody is justifying "rape and murder." Self-defense is *not* murder. Anyone attempting to harm my family will be killed. I've known that since the previously mentioned eldest child was laid in my arms for the first time...and I stopped being a child and turned into a parent. Parents are about one crisis away from becoming one of our ancestors. (I'm not talking grandparents here...I'm talking about the odd forehead ancestors in the caves.)

The old saying is "a little lower than the angels, a little higher than the animals" or something like that. Sometimes, gloriously, as humans we're very close to the angels - especially in crisis situations. In a severe crisis, you often see the true majesty of the human spirit. (Remember the pics of the guy on the wire dangling down to rescue people off of rooftops? You were looking at somebody very close to the angels at that moment. He was risking his own life to save total strangers.)

Other times in a crisis we're a lot closer to the animals. Ever see a dog who's just given birth? Mamma won't let you get near the puppies. She'll take your arm right off. Parent birds have that "flop around on the ground pretending to be wounded" thing down cold...to draw a predator away from the nest. Cute little fuzzy bunnies that make great pets fight like nothing you have ever seen to protect their young. So will humans. Admitting that is nothing more than admitting nature.

It's only being honest to say that we don't know to what we'd be reduced in the kind of crisis Katrina delivered. I'm a very nice person. I like to think of myself as a very nice person. But when I looke up at that picture of my daughter, with her bright smile, I know there are no lengths to which I would not go to preserve her life. I have three daughters biologically, one daughter we took in, one son we took in, and a large list of kids that spent a lot of time at my house and called me "Mom." I've *already* broken laws for those kids. I've signed things their parents should have signed; I've pretended being their mother at parent/teacher meetings so that I could find out what was really going on with them at school...things too numerous to mention.

Would I break more laws for them? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say..."yes."

We all have a "survival instinct." It's part of being human. It's made it possible for us to explore this planet, to carve out new countries...and to live through the countless crises humans have been handed throughout history.

The only difference between me and other people is that my instinct would kick in harder and faster than other peoples. Not just because I have a family...but because I'm one of those people in wheelchairs who had a regrettable tendency to end up dead. Every day of my life is already a fight. A crisis would intensify my fight, because I know I'm not going down without a fight. Not ever.

Now that I've gutted myself emotionally for this thread, I wish to fuck you people would stop calling each other names. It's really beginning to bug.