Street Fighting ManI confess I always found the notion of the Rolling Stones singing "Street Fighting Man" to be particularly funny. I mean, take a look at Mick Jagger. I could have beaten him unconscious even when he was young. But it was a revolution song, back when kids whose dads had good jobs could play at revolution before they put their teaching degrees to good use. We're not singing revolution songs anymore — not unless you count crater-faced Lee Greenwood singing "God Bless the U.S.A." over the loudspeakers as a group of high-waist-pants tea partiers hold up those idiotic "Don't Tread on Me" flags even as the faces of their dead grandsons are trodden deeper into the mud of Afghanistan. But we do have a number of right-wing oil cans babbling about "resistance" and wearing camo pants to the mall, even if a lot of the older ones faked asthma attacks or gayness to stay out of Vietnam, which is odd, since — by God — a patriotic American could get all the killing he wanted in Vietnam. Well, bravery is always easier when you're not scared, and if the most recent reincarnation of the Confederacy wants to resist the federal government AGAIN, I guess it's gonna happen. 'Cept it ain't. The right wing absolutely stinks at getting out in the streets and giving up some blood for the cause. Oh, they're good at blowing up federal buildings and then running like dogs, and they're good at hiding out in Idaho and marrying 12-year-old girls because Jesus told them to, and they talk a lot of blood and "cold, dead hands," but when you get down to it, the right wing's biggest political demonstrations came in the form of Ku Klux Klan parades in the beginning of the last century.
You know who has the guts to bleed in the streets? Gays rioting at the Stonewall Inn. Black men and women marching into dogs' teeth in Alabama. Union members getting shot down by coal mine guards. Women getting kicked in the stomach and handcuffed for wanting the vote. Kids at the Chicago Convention. Antiwar protestors. Occupy America protestors. Anarchists in Seattle. There's more guts in one tired woman pushing union ideas at a Wal-Mart in Georgia than in 2,000,000 gun owners who howl about watering the tree of liberty with blood. You got a $500 assault weapon, and you think you got guts. You got a pen, a union card and a boss who thinks you're a chimp, and you got real guts. Being willing to kill never meant much. Being willing to die is everything because it means you think ideas live longer than people and because dying is just plain harder than killing. That's Christ's message, though you have to think over the noise of a Christian nation to hear that message. You can buy a gun, and you can buy bullets, but you can't buy tough. Already, while the right-wingers are calling radio talk shows and drooling about armed resistance, already they've stood up at Wal-Mart, already the police officer's billy club has crunched the head of some Occupy America kid who thinks jobholders should get more respect than stockholders. And you can feel bad for that cop. He's got more guts than the people who sent him out. Tough? You haven't seen tough yet. Clean your guns. Eat another chip. Dream of killing. But when it comes time to stand or run, know that the boys in the camouflage pants ain't got much of a record. Not unless it's a lynching. To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com COPYRIGHT 2013 BY CREATORS.COM 
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