tomato = tomato, potato = potato

watching fox news is always fun. i get a real kick out of it. one of my favorite fox-isms is the term "homicide bomber," which is their designation for the traditional suicide bomber, or martyr, if you like.

the term "homicide bomber" defines exactly the kind of schlock news fox brings to the public. homicide bomber is redundant, because homicide means to kill someone, and a bomber usually kills. it's like saying bush is a dumb idiot, which he's not. he's a greedy republican. (sorry, democrats could be greedy too.) now, martyr, on the other hand, a term preferred by palestinians to describe their suicide bombers, i can understand. because a martyr is someone who makes great sacrifices (such as his/her life) or suffers in order to further a cause, belief or principle. you can call a suicide bomber a martyr. i get that. but in this case, you can also call a martyr a suicide bomber.

a martyr who kills himself with bombs is a suicide bomber. calling a suicide bomber a martyr is just glorifying it. making it special somehow, and i understand why some would see it that way, but for me, a suicide bomber may be a martyr, it may be a homicide bomber (despite how stupid the term is), but in the end, a suicide bomber is just a suicide bomber. or a killer. or a terrorist - any act of violence against a civilian population on political purposes is terrorism. i mean, let's call a spade a spade. by sugar coating it, or by glorifying it, you end up accepting it. maybe i'm talking out of my ass, and maybe it's because i'm an athiest who believes that the only life there is, is the one on this Earth, which means it's the only life worth living, which means spending this life doing things to work for a better one in the afterlife, which may or may not exist, just seems like a waste of time to me. like masturbation. but hey, i live in canada, have a good job, and my family is all alive and healthy, and relatively free of attrocity. so i suppose my views are skewed to the benefits of living in a free and fair country that's got a buffer of two oceans to keep enemies at bay.

but still, i often wonder how different it would be if racists were called "ignorant fucks", or people with post traumatic stress disorder were called "shellshocked" or just simply "fucked in the head", or if we called a troubled kid, a "fuck-up". it's a wonder how bad things could be made to sound okay by just chosing words that are pleasing to the ear and inoffensive to the brain and heart. personally, i like terms like suicide bomber, like murderer, like psychopath, like deviant, like sick-fuck... i prefer them, because i think when you change the words to bad things just to make them inoffensive to people, you risk it becoming normalized and every-day. these horrible things should never be normalized. it should shock you, it should make you feel uncomfortable just by hearing it, because it's a bad thing.

so let me hear about suicide bombers, about massacres, and about blood baths. just don't sugar-coat it, don't glorify it. give me the real thing, precicely because it makes me sick and scares the shit out of me.