Okay. I’ve held my tongue more than long enough, and it’s time I took it out from between my teeth and had a good old-fashioned rant. Here goes:
I’m what you “honest” people like to call a thief. I’m only using the word this once so your poor benighted wage-earning little minds will understand me. Frankly, it’s been hate speech for so long that it’s time it was removed from the dictionary altogether, and let him deny who has been chased by a baseball-bat-wielding thug yelling “Stop, thief” (yeah, I’m going to stop so you can beat the shit out of me. Like, at once. :rolleyes: ). We – all of us, really, “honest” and “crooked” alike – need a better word, one with a more positive image. I’m in favour of light, myself. This isn’t to perpetuate any anti-Black mindset – and I’ll be circulating T-shirts with the legend “You don’t have to be white to be light”, just as soon as I can pinch them – or indeed any anti-darkness mindset, for that matter. In my experience, darkness is extremely conducive to light activity. 
But it is a nice, happy, cheery kind of word – just think of the phrase “light-hearted” – and I don’t mind if people automatically think of “light-fingered”. It doesn’t hurt me, and it helps people make the association. So, try to remember for future reference: I’m not a thief, crook, robber, criminal, cutpurse, pickpocket, or larcenous little toerag :rolleyes: - I’m light. And I’m switched on and proud of it. Yay me!
Now if I can clear up a few points. Some of this may be a little disjointed, especially if I let my emotions run away with me, but you may see why before I’m done.
First off, everyone needs to lighten up. That’s such a happy phrase I’m going to leave it in. Of course, I don’t mean that everyone ought to go out and start stealing. We need some of you earners 
to keep the whole ball rolling. Being light is something you’re born with, like your hair or eye colour or a musical ear. It’s not a choice you make – and it’s certainly not a “lifestyle”, either :rolleyes: .
Actually, I’m going to interrupt myself for a moment just to stress this point. Yes, there are bars and clubs where people “of the crooked persuasion” :rolleyes: like to hang out together – regardless of the continual unwelcome attention they get from “straight” people and police alike. (Police. Hah. I could show you a “bent” copper or two, believe me.) But no, we don’t all turn up in striped jersey and domino mask with a jemmy in one hand and a big black bag marked “Swag” over our shoulder :rolleyes: . We don’t sit around together gloating about the size of our “hauls” or robbing each other blind. We don’t spend all our time “planning our next job”. We socialize just the same way that you do, 90% of the time. Oh, maybe light issues come up in the conversation a little more often than, say, you might talk about not being light – but we have reason. Believe me, we have reason.
I don’t want to labour the point too much, still less hang a big guilt trip on anyone, because there are a huge number of tolerant and thoughtful people outwith the light “community” :rolleyes: , but it’s very hard to assess the extent of the evil that’s been practised against light people in the past, or how much kleptophobia there still is about the place even in the 21st century, for pity’s sake. Do you know, for example, that more or less within living memory, if we were seen engaging in light activities in public, not only could any member of the public chase us down and beat us up, but it was an offence for any onlooker not to join the “hue and cry”? What price institutionalized bigotry, huh? Do you know – can you understand – how many people still think they’re entitled to kill or maim us just for do what we do in a private place? It would break your heart. Don’t get me started on what they do to us in “religious” countries.
That’s not to deny that things haven’t improved in the last couple of centuries. At least they don’t hang us any more. 
I mean, as late as the 1870s in parts of the good old U S of A, if we were seen “stealing” a horse or a cow, we were lucky if it was left to the law to murder us. At least they don’t put us on a ship to the back side of the world for us to be a slave of the State any more. But our activities are still criminalized and we still get arrested and beaten up and put on trial and jailed - for being what we are.
Let’s just look over a couple of aspects of that. Put on trial. Now in a democratic society that’s meant to mean you’re tried before an impartial judge and a jury of your peers. Yeah, right :rolleyes: . When’s the last time you saw a jury with even one “crook” on it, let alone a representative sample? As for the judge, once in about a hundred years you’ll hear one make a sympathetic remark, and the media and the “honest” public promptly jump down his throat. Yeah, you get justice in the “criminal” court. :mad:
Then jailed. Can you imagine it? Being shut up in a locked cell in a prison with a bucket for your ablutions and “Bubba” for a cell-mate? And, quite honestly, whatever else Bubba might do to you (and I’m not going to go into that), you can guarantee that if a young man goes into prison slightly “larcenous”, he’ll come out again as “bent” :rolleyes: as a three-dollar bill. The laughable thing – it’s a bitter laugh, but the irony gets to you – is that people still believe that jail will “straighten” you out :dubious: ; as if such a thing was either possible or, for that matter, desirable.
Morally and philosophically, there isn’t one good argument that could be advanced to support the idea that I ought to be “straight”, or that being light as I am, that I ought not to act according to my nature. “Thou Shalt Not Steal?” Oh please. Next you’ll be peeping through my bedroom window to see if I’m worshipping a graven image, or listening to everything I say in case it’s a prayer to Dagon or Rimmon or Zeus. Pathetic. All you Christians, count how many times Jesus actually said anything about punishing “thieves”. You’re supposed to love your neighbour as yourself, and forgive your brother seventy times seven, and keep a really close eye on your own faults before you start looking for anyone else’s.
That last point deserves a little stressing, too. For all you people who like to kid yourselves that you are “honest”, ask yourselves if you’re really sure that there isn’t a time in your life that you might have made off with something that “didn’t belong to you”. Mm? You see, it’s not a “crooked”/”straight” dichotomy. It’s a continuum. Some of us have more tendency to be light than others – and some of us are just too fucked-up to admit this very simple fact about ourselves. It’s my opinion that they’re the ones who make the loudest noise about other people’s “dishonesty”.
So having disposed of any Biblical justification for kleptophobia, all that’s left is a long secular history of light-bashing. And of course, all the laws carefully framed to prohibit “criminal” activity have always been laid down by exactly the people who’ve got the biggest axe to grind. And the law aside, the extent to which it’s been respectable to promote anti-light attitudes is sickening. I mean, if you read Oliver Twist you’d be convinced there were hordes of evil old Fagins right outside your door just waiting to snatch up your innocent little boy and teach him to “pick a pocket or two”. shakes head Listen, for those who really haven’t heard the news: We don’t go out looking for “straight” kids in order to turn them “bent”. We don’t hand out toasters to whoever can “convert” the most. We don’t need to.
Now just a quick look at the B-word. 
A lot of people have got this weird idea that if you’re light, you go around doing nothing else. They’re also fixated on the idea that there’s One True And Righteous Mode of Entry. You either use the “front door”, or else you’re some sick, evil individual who needs to be locked up straight away. :rolleyes: Well, excuse me! First off, it’s not true that if you’re light you’re automatically a burglar. Some of us practise burglary and some of us don’t. Secondly, despite this antique phrase “breaking and entering”, most times nothing gets broken and no actual force is involved. It’s remarkably easy to “gain access” if you haven’t got some kind of Fort Knox, No-Entry-To-Burglars complex about your “back door” – and many people don’t, whether it revolts you or not, my friend. And thirdly – no, I’m not about to visit your house and “come in the back way”. :rolleyes: Just get over yourself.
When all’s said and done, we want the same as anyone else: a comfortable home life, a caring relationship, maybe something really staid and conventional like, I don’t know, two point four children to provide for. The only way we differ from you is how we make a living – and it’s less different than you might think, at that. Merely by asserting that you “own” something you are depriving other people of the right to enjoy it. So all I do by winning, liberating, or knocking off, something that you consider “yours”, is the exact same thing that you’ve done to your fellow human being. And, quite frankly, with the extent to which we’re pillaging the Earth’s resources to satisfy the so-called “natural” desires of earners, it is high time we started appreciating the virtue of redistribution. Your “earning” is going to destroy the planet a good sight sooner than my light “lifestyle”.
To all of you tolerant people out there, thank you for letting me get this off my chest. And to the rest… fill in the blank.