As I’ve spoken about on many occasions, the amusement park of Kings Island is near my home and it’s not at all unusual for me to go there during the day, or after a hard day at the office to ride a few roller coasters to relax. I consider the place a considerable asset to my life to have something like it in my neighborhood. So it was, I spent the past Friday night sort of celebrating the recent announcement of their 20/20 roller coaster, Orion—which will be a tremendous asset to the park, and I couldn’t help but arrive at a few conclusions about the nature of amusement parks in general and what role they play in our economy. Kings Island under the management of Cedar Fair Amusements has actually improved over the years, as opposed to a gradual slide into decline which seems to be the case with most other businesses, and it is now very much on par with the amusement parks that are so popular in Orlando, Florida. The roller coasters alone in Ohio between Kings Island and Cedar Point are just fantastic and the perfect complement to a personality like mine that runs off adrenaline and intensity.
My favorite rides at Kings Island is Mystic Timbers and Diamondback so it’s not unusual to find me in that part of the park on a Friday night. My wife and I enjoy eating in the new Brewhouse or in line for one of those rides thinking about things. I was feeling particularly reminiscent on the night of Friday August 16th while in line at Mystic Timbers thinking about the new coaster Orion and the general construction of the entire amusement park. All summer long I was able to go with my family to Kings Island and get away from the stuffy world outside enjoying many long days at the waterpark. Just to think of Orion which will have a 300-foot drop traveling at 91 miles per hour it was certainly something to look forward to, but I couldn’t help but consider the meaning of it all.
Everything at Kings Island, or any amusement park for that matter is there for the creation of intellectual enjoyment. Whether or not it was the thrill of a new ride, or the joy of the many food options, or even the relaxing travel through the woods on the stream driven train that is so popular at that park, everything is geared purely for the enjoyment of the human mind to think and conceive of some form of leisure that is specific to our species. And that so many millions and millions of dollars of investment into that leisure time activity could be gathered in one place. Particularly while in line at Mystic Timbers is so much of that joy on display. The Diamondback is very prominent on the skyline, the Miami Valley Railroad, the log ride, parts of the kid land, the Eiffel Tower, there is a lot on display. After visiting Paris recently and wanting to see the Eiffel Tower there I was quite amazed that there wasn’t more to the real Paris monument. I was used to Kings Island that had the tower there surrounded by so many exciting rides. To have such a collection anywhere in the world is amazing and it is something I appreciate every time I visit the place, no matter how many times in a season I do. It’s not that Kings Island is there to make anything useful in the world other than entertaining its guests and that we have a society that can afford to do such a thing is simply something to behold.
The newest thrill ride at Kings Island is a giga coaster than features a drop of 300 feet. Orion will be ready by next spring and will cost more to build than it cost to build the entire park in 1972. Wanna take a ride in the front seat? pic.twitter.com/npIZDxnOM9
Amusement parks are quite common in America. Ohio and Florida have an above average representation. It’s not like they are on every street corner, but compared to other places around the world, they are common. But you can go for thousands and thousands of miles anywhere else in the world and never see anything so dedicated to the human imagination and entertainment as we find in the United States, an entire park dedicated to the indulgence of human beings specifically—purely for entertainment. There is a little amusement park outside of London and there is a pier in Brighton that is similar to the Santa Monica pier in California, but those places don’t come anywhere close to Kings Island which has become an international destination over the years, and it certainly deserves the recognition.
I think it is worth noting that a place like Kings Island is the byproduct of capitalism, and that is such a wonderful thing. Most people attending probably don’t think about it much, because as human beings they are used to life at the top of the food chain. It is their minds that put them there, not their sheer physical strength or any other factor. The ability to think makes humans the dominate life form on planet earth, and it is to relax and entertain those minds that these amusement parks serve. To be able to take so much acreage and power resources just for the entertainment of people could only happen in a culture where capitalist excesses are generated is amazing. And for the continuance of such an enjoyment to always be expanding, as things are at Kings Island says a lot about the success of our culture. I think about it every time I visit the park and as I am reminded that there are others around the country it goes a long way to making the positive argument for the success of American culture.
To think that the new Orion roller coaster will cost more than the entire Kings Island park cost in 1972 when it opened is to say that the market for human recreation is so high that it can justify such an investment. You won’t see economies in Peru or Brazil making such leaps just for the heck of it, or anywhere in Europe for that matter, unless the Disney company is putting up the money. It’s just not something that is done, because the excess money and need for the product couldn’t be enjoyed any other place. In that context I still enjoy the indulgence of Mystic Timbers which essentially is a wild rollicking bronco ride through the woods and back. The ride itself and its theming are almost showing off. It is such a casual ride that not even the many attractions in Vegas or Gatlinburg, Tennessee can compete with it. Yet in Mason, Ohio which was essentially a community that exploded into its present-day form because of Kings Island, Mystic Timber is just one of over 100 attractions that are there just for the enjoyment of them, and nothing else. And that’s what does it for me, to step out of the real world and to just spend time in the enthusiastic world of Kings Island for a few hours or an entire day is something that is very special to me, and it’s not lost to me how special it is. I’m very happy that Kings Island can still be enjoyed throughout Halloween and into the Christmas season with Winterfest. But every year for me the end of summer happens when Kings Island is no longer open daily, and I await each year when it starts opening on weekends once again in April. Because I love having it open to me when I need it, and all the many evenings I have spent there by myself and with my family just being entertained. For minds with a lot going on, an amusement park is the perfect thing, and I never tire of it.
There was never a Leelah Alcorn from Kings Mills, Ohio who died on December 28th 2014. There was a kid who killed himself by the name of Josh, but there was never a “Leelah. Yet at the 2015 Grammy Awards ceremony the name was mentioned as if it were a reality. Candlelight vigils across the world broke out to mourn the boy who wanted to be a girl and the parents of the deceased were attacked because they refused to acknowledge the name of their son as a female. The world has gone literally mad as virtually every news outlet in every demographic market cited the name of Leelah as if it were a reality instead of the actual name of Josh just because the troubled kid mentioned it
in a suicide note saying:
“I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man
who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse. That’s the gist of it, that’s why I
feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me.”
Well, the kid killed himself and the news reports were astonishing in the aftermath. They went something like this:
In life, Leelah Alcorn felt alone. Born male, she feared she would never be the woman she felt like inside.
In death, the transgender 17-year-old – born Josh Alcorn – wanted to make sure others never felt the way she did.
“The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights,” Alcorn wrote in a post on the social media blog site Tumblr.
“My death needs to mean something,” she wrote in the post, which she scheduled to appear the day after her death.
That plea marked her final public words.
On Sunday, just before 2:30 a.m., Alcorn walked 4 miles from her middle-class Kings Mills neighborhood with its views of Kings Island to Interstate 71. There, she was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer. The highway was closed for more than a hour.
By Tuesday evening, Leelah’s story had become a worldwide story – one of how transgender teens often feel alone and afraid. The hashtag #LeelahAlcorn was topping Twitter; news sites worldwide had picked up the story; and someone had even created a Wikipedia page for Alcorn.
Alcorn’s mother, Carla Wood Alcorn, wrote on Facebook Sunday, “My sweet 16-year-old son, Joshua Ryan Alcorn, went home to Heaven this morning. He was out for an early morning walk and was hit by a truck. Thank you for the messages and kindness and concern you have sent our way. Please continue to keep us in your prayers.”
According to the school statement, Alcorn attended Kings schools and was most recently enrolled as an 11th grader at the Ohio Virtual Academy, an online school.
Before her death, Alcorn scheduled her note to post on her Tumblr blog at 5:30 p.m. the day of her death. A note titled “Sorry” came later. In it she told her younger brother and sisters she loved them. She thanked her friend Abby Jones for “dealing with my pathetic problems.” And she told her mom and dad, “You just can’t control other people like that.
In 2010, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reported 41 percent of 7,000 transgender people surveyed had attempted suicide.
An analysis of the survey responses by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute last January showed transgenders who experienced rejection by family and friends, discrimination, victimization or violence have a higher risk of attempting suicide.
Leelah Alcorn, who was born Josh Alcorn. Cincinnati City Councilman Chris Seelbach, the city’s first openly gay councilman, has taken on Alcorn’s cause. In a post on Facebook – shared more than 4,700 times – Seelbach said Alcorn’s death shows just how hard it is to be a transgender today in the U.S.
“By reading her letter, Leelah makes it clear she wants her death to, in some ways, help ‘trans civil rights movements,'” he wrote.
[Abby] Jones met Alcorn last spring when Alcorn, a talented artist, applied to work as a caricaturist at Kings Island.
Alcorn’s work was the best of any new employee. They drew caricatures of each other and a friendship took root.
“She was super bubbly and upbeat, with a really brash sense of humor; she could make anyone laugh,” said Jones, 17, of Milford.
Freshman year of high school, Alcorn came out as gay as a way to transition. Her friends were kind. She wrote her family “wanted me to be their perfect little straight Christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.”
She had never really understood what she was feeling. At 14, she finally understood. But, she said, her family didn’t understand.
“She would get really down, there was just no talking her out of it,” Jones said. “She always said, ‘Nothing is going to get better, I am never going to transition successfully, I am never going to be the pretty girl I want to be.’ “
The following links show to what extent the various progressive advocates advanced the situation out of proportion trying to profit off the sad kid’s death:
Clearly, there is more at work here than just a kid who committed suicide. Those types of things happen, but in this case it looks as if Josh being a bit on the soft side was nurtured through popular culture to believe that he was a woman and the public school system along with the progressive culture in general supported the child in this belief. Believing that Josh was a child of the “community” and not of his parents—society took it upon itself to supersede the Christian teaching the parents were trying to give their troubled boy—and this only fed the problem more because it put a light on his plight from friends plugged into MTV and Lady Gaga music driving a wedge between his parents and the rest of the world—which was wrong.
Yet it wasn’t the child who was attacked for committing suicide in such a premeditated way that he actually left a post dated blog post of the incident—it was the parents for taking the child out of public school to try to reclaim their child before it was too late. They were raising him in a conservative area with a religious influence for a reason—because it is an area which supported their family values. Likely, as a family, they avoided places like Key West during Fantasy Fest so that their children wouldn’t be corrupted by what they saw there, so they lived in a nice conservative community, went to church often, and did their best to give Josh what they thought he needed. The parents were qualified to do that because Josh was “their” son. But, the LGBT community feels it is their mission in life to destroy such people and through popular culture, they got their fangs of poison into young Josh, and the parents had a right to be upset about it. From nearly every corner of the world nutcases who believe the Rocky Horror Picture Show was actually a good movie uttered that if society didn’t accept their ridiculous notion of sexual perversion—there was a lack of moral justice contained in the hypocrisy. In other words if people didn’t accept that some men wanted to wear high heels and dress as a woman—that there was something wrong with those who condemned the behavior—instead of the owner of a hairy ass hanging out of a pair of thongs under fishnet stockings.
It was clear what that old movie and later the stage play Rocky Horror Picture Show was up to when it told the story of the newly engaged couple Brad Majors and Janet Weiss who found themselves lost and with a flat tire on a cold and rainy late November evening. Seeking a telephone, the couple walked to a nearby castle where they discovered a group of strange and outlandish people who were holding an Annual Transylvanian Convention. They are soon swept into the world of Dr. Frank N. Furter, a self-proclaimed “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania”. The ensemble of convention attendees also included servants Riff Raff, his sister Magenta, and a groupie named Columbia. They all discovered the wonders of sexual perversion during the story and everyone had a marvelous time—according to the movie. It was a story designed to break down the moral boundaries of Christian society as a direct assault.
With this Josh Alcorn case we see how far into the logic of society that the Jim Sharman directed movie has manifested into normalcy. After all, for over two decades many college campuses have shown midnight showings still of the old movie which attract hoards of young ideological, and rebellious fans looking to be different from their parents with the escape velocity of youth. Literally, the lunacy of that Rocky Horror Picture Show story has grown from a mere seed planted long ago in American culture to reveal a harvest of decadence plaguing our land—and it was an attractive rebellion to young Josh Alcorn who was obviously pushing back against his church going parents like most young people do. Only in his case he had a support network which interfered with the family believing the kid to be a child of society which supersedes his parents. Such beliefs are clear in the support links above. That is the real cause of the death of Josh Alcorn. Realizing that he had gone too far to come back after Christmas ceremonies—he stepped out of life hoping to be made into a martyr, which of course the whispers in his ear had told him would happen. Upon his death, they made good on the promise calling him Leelah instead of Josh—the ultimate insult to the Christian family who gave birth to him and raised him from a baby. To declare otherwise is to insult all the long nights of caring for the child as an infant, all the diaper changes, all the countless hours of teaching him to talk, read, write, and move around in the world—a decade long endeavor that required a lot of time. The LGBT community actually arrogantly believed that it had a right to sweep in and corrupt the youth with just a few years of pop culture investment—and that they have a right to the soul of a potential collectivist for their hive of homosexuals, transvestites, and lesbians all serving the animal instincts of sex—raw sex and unpolished emotion.
Yet those Rocky Horror Picture Show nutcases and transsexual perverts demand tolerance from the conservative right—but they certainly don’t give it in return. They are violent, and intrusive. From the moment of Josh’s suicide they have hounded Josh’s parents who simply wanted to grieve for the loss of their beloved child. For the parents, the kid had just entered puberty a few years before and everything happened so fast that they didn’t even know what hit them. They pulled the child out of public school too late—and they likely regret it now—so their loss is even that much more magnified. The LGBT community expects respect and understanding—yet they don’t give it. Instead, they are all about being in our faces about it flaunting flamboyantly their decadence with great fanfare—then expect sympathy when something goes wrong.
They are in essence trying to conduct upon the world the same plot given to Brad and Janet when they came across the transsexuals in the castle—they were a nice, pure, couple who were gradually corrupted throughout the story until at the end they are bisexual experimenters ready to assimilate into the rest of culture without any judgment as to gay, transsexual, ugly, pretty, good or bad—they are just there for the consumption of pleasure—social pleasure and nothing more.
Josh’s parents had a right to not let their boy wear a dress. He was a boy and so long as he lived under their roof, that’s the rules of the universe as far as a family is concerned. It was not “societies” responsibility to rescue the child from oppression—and religion. Society interfered, and they caused the death of a young man shortly after Christmas in 2014. But to make matters worse, they attacked the parents too for trying to instill values in the young lad, then showed quite a lot of ridicule when open acceptance of their LGBT ways was looked upon with scorn from normal Americans. Yet the media in just about every regard picked up the story and ran with it—a young girl named Leelah Alcorn threw herself in front of a truck on a lonely stretch of I-71 because nobody accepted who she was. Because she didn’t think her parents would ever let her wear a dress in their presence. The media lied; there was never a Leelah, only the ranting of an unhappy kid caught between social pressure and religious conviction who invented the name on their way toward suicide. And the media picked up the story and made up the rest to fill the LGBT progressive agenda. What is most obvious in this story is that if the media was so willing to accept a complete falsehood—what more do you think they are willing to make up and lie about? You already know the answer dear reader. If it fits the progressive agenda—anything is fair game—and that is what we learned in the wake of young Josh Alcorn from Kings Mills, Ohio. I feel terrible for the parents. They tried to help the child, but society snagged him away like child molesters in the night—and they destroyed the Alcorn child. Lady Gaga types and all the seeds planted by Jim Sharman are all just a bit guilty of the creation which ended up on the highway late at night in the cold of judgment and social pressure lost to time and opportunity. The fault rests on their shoulders for creating an opposing force to the sanctity of the Alcorn family—and the responsibility is one they more than share.
The Overmanwarrior 