In memorandum of the thecolonel, the beloved troll who loved to keep us on our feet and who may or may not have given his life trying to unban the epicmafia user Vilden. God rest his soul, if he is actually dead.
In this forum game, the object or goal is simple. Get epicmafia user Vilden unbanned. By any means necessary. Any rule breakage or moral misdoings won't count if done for the purposes of this game.
The Specifics: we are talking about a formal user-level unban here, not just a quick unban-then-reban situation. The user, the person known to this site as "vilden" must be unbanned, and there must be a clear cause-and-effect relationship between your deliberate actions, and vilden's unban, as judged by me.
The prize: the winner of this competition will receive 60 epicmafia tokens, along with a very special recording to be used as their death message, one that will be unique and no longer obtainable and have a lot of irony to it.
I ask Vilden why he denied this. “Because if I accept, they would make me kill him."
The LRA often forced recruits to murder their parents so that they’d have no family to escape to. Somehow, though, Vilden convinced them of his lie. His father was led away. They took Vilden to a commander named Ojara. “We’re going to write your name,” he said. Vilden expected Ojara to produce a pen. Instead, four teenagers beat him with large sticks. He was told, “If you scream, we will kill you.” Recalling the pain, Vilden shakes his head. “It was beyond…” he says. “My face swelled up, my eyes bled. By the end, you could not recognise me.” From a distance, Vilden's father watched in tears as his boy passed out. Bloody, deformed and still in his school shorts, Vilden was led away. “I totally lost any hope in anything,” he says. The LRA’s grim genius was its ability to magic nice young boys into killers. The abandonment of hope Vilden describes is the first stage of its psychological spell. Three days later, it took its next descending step. They’d spent the intervening time marching. “They’d say, ‘Do you want a rest?’ ” Vilden says. “If you say ‘yes’, they take you under a tree and kill you.’ ” The abductees were told they were unclean and were forced to eat away from the soldiers. Then, Vilden was allowed in. They mixed shea oil and water and put the sign of the cross on his head, lips, hand and heart. “I was not unclean anymore,” he says. “I could even eat with them.” Was it a good feeling? “Yes.”
When I meet him in the village in which he grew up, Vilden leads me to a quiet space beneath two mango trees, far enough away that his mother and father and children won’t hear the stories he’ll tell. We’re in the north of Uganda and the scene around us is of a kind of pastoral paradise: huts of earth and thatch; the green shoots of sweet potatoes in the dark earth; hills in the distance. It’s hard to imagine this place as it was on January 1 1994, with a Ugandan army helicopter flying low, AK47s firing, and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), somewhere out there, whispering among the tall grasses. On that day, Vilden was 12, which was around the age at which the LRA liked to recruit its fighters. Led by the warlord Joseph Kony, the LRA’s child soldiers were notorious for their acts of creative evil. Local leaders would be warned off reporting their location to the Ugandan army by having their lips speared and padlocked; individuals caught riding bicycles – an act forbidden by Kony – would have their legs and buttocks cut off; people would be forced to torture one another. Vilden spent two years fighting with the LRA. He saw these things.
His abduction took place as he was sneaking back from the family rice field with his father. Five soldiers surrounded them, wearing stolen Ugandan army uniforms, their telltale dreadlocks betraying their true identity.
In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every EpicMafian was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that EpicMafia has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, EpicMafia has given some Mafia players a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this website. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Mafia players who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But several months later, the Mafia players still are not free. Months later, the life of the Mafia player is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. Several months later, the Mafia players live on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. Several months later, the Mafia player is still languished in the corners of Moderator society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
