Have you ever wondered why our government worries so much about rogue countries and terrorist? Hey we are the United States of America, we are the good guys, we are the ones that are only doing good in the world. Why on earth would any one or any country want to cause harm to a benevolent country like ours?
If you came home some day and found your tires all flat on your car, your dog dead, and descriptive words spraypainted on your house, wouldn't you think that somehow you had offended someone big time? Well the World Trade Center and the USS Cole are our tires and dog and somebody is trying to tell us that we have offended them “big time.”
Sure we are the richest country on earth, and you can pass off these terrorist acts as fits of jealousy or you can think of them as acts by religious fanatics that want to have a religious war with us Christians. Does that really wash?
Lets face it, if you are envious of your neighbor or you think that he is going to Hell because he doesn't believe the way that you do, you don't go out and commit suicide trying to blow his house up or put yourself into the position of going to prison for life in order to get even with him or to change his families thoughts on God.
When you have a group of people that are ready and willing to die to get at you and your country, it is time to say, wait a minute. What is going on here? Where have we gone this wrong, that people want to harm us this badly?
Something is going on here that our government isn't telling us about. When you make the decision to kill yourself to get at the United States of America, something has happened to get you to that point.
I have read about the “School of the Americas'” and could see if someone tortured your mom or dad, sister or brother, and then you found that the USA taught these people from your own country how to do these things, then maybe I could see you committing that final act in revenge. From what I have read though, that school has a South American focus to it, and we are getting Middle East terrorists.
Sure we support Israel and that is like a affront to the Arab countries, but it has to be something more than that. In order to get people to want to give up their lives to get back at us, they have to want to get back at us for something more than political than monetary support of another country. Something has made this hate of the USA personal, something that is worth dying for.
I could give up my life for my family or even my country if it came down to defending my homeland, but to give up my life because the other country was supporting a nation that I was against or that country was using too many resources or that country was just plain arrogant, would not meet my threshold for giving my life away.
Our media are letting us down. We are told about fanatical Arabs that are bent on the distruction of our country and our way of life. What got them to this point? Was it one act or a series of acts. We always think of ourselves as the good guys. Does that mean that these people that want to harm us are just out and out evil men? Is everything thing that they believe about us just a lie and we have done nothing to harm them in any way? Is this just going to go on until they kill enough of us to appease some standard that we don't know about?
We are the United States of America, and in theory we are supposed to be working to help the rest of the world achieve a better standard of living, a better form of government, and more freedom. Some place we have screwed up big time or we wouldn't have people willing to die in order to get back at us.
June 18, 2001
