Blast from the recent past...

This was something I wrote on a blog I had briefly at another site. It was about things I was for or against. I wrote it a while ago, as you will most likely notice by the lower death toll of Americans in Iraq. I abandoned that blog fairly quickly, but some of the things I wrote there still stand. I just figured I'd go ahead and bring a couple of those things over to this blog.

Anyway, here it is:

I am AGAINST the current “war on terror”. Not because I think that terrorism is a good thing. I don’t. It’s also not because I think that terrorism should not be stopped. I merely question the wisdom behind trying to stop terrorism in the manner in which we claim we are trying to. If one looks at the situation, we (and I use that term “we” VERY loosely) are currently engaging in some of the very same activities that more or less created the very terrorists that we are fighting against. We (again, LOOSELY) have invaded a country which was guilty of NOT ONE of the reasons we gave for the justification of invading it. In effect, we have basically left it in ruins. Do we not see that this will only lead to further acts of apparently random acts of violence? Put yourself in these shoes for a moment: you’re a 7-year-old and you are at home asleep. Your parents and siblings are all in your house with you. Suddenly, you hear a loud BANG and your front door lands in the middle of the floor. This is immediately followed by your father yelling in your native language to a man with an American flag on his shoulder who cannot understand your father. You run from your room and reach the living area just in time to witness your father being shot to death and your mother being dragged away. This is immediately followed by your and your siblings being dragged away. What would you do? For that matter, what COULD you do? For the rest of your life, the only things you can remember are your father’s brains lying on the living room carpet and an American flag behind the trigger of the gun that took your father’s life. What do you do once you reach young adulthood and a man comes along offering you a way of exacting revenge against the devil that took your father’s life and destroyed yours? You were too young when it happened to know that it was all a misunderstanding and that the man with the flag was simply doing as he was ordered. Your revenge fantasies become focused on the flag that killed your father and what it represents. You begin to look through the magnifying glass that is your local radical fundamentalist and he focuses your energies on the ant that is the man who killed your father, represented by that flag. That fundamentalist tells you that your religion says that you will receive great rewards from Heaven if you blow yourself up in the name of your God. Why not? It isn’t as if you have anything else to lose.

That’s just my take on it. You can believe what you want. I just think that the only way to stop terrorism is to fight against what causes it. Some of those things are: bigotry, intolerance, poverty and the exploitation of cultures and nations that those in power deem to be “lesser”, yet still possessing resources that we covet. Mr. Bush, do you hear that? I said “covet”. Wasn’t that one of the commandments that your God passed down to you? Exodus 20:17 says: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Mr. Bush, do you or do you not practice Christianity? If so, do you believe it wholeheartedly or are you selective in what parts you choose to follow? Just curious. If DICK Cheney (or anyone beside yourself) is controlling your every move, just remember that you are the President and you don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do or that violates your “principles”. I won’t forget those things. Neither will your God. That’s why I hold you personally responsible for the deaths of over 3052 American troops and who knows how many Iraqi civilians. You, sir, are guilty. I would very much like to see you impeached on the grounds that you lied and those folks died. I would also very much like to see you turned over to the World Court to be tried for crimes against humanity. That’s something that you didn’t even let Saddam Hussein have. So you see, I am wishing you far better treatment than Saddam Hussein received. Even Richard Nixon took his lumps like a man. You are not only guilty, you are a coward.