When I was a young boy, myself and a friend did something really stupid. My street dead-ended in a big dirt area just before a small fenced-in forest and above a small creek. At one point, we decided that something must be living in a big hole there and so we took a big stick and shoved it around in there. Well, the “thing” in the hole was a nest of yellowjackets and boy, were they mad. I was stung hundreds of times and my mom combed yellow jackets out of my aching head which hurt for days afterwards.
People are sort of like those yellow jackets. Go shoving big sticks in their oil wells and they get mighty riled up. Even some of the more easy-going insects of the crowd might get angry when their home is trashed. This should be obvious, but U.S. foreign policy creates an atmosphere that supports terrorists. The real whack-job people find a convenient outlet for their madness and the bad conditions related to occupation foment understandable outrage among normal citizens, helping the extremists to garner both passive and active support. The terrorism backlash is mutually beneficial to both our government and to the terrorists themselves. Our government gains tighter control over the population through strategic fear-mongering and “security measures” while gaining the latitude to expand their powers (with corruption better masked than usual) and the terrorists gain more support from the outrage engendered by the backlash and, they think, closer to success.
Aside from all that yellowjacket business, the definition of terrorism is “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes”. Revelation: war IS terrorism. There’s state-sponsored terrorism, aka “war” and independent terrorism. Sort of like mainstream and indie movies. They’re all movies. Terrorism cannot be violently fought – fighting engenders terrorism (in both parties). Caution is a reasonable reaction to terrorism, then trying to understand the root causes and address them is a good solution, but fighting the symptoms is useless in terms of eradicating the problem. This is similar to how landlords who have tenants report a mouse problem will react by leaving out poison. That’s a ridiculous “solution” – it only kills one batch of mice, but does nothing to prevent the next batch from moving in and freely traveling through the copious holes in the building.
OK, enough metaphors. The summary: terrorism is not the simple “good vs. evil” “eye for an eye” “you’re either with us or against us” matter that those who guide the media would like you to believe. Peace out.
“Fear is the deadly enemy of accomplishment; it paralyzes effort, destroys initiative and corrodes the mental machinery. Fear and worry go hand and hand, the one produces the other.”
“To live in continual dread, continual cringing, continual fear of anything, be it loss of love, loss of money, loss of position or station, is to take the readiest means to lose what we fear we shall. By living in fear you not only slam the door on all progress, you also attract to yourself the very thing that you dread.”
Henry Thomas Hamblin