BAD Reads
Grow Your Own Terrorists
Dear Mr and Mrs America:
While you sit comfortably in your air-conditioned McMansion, stuffing high calorie snacks into your already overfed body as you surf the channels on your 42 inch plasma TV, thousands of families in the lands of terrorism are living a different life.
They don't give a damn about democracy or civil liberties or what we call "freedom". They're too busy trying to make sure their families have enough food on the table to survive until the next day. They're worrying about having a steady supply of electricity and clean running water.
They need medicine for their babies and medical facilities with 21st century technology so those babies' mothers can have pre-natal care and safe deliveries.
They're not worrying about Baby Mozart and pre-school applications and Gymboree. They're not thinking about band practice and soccer league and taking their kids to Disney World. They're not planning for college funds and SATs. They're just hoping to raise their kids to adulthood and for them to have a future.
So if the terrorist organizations are the only ones who can bring them food and medicine, they'll take them gladly. If the radical clerics run the only schools that will give their children any sort of education, they will take it.
The terrorists at the top of the food chain are not poor, ignorant and angry. They are well educated and well to do--just look at the backgrounds of the 9-11 terrorists as an example.
But below them are thousands of young, angry men and women who see only poverty and misery in their futures and get their only hope from organizations who take the anger that should be directed at their governments (and at ours, who support many of those governments) and use it to fuel religious fanaticism and violence.
You can stick as many yellow ribbons as you like on the back of your SUV. You can keep talking about "revenge" and protecting our way of life.
True revenge would be to render the terrorists impotent by taking away their power over the poorest of the poor in their countries. By feeding their children and giving them a chance to go to REAL schools.By making sure that their families have medical care,clean water and a steady supply of electricity. We could do in the Middle East what we did in Europe after WWII and make the people who hate us become our allies.
But the men you elect to public office to keep you "safe" are manipulating your fears as adroitly as the leaders of Al Queda, Hezbollah and the rest manipulate their followers. They are using it to keep themselves in power.
As long as we allow them to continue on their current path, we will continue to grow a new crop of future terrorists.
As long as we continue to support governments who spend billions on weapons of mass destruction while they keep millions in poverty, as long as we continue to send troops and weapons instead of food and medical care, we will continue to grow a new crop of terrorists.
Terrorism is like a crop of dandelions on your lawn. You can cut off the tops. But until you do something about those underlying roots, they will grow back.And they will eventually go to seed, cast the seeds to the wind and grow far,far more dandelions.
We are growing our own terrorists.
And until we start to look at how we can help those mothers and fathers who want the same things for their children that we want for ours, we are going to continue to grow terrorists.
The children of todays terrorists are the future terrorists who will endanger those same children we are raising so lovingly here in our safe American homes.
Think about that one, Mr and Mrs America.
Particularly before you go to the polls in November....
