Recently there has been great turmoil in our Nation over the unprecedented invasion of privacy going on in our nation's airports. Honest, law abiding citizens are being treated like criminals. Veterans being treated like drug dealers. Women with prosthetic breasts being forced to remove them, and prove they do not have explosives. Women in traditional garb being asked to violate their religious convictions. Children, screaming "don't touch me" while being touched in places I was told to tell the police if I were touched there when I was small.
And why are we enduring this?
Terrorists.
I ask myself, what is a terrorist? What do they do?
According to the Wikipedia: "Terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.[1] No universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition of terrorism currently exists.[2][3] Common definitions of terrorism refer only to those violent acts which are intended to create fear (terror), are perpetrated for a religious, political or ideological goal, deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants (civilians), and are committed by non-government agencies."
By this definition, they have won. America is gripped in an irrational fear.
Many people are offended when I call this an irrational fear. Fear of nonpoisonous spiders, is irrational. Fear of non poisonous snakes is irrational. Fear of bridges, is, while a very unlikely way to die, does claim a life now and then. Every year, on average, 57 people are killed by lightening, yet our nation is not gripped in fear every time thunder claps. While some may suffer exaggerated levels of fear, most of us calmly seek an indoor location and proceed at a calm pace.
Worrying about whether or not the person next to you have a bomb in his underwear is a highly exaggerated fear. So far, no one has died this way. One man has suffered severe genital burns trying to set off an improvised munition, but no deaths. Ironically, he had no balls in the first place. A real man doesn't kill innocent people to make his statement. If he has a qualm with another man, he walks up to him, calls him out and they settle affairs like men. Cowards use terrorism. Cowards fear terrorism.
It was with considerable difficulty I managed to find a most disturbing mortality statistic. Innocent civilians killed by police officers due to mistaken identity, or negligence. I have only been able to find the number for this for the calendar year 1993. Apparently, no agency is tasked with compiling this statistic; or they simply do not publish them.
In 1993, 330 innocent, law abiding citizens were wrongfully slain by policemen. In that same year, 30 innocent, law abiding citizens were wrongfully slain by fellow, otherwise law abiding private gun owners. In 1993, there were four incidents of international terrorism that claimed 9 American lives. 9 per year is the statistical average over the last fifty years since the USA began meddling in middle-eastern political affairs via the CIA and the multinational oil corporations.
There were 770,000 policemen in 1993 and 80 million registered gun owners. If you do the math, that means you're 1200 times more likely to slain wrongfully by a cop than a lawful gun owner. Cops kill 11x more innocent Americans every year than civilians.
Cops kill 36.6 times as many Americans as Muslim terrorists.
Yet how many of us have irrational fear of policemen? How many of us think it would be preposterous to disarm our police forces; when in fact, we might be safer with individual citizens being armed than our policemen.
So I must ask you, should we really be invading the privacy rights of veterans, cancer survivors, children and law abiding Americans; because Muslim terrorists kill 9 people a year while our own police kill 330?
We must not let the terrorists win. Their goal is to force us to live in fear, until we give into their demands. We must address the real problems. Why are they here, what do they want?
They live in countries where religious fanatics run the government. They've only read one book, or books written about that one book. They can kill their wives if her ankle is seen by another man in public. A father can kill his daughter if she "dishonors" the family, and I cannot think of anything more dishonorable than that.
Poor, ignorant people grow up to be terrorists.
For what we've spent on full body scanners, and a decade of the war machine we could have changed those people's lives for the better. Just a couple of solar panels and some LED lights, a 24 volt well pump, and a way to move their sewage away from their houses and dispose of it in a sanitary way. The ability to grow their own food.
Instead, we are molesting them. Economic molestation. We're taking the oil from beneath their ancestral lands, giving their radical religious wingnut leaders a pittance of the money, and the rest of the profits are raked in by the CEO's and stockholders of the Oil companies.
So we can drive SUV's and musclecars that get less than 15mpg in some cases.
You'd be angry and hateful too, living in your dirt floored hut, scrabbling out a living in lands where your ancestors used to be able to survive, until the climate started to change because of pollution... oh wait, most Americans don't believe in Climate Change... but we do believe in 15mpg muscle cars, so we can feel sexy.
I'm not condoning terrorism, but just think about it.
What would Jesus do? Would he rip up and down the road in his hot car trying to impress young girls, or would he want us to make this right? And I have a funny feeling, if a TSA agent tried to check His scrotum for explosives, they might have to detain Him.
We are at a crossroads in history, and this BS that we as a People are having to endure over terrorism should not be driving us to be fearful cowards supporting the Backscatte Scanner industry and Big Oil industries.
Once upon a time we were the world's greatest economic power. We could have brought that power to bear on these nations, and helped them solve their poverty, and change their policy of religious ignorance. Now, thanks to our extreme level of corporate welfare and irresponsibility and warmongering political parties, we are very nearly reduced to a 3rd world nation and we are looking to China to bail us out.
And we're afraid of brown guys who may have explosives shoved up their wazoo, or wrapped around their testicles.
How rational is that?
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