Time to Think Things Over

The New York Times today published a front-page article that 6 million Americans are currently living on food stamps alone--that's right--no money. Part of me considers these people geniuses being able to live on nothing in this country. Another part finds this revolting that we have no social safety net to assist these people and , more importantly, we now lack a sense of the common good that our own people need a helping hand as much as others. The data doesn't help racial stereotyping. The numbers fall evenly across racial and ethnic lines.

Talking Heads here in DC are still gabbing about the gonad bomber and how much more totalitarian can we get in ensuring security for every airline passenger. Having just experienced the almost perfect totalitarian system in our ariline travel, I am now inclined to pay more of a fare for no security. I'll take the odds which are phenomenal that I'll be blown up in an air plane. It would be worth it to me to avoid all security measures.

In the whole flap over the latest terrorist incident, we have yet to hear any calls for the West to rethink its whole approach. I have figured that the United States spends $900 billion a year on defense, intelligence and so-called homeland security. This is nothing but a big racket--payoffs to security firms, defense contractors and people like Michael Chertoff, who represents the company who makes the full-scan machines for airports. If you add in millions for academic studies on islamic fundamentalism and Jihadism, you have another bull market industry. But does any of this make anyone--let alone Americans--safer or deal with the issue of terrorism?

My college son says that Al Qaeda won by making America change its way of life and alter its political and legal system and getting us bogged down in endless wars in the Middle East. Sadly, he may be right.

Whether it's the Bush or Obama Administration, people like to quote the so-called political statements of the alleged terrorists or the thinking of the radical imam who affected them. They don't mention that the recruiters of these young men talk to them in almost pastoral language, not in the harsh language of war. The underwear bombers' postings on the internet read like the young killers at Columbine. To manipulate that loneliness and despair into passive/violent action has been the hallmark of Al Qaeda and their affiliates for this second generation of terrorists. These young people are generally upper-class, have led a somewhat privileged life and are characterized as sharing many of the same anxieties of young men everywhere. Their own religious faith has failed them and only now are Muslims beginning to understand the danger in their midst.

After all these terrorists have been more successful in killing other Muslims than Westerners. While patrolling the jihadist websites, intelligence analysts should pay more attention on the actual interchange between radical imams and these young people, instead of the flashier, more provocative ideological statements. These people aren't really drawn to the ideology but the moment when they can become something. It's not something you or I might identify with. But the whole world talks about them--they have achieved the Andy Warhol "Fifteen Minutes of Fame". And that's about as good as they think it can be.

If Al Qaeda can always spare the change for the relatively cheap airline tickets and the minimal costs of plastic explosives or wire-cutters, then the solution to countering them is not in creating gigantic administrative structures, which may or may not work. Conservative security experts want these people out of our legal system, but then how do you stress they are just cold-blooded killers and not some 'warriors" fighting for some cause? Is it really worth virtually shredding our own constitution and system of law just to accomodate terrorism? Unfortunately, terrorism has become a political instrument to perpetrate fear among the general population, ensuring the eternal life of what is now the military-terrorism complex. If the West were really serious about terrorism, it would take the time to think things over.