(Submitted to the Orange County Register, September 13th, 2001)
Coward: one who, knowing what the right action is, chooses to do something else because of fear.
Hero: one who, in spite of fear and the knowledge of great difficulty and risk, chooses to do the right thing.
This is clear, simple and conforms to common usage, despite the dilution and perversion, mostly by vote-seeking politicians, to obfuscate. Hero's, they tell us, are plane crash victims, or AIDS victims, or any kind of victim, or, alternatively, from Hollywood, the guys or gals with the biggest muscles, the best martial arts, or the most guns. Cowards, we are assured, are those who attack us in such a way that we cannot defend ourselves, hiding and striking at vulnerable moments.
By those definitions, would anyone want to be a hero? And, that classification of "coward" is enough to include the American revolutionaries, most soldiers, police, and certainly B-52 bomber pilots dropping tons of lethal explosives on people armed with AK/47's in the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of Iraq.
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When people start playing with the language, it is usually for the purpose of confusing. It is a con game. Who is trying to con us and why?
Examining the reality of the recent terrorism, it is clear that the terrorists were not cowards. Cowards do not willingly give up their lives for what they believe in. To their supporters, they are heroes. By their standards, the hijackers did the right thing, attacking America, in spite of overwhelming odds, great risk, and, we should assume - as these are, after all, human beings - fear at the prospect of failure and certain death.
By our standards as Americans, they are not heroes, as they did not do the right thing. They are villains, for certain, but not cowards. Despite the Hollywood images, not all villains are cowards. Often the villains have the biggest muscles, the most guns, etc., as well. This does not make them heroes, either.
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> The people in charge of guarding us from these villains seem determined to convince us that:
a) the hijackers were cowards, somehow less than human.
b) the proper way to deal with them is to punish them and get revenge.
c) we can blow away all these evil people, and end the problem once and for all.
As I have pointed out above, by the normal definition of coward, these people certainly did not qualify. Second, how do you punish or threaten someone who is demonstrably willing to die for his cause? One visualizes the Israeli policeman facing a suicide bomber in the marketplace, "Stop or I'll shoot!" Right.
Do you threaten to kill their families, nuke entire countries to "teach them a lesson?" This puts us on the same moral level as the terrorists, and is more likely to generate 100 new dragons for every one we kill.
The extensive networks of these terrorists that our security forces have described in recent days stretch around the globe. There is no single target. There are no single hundred or thousand targets, and there are always more innocents in the way than actual terrorists. When we kill another innocent, who has friends, a mother, a father, brothers and sisters, we generate a new host of terrorists.
Why are we being led down this false path? What is the purpose of this con game? Well, for one thing, the professional security journals and trade magazines have been trumpeting the warning for well over a decade now, that American security is ludicrously inadequate. Various news agencies have demonstrated repeatedly how idiotically and criminally negligent airport security has been. I.e., the people we elect and trust to make the physical security of American citizens their number one highest priority have fallen down on the job, ignoring the best professional expert opinion on the apparent theory that since we've been lucky so far...
Secondly, there are good possibilities that these recent incidents will be used to support particular political agendas. There is a bill before Congress, for example, from Senator Hollings, that will essentially eliminate a huge part of the Bill of Rights, outlawing electronic privacy in favor of a draconian set of rules backed by enormous penalties for anyone who tries to keep the government from knowing every detail of his personal life.
Such measures and worse may follow, until we find that our free America is no more. Do you really trust the people who miserably failed to protect us to spy on us all?
It is time to call for an accounting. Who exactly dropped the security ball? Fire them. Who is trying to exploit the danger to destroy American freedoms? Expose them and run them out of office.
When we have good people who see their primary task as that of ensuring our security running things, then we may have a chance of actually stopping any future terrorism on the scale we have just witnessed. So long as those who let America down are still running things, you may want to consider emigrating to someplace safe.
And, if you want to look for real heroes, consider the plane that crashed before its intended target, apparently brought down by passengers who were willing to do the right thing before it was too late, regardless of fear or hazard. Don't let their deaths be in vain.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:47 MDT