4 May 2010 What a field day for the Heat!

4 May 2010 What a field day for the Heat!


The suspected bomber, the one who admitted involvement, has been charged. His accomplices or coaches in Pakistan, perhaps both, have been arrested there. I’m willing to bet that the Pakistanis will extract more information than our interrogators. However, I don’t, for the minute, want a government such as Pakistan’s for our citizens.

There are almost certainly other Jihad-oriented Pakistanis carrying U.S. passports and plotting harm against their fellow citizens; living in our cities. There are certainly sleeper agents waiting to be activated before they take their turns at killing the people they live among. They have been so conditioned that they are all too willing to try to destroy the nation that welcomed them and gave them personal and economic opportunity.

Radical Islam is a dangerous force in this world. Even more dangerous is the unwillingness of moderates in the Moslem world to speak out against or to censure the murderous nature of fundamentalist jihadism. As with German citizens in WWII, the silent compliance of moderate Moslems only aids the murderers.

This time it was a Pakistani-American. Next time it may be a native American who lights the fuses and leaves the bomb to shatter lives and buildings. Our native hate groups are equally dangerous, equally as indoctrinated in the politics and religion of hatred.

Like Pakistan’s Mullahs, our right wing hate mongers have a large, fertile, and poorly educated audience to radicalize with their particular brand of stupidity and hatred. We’ve already seen one of our most hateful pundits try to blame the oil well blowout in the Gulf on environmental activists. How any environmental group could mount an attack on a well head over a mile beneath the ocean is a question that will never be asked by his true believers. They lack the intellectual curiosity to form the question.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State. I heard the incident described today as “the day the war came home to America.” In a sense that is true. Students in other nations during the 1960’s had learned that challenging a government’s policies in the streets could, and often did, result in great risk of physical harm. Our students had, by and large, been handled much more gently by police and military units called in to maintain order. With the exception of Chicago, those nice white, middle class girls and boys could take to the streets in protest with little fear of physical harm. Black Americans met with violence much earlier than the VietNam protesters. They already knew what Kent State was to teach their white analogs.

When one wishes to change the course of governmental policy, one needs either a greater force to counter that policy or a willingness to place one’s life on the line. The by-standers killed at Kent State were collateral damage. They were most likely the victims of a misunderstood order to “Hold Fire!” The National Guard troops who fired that day were equally victims, trapped between obligation to follow orders and the willingness of demonstration leaders to involve bystanders and to attempt to force a governmental back down.

In another sense, a most unpleasant and painful one, the war came home every day. It came in aluminum coffins – “Remains nor viewable.” It came in returning soldiers with drug habits. It came in doctors, nurses, & corpsmen who had tried, repeatedly, to save those who could not have been saved. It came in photographs of friends who would never be seen again, in nightmares, in stories that needed to be told, but which could not be told because no one wanted to listen to them. Kent State was a big thing here. Young Americans died.

In VietNam young Americans died, too. And it was no big thing. It was just “Nam.”