Wednesday, November 03, 2004

A Time To Vent

Ahh damn it.

In some ways I look at this as a referendum on Evangelical Christian morality than anything else. That and fear.

Fear first. I know that the events of September 11, 2001 were devastating. As I noted before, I lost a family member and was scared nearly out of my mind about a dear friend that day. I've got a handle on how scary the idea of terrorists are. I also understand the desire to strike back and fight them, both as a need for vengeance and to offer some semblance of security. And, I support the war in Afghanistan - the Taliban were well warned by two presidents that one more alQaeda linked attack would mean their asses were on the line (per Richard Clarke's book). But somewhere along the way, the fight we are fighting has ceased to be a war on terror and has become something else. I think facts have adequately established that the war in Iraq bore no relevance to the war on terror. I do not want to play a guessing game as to the motives the administration had in going into Iraq - it is irrelevant. We are there. Moreover, there is a large part of the populace that has not accepted these facts: Iraq had no part in 9/11, Iraq had no relationship with alQaeda, Iraq had no WMDs, and Iraq had no extant WMD programs for the last ten years. These are facts, but they are facts that a large part of the country has not accepted and maybe never will. As such, I'm not sure it matters if they ever do. Worse than all that, we have allowed the situation in Israel to deteriorate and we have created a lot of angry people with our adventure in Iraq. That does not bode well for a war on terror. So, to me, there is more reason to fear now than there was four years ago (or, perhaps more relevant, three years ago).

Now morality. I'm not an Evangelical Christian, nor do I ever plan on becoming one. As I have grown older, particularly since I have gotten married and had kids, I have found in myself a developing relationship with a spiritual higher power. I note that I do some serious semantic gymnastics to not say "God" there. It's not that I do not think God is the thing that I am becoming close to. It is much more that saying I have a developing relationship with God makes me feel that I am placing myself in the company of people whose beliefs I reject as wholeheartedly as I possibly can. My God does not believe in intolerance, manifest destiny or the various ways that many Christians have developed a sense of insularity - that everyone else is "them". Here is what I believe and I think my God wants the world to believe.

I think that gay people deserve every single right that straight people do. I think that Muslims and Jews deserve the same respect that Christians do (as do Hindus, Buddhists and so on. I mention those two specifically because to some extent American antipathy is focused to an extent on these groups). I believe that one can regulate guns without taking away the right to hunt or protect oneself adequately. I believe that the phrase "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is one of the most dangerous ideas in history. I believe that a corporate based economy is a very bad thing, and that the benefits of large corporations to workers are due to inefficiencies in the corporate structure and as these inefficiencies are corrected, the workers get less and less (more on this another time). I believe that there is a delusion out there that there is a strong flow of people from lower to middle class and from middle class to upper class. In reality, the flow is nothing like that - the flow is from middle to lower and upper to really upper. I believe that peace not war is the solution to terror. I belive terror cannot possibly be solved by violence, only by removing the causes of hatred.

So here we are. In my next post, I will go over what next.

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