To err is human…

kmt

2/9/2006 1:56:15 AM #

You started out strong there, but you lost me when you opted to lump the (continual) ridiculous overreactions of a faction of "religious" (I can't speak for the level of their spirituality vs. the level of their out-and-out hatred for the Western world) savages with an entire community/religion. Please, before anyone’s panties get in a bunch and you start screaming “If you don’t like this country, then go live somewhere else you friggin bleeding-heart liberal!” let me clarify: 1) I love this country… and am eternally grateful for being lucky enough to born in a place where so many freedoms (including that of speech) are ours and 2) I am not supporting the actions of these factions. I find the whole uproar unreal. But, I guess, when a person/group of people is hell-bent on the inherent evil of other(s), they’ll find any and every reason to justify their hatred/anger… even if it is ridiculous. But let’s think about their hatred for a moment: We here in the good, old US get a very limited view of “their world.” We only see stories about how we’re hated, how much they all want to (and do) kill us, and what a huge “favor” we’re doing by going there and “sharing” democracy (so how dare they hate us, ungrateful bastards)! This keeps the meager remains of support for “Operation Iraqi Freedom” intact. (Keep us afraid of “those bad people,” and we’ll agree to just about anything… Patriot Act, anyone?) When’s the last time you saw the top story on the 10 o’clock news tell us about peace-loving Muslims? About Muslims helping others? About devout Muslims who want nothing but peace in our world? You don’t… that’s far too boring (Ratings, people, ratings!). On top of it, that would make them, gasp, human… and we certainly wouldn’t want to go about killing humans… would we? Now, think about how they may see Americans. Mid-East media coverage is just as slanted, if not more so, than ours. To them, we appear to be a country full of, yes, hypocritical religious zealots who talk about peace, but then run a tank through their hometown; kill their loved ones; and, among other things, are doing our darnest to destroy them (hmmm… seems our respective POVs aren’t all that different, eh?). Are we all like that? I prefer to think not… Lumping the actions of hundreds, maybe thousands, with the true beliefs/intention of hundreds of thousands/millions is a mistake on both sides of the fence. That is the mistake we’re all making. And that, my dear, is what may spell our doom. OK. Skewer away!