Imagine curfews. When was the last time you were subject to a curfew? Imagine martial law being imposed. Imagine curfew violations being enforced with steel jacketed slugs.
Imagine those same tanks and troops patrolling your subdivision streets, but now imagine they are not your friends and neighbors. Imagine, just for the sake of our little thought exercise, say, they are a Chinese army occupying Oregon with our own troops disbanded or in hiding. Imagine that those foreign troops can break down your door with impunity and point their rifle barrels at you and your sons while they search your house. Be careful what you do and when you do it since locks no longer mean anything.
Maybe you were glad when they first arrived. Probably not unless you also wanted the current rulers removed from office and brought to trial. But, either way, imagine they have been there for months or years. Still want them around? What would you do in such circumstances?
Why bring up such unpleasant thoughts? It “can’t” happen here after all. Right? After all, we have those super spooks at the CIA and the NSA and their expensive high tech toys to ferret out all the bad guys before they ever get here. Right? After all, we have the ever vigilant and no doubt super competent Homeland Security to find all the bombs hidden in the shoes. After all, we are building a 42 foot wall along, gosh, several hundred miles of our many thousand mile long border and surely the Border Patrol or the Minute Men won’t let any bad guys in. Right? Surely the wily skills of our wise wizards and ambassadors will make friends rather than enemies abroad. Right?
And, it’s not as if we would ever have lunatic fringe groups already here ready to start revolutions or insurgencies for their own purposes. Black Panthers? White Supremists? Squeaky Fromme? Right to Life abortion clinic bombers? Americans would never kill fellow Americans or indulge in ethnic cleansing like those other uncivilized countries, would they? The Civil War, Southern lynchings, race riots and the near eradication of Native Americans were surely just anomalies, weren’t they? And, just because NeoCons have called dissenters “traitors” and wished them dead merely for disagreeing with the Republican Administration does not mean they really would like to kill or jail them if the opportunity presented itself and they thought they could get away with it. Right? . . . Right?
Okay. Granted. Unlikely for the immediate moment at least, . . . but . . . still worth contemplating. While our Far West is not the Middle East, we cannot be sanguine that our good fortune will continue forever. Do we need to be reminded by history every single smug civilization that ever existed, imagined it was incapable of being destroyed? Ask the members of the Third Reich that was supposed to last a thousand years. Ask even the Romans. They too thought their particular Gods or military might would protect them in perpetuity. The verdict of History is that it can happen here. It will happen here if we do not consider all the possibilities and act intelligently.
More importantly and of current day relevance, we should remember the excuses of all those in charge of our country at the time of 9/11 who repeatedly alleged that driving planes into buildings was utterly impossible to foresee and could not have been contemplated. Perhaps if they had periodically indulged in a similar thought process to that set forth above, they might have seen some possibilities and taken steps to prevent them. Is that lack of foresight happening again in our present policies concerning the Middle East
In any event, you cannot know a problem unless you give it some serious thought, part of which must be an attempt to put yourself in the shoes of others. How can you possibly conclude how others will react our policies toward them if you cannot first fully understand what they are going through?
Moreover, we might read in the paper about how we are supposedly “at war,” yet we are certainly not acting like it today. And, since we are not experiencing it first hand, doesn’t that suggest we can and should afford the time to devote at least some small modicum of imagining what could happen in some detail?
We certainly need to do so before accepting at face value any facile solutions offered by any slack jawed politicians or pundits which can be summed up in a ten second “sound bite.” We need to do so early on because we ultimately are all responsible for what our elected leaders and the allies they choose are doing or create, even if the consequences were unintended or unwanted. There are consequences. Evidence suggests 9/11 may have been a consequence of some of our policies. Perhaps we would not have changed the policies, but why weren’t we recognizing and discussing what could happen?
Whether 9/11 was a consequence or not and whether you see yourself as God fearing or Jesus loving or neither, we must go through such thought puzzles because we need to do some cost/benefit analysis of possible consequences to others, if not ourselves.
Some of you after doing so might conclude our part in the Middle East is wrong. Others might go through the same analysis and conclude we need to fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them here. That’s fair. Disagreement and competing points of view are what democracy is about. The point though is that informed decisions should not - cannot - be properly made without careful consideration, especially when dealing with something that is as alien to our present personal experience as what is going on in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Somalia. The future activities of someone who is forced to live where 9/11 is truly 24/7 cannot be predicted or even intelligently debated unless we try to understand the atmosphere that such daily fear, frustration and derivation breeds.
So, start thinking. Then, express your opinion to those who have power and put new ones in charge if they do not seem to listen or cannot prove they have been exercising similar thought processes themselves.
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