First, we have to look at the meaning of the phrase "war on terror". This has been widely derided as absurd, because "you can't make war on a tactic". This is true, but misses the mark. The tactic is terrorism, and so if one were making war on a tactic, this would be the "War on Terrorism", but it wasn't named that. Let's go deeper.
"Terror" is, of course, an emotion, an exaggerated fear. So the "War on Terror" is actually a war on an emotion. Absurd, right? Well, perhaps not absurd, but fiendishly clever.
War is the man-made mass event that is most feared in the world. And so war creates fear - war creates terror. Aha! This is self-reinforcing. The war creates the very thing it is supposedly made to stop. So the "War on Terror" is designed to be never-ending. You might think of it, instead, as the "Love of Terror".
So how do you help end the "War on Terror"? It's simple.
Refuse to be afraid. If you're not afraid, those who would manipulate you, can't. This is true at every level from the boyfriend or girlfriend who threatens to leave you if you don't do a certain thing, or act a certain way, all the way up to a group or a nation threatening another group or nation with bombs if they don't behave in the way the first group wants.
But, you say, fear is natural. Yes, that's true. Fear is an evolutionary mechanism related to "fight or flight". Humans evolved so that when confronted by a large, hungry animal, their instincts helped protect them so they'd live and procreate another day. But much of what we fear today is artificial - we fear ridicule, or we fear losing a loved one, or we fear losing a job. In fact, none of those things is in your face, life or death, and so none of them requires "fight or flight".
In over 20 years of counseling people, I've learned that almost all fears, when you push them, are masks for the fear of death. Think about that. When you're afraid of losing a job, the subconscious train of thought goes like this: if I lose my job, I'll never find another one, and then I'll lose my home and my family and won't be able to feed myself and I'll die. If you're able to read this message, then that's probably pretty unlikely, because you live in a society where there are resources. Yes, life might get harder, maybe a lot harder, but it might get better too (by, say, finding work you like more), and the chances of you dying because of a job loss are pretty small.
So how do you stop being afraid? Learn about "death"! There's nothing to fear. At this point, massive evidence exists that one lives on afterwards. Check out
1) World ITC - The new technology of spiritual contact: http://www.worlditc.org,
2) the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson's group at the University of VA: http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/personalitystudies/, and
3) Near Death Experience and the Afterlife: http://www.near-death.com/.
If you know you are going to live on after "death", and so are not afraid of it, then what in the world is there to be afraid of?
In addition, here are two other things you can do:
1) Forward this widely (with attribution), so that others will refuse to be afraid.
2) If you are so moved (and because today is the International Day of Peace), you may choose to actively work for peace. One way to do that is to support the Peace Alliance in its efforts to create a Dept. of Peace - check out http://www.thepeacealliance.org/.
