[sup]Note to mods: this may belong or end up in a different forum. Sorry.[/sup]
Today was horrific. I am 39 years old and I don’t remember in my life having such strong, roller coaster emotions. The shock, disbelief, anger, sadness. The thrill at seeing the wonderful human response to this. Seeing my fellow Dopers offering up news, help, whatever they could do.
I have been to Saudi Arabia several times. I have friends who are Palestinians. I have neighbors and extremely close friends who are Jewish. Other friends and colleagues are Muslims of differing ethnic background: from Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Malaysia, India, Pakistan. All of them are nice people that would have most anyone into their home in a moment and shelter a stranger in a time of need.
But how does this end?
How do we stop the killing of innocents? How do we stop the hatred, the violence, this depravity?
From my experience, and in my opinion, there are only two ways out of this. One is horrible to consider. The other is impossible to imagine.
Somehow come up with a way to broker a true and lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But given the going in positions of both sides, I don’t really see how this can be done. Certainly more powerful and informed intellects than mine have attempted this and repeatedly failed.
Identify all terrorists. Hunt them down and execute them, even if just on suspicion. But you really can’t stop there. This would require eradicating all traces, at least of their families, so that their children don’t later take up the cause. And probably their neighbors, cousins, etc. And anybody who had ever supported the cause of terrorism from a secondary standpoint. The bloodshed would be enormous and in the end might not even do anything but to create more hatred. You couldn’t use nukes because the collateral damage of innocents would be too high and if you didn’t nuke everybody then eventually someone would come back with a nuke for us.
I know that there are a lot of brilliant minds out there, at least that’s what the IQ threads tell me wink… so what’s your cool, rational, reasoned response to this?
What do I think? I think there’s no hope. I think no matter what we do, the extremists will take this as an opportunity to seize power the world over and the only way to stop would be to debase ourselves, to destroy our own souls to save our lives and kill millions of innocent. There’s no hope at all.
But there never was to begin with. We’re all going to die. We were always all going to die. The world is vast and incomprehensible and full of evil, and all we can do is stand and fight our little battles until inevitably, we lose.
And I can believe all that and still get up in the morning, because I also believe that good will triumph over evil and justice will prevail and people are basically good inside, even though I know I’m wrong. Being human is about living in the thin spaces… between the eternity that came before us and the eternity that will come after… between the blinding horror of facing bleak truths and the gibbering madness of rejecting it.
We know how to make peace and we know how to make war. I’m sure that we won’t take the road to peace but here it is…
The attacks were a response to American involvement in mideast affairs, esp. the Palestinian and Iraq situations. The Palestinians live under a system of apartide. If you remember Madeline Albright called the deaths of 100,000 Iraq children ‘acceptable losses.’ These situations have to change. For starters we could lift the Iraq sanctions and start a ‘Marshall plan’ to help out the people of Iraq. The would be along the same line of the plans that we used to rebuild Germany and Japan after WW2. The Germans and Japanese are our allies today so it could be made to work.
The Palestinian problem could be resolved much like our racial problems were solved in America. A system of progressive taxation, income redistribution, welfare, food and water subsidies, public health care, and government housing (like section 8), a enforced civil rights bill, affmative action, and jobs for all, would be a good start. Integrated schools and free public education would be step two. Returning the occupied Lebanese territories would be step three. The G7 governments could help with the costs; we already send massive amounts of money to Israel in the form of weapons. The G7 governments could also allow massive immigration of Palestinian and Iraq persons to act as a release valve.
This will never happen. What will happen is that we are going to bomb the heck out of Afghanistan and kill lots of people. This will create more suicidal terrorists and the cycle will continue…
Remember as mad as we are they have kill relatively few of us. We’ve killed many more of them. It’s not shocking that this happened. It’s shocking that it hasn’t happened sooner.
People use violence, esp. suicidal violence, when they feel that they have no other options. Every government in the United Nations has at one time or another criticized US actions in the Mideast. Things like this don’t happen in a vacuum. Stuff happens for a reason.
Of course we’re all doing to die. That comes with being human.
With grace, luck and will, maybe our test will be how we’re going to LIVE with this. (Badly misquoting Bujold: “Tests are gifts. Hard tests are big gifts. What are you going to do with your gift?”)
I’m as whipsawed and clueless as anyone. Don’t look to me for answers. About noon numb disbelief and horror broke into pity for the victims; fierce respect for the ordinary-joe survivors and rescue workers–and then slowly, slightly less numb disbelief. Fury hasn’t washed ashore yet, but it’s coming.
This won’t make much sense.
First and foremost, I believe most people usually try their best; don’t come up to scratch sometimes but most try. I believe that no country or religion is The One.
I believe that my country and people–faults and all–have, however imperfectly, shown the world a new way to live. Open, loud, lusty, a “babble of voices” but with a fluidity and painfully acquired force of law that distills the best traditions of all.
Like hell we’re doomed.
We came from everywhere, most of us descendents of those discounted and/or discarded from all over the globe. That’s a damned fine legacy.
Monsters walk abroad. So what? They have before; they’re back. D’ya think any generation’s immune? What matters is how they’re defeated and the how liveable the world is after the fight.
I can’t contribute to this thread because I am no visionary.
Before college (and even partway through it) I could hardly handle the despair I felt about the cold war and nuclear proliferation. I didn’t see any end to it, to the hatred, to the misunderstanding. I got fatigued worrying about it, and started avoiding the issue.
When the Berlin Wall came down, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I wish I’d had that hope when I was so scared and depressed.
And I hope my despair about our current problems is also misguided.
How can this possibly work when the people and government of Iraq are openly hostile to us? Germany and Japan had just been defeated in war. G’s government and military was crushed; J’s military was gone, and its leader was humbled and unwilling to see any more of his people incinerated. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s government still has as much influence over the country as it did during the Gulf War, except for the “no-fly zones.” For your plan to work, we’d first have to destabilize the government – a polite term for assassinating Hussein and killing most of the military and civilian authorities. Not the best way to start a new relationship with the people, wouldn’t you say?
Nice to hear that we’ve solved our racial problems here in the USA. I must have missed the news report on that.
The Israeli/Palestinian problem isn’t really racial anyway, it’s religious and territorial. The situation is better compared to the USA’s or Australia’s treatment of its indigenous population, though that’s still a weak analogy. The Palestinian muslims, who had lived there along with a few Jews for a long time under British administration, were kicked out of their homes in 1948 to provide a homeland for jewish refugees from Europe, as well as Zionists (in the literal sense of the term) from the USA. Many jews were against the formation of a jewish state at the time, and many of us still think it’s a bad idea. Palestinians want it all back, Israel doesn’t want to give it up – after all, Israel has developed the region far better than the Pallies ever did, and jews have as much historical claim to the land as muslims. The palestinians’ and israelis’ goals are mutually exclusive, for the most part. How is altering the infrastructure going to change that?
Second, Lebanon’s occupied territories aren’t really a Palestinian issue; that’s a border dispute between Israel and Lebanon. Palestinians use the space because it’s there and it’s poorly administered, but the fact is that Lebanon doesn’t want them there at all – they just tolerate them because it keeps Israel from solidifying its hold on the region.
I could continue on these topics, but I don’t have any reference material in front of me and I’m also somewhat ill lately. Let’s just say that there’s a reason we repeat Rodney King’s “Why can’t we all just get along?” in a sarcastic tone.
Don’t know how this will all end, except to say that it probably won’t.
[complete hijack]
Anyone else getting sick of these struggles going on through
throughout the centuries? From the Middle East to N. Ireland to the Balkans, it seems that many conflicts are over something your ethnic group did to mine numerous hudreds of years ago. Christ, the US and England were mortal enemies a scant 200 years ago and that seems to have been patched up. Why can’t these others (as long as we’re asking deep questions)?
[end hijack]
I also can’t understand the terrorists view on how this will end. Do they honestly think the US will say “Gee, after killing untold thousands of our civilians, we have really come to see your point. Sorry about the past confusion”
They have only ensured that their struggle will continue, and that they will be given less quarter in the world view.
I believe in retaliation. The knowledge that people who commit atrocities will be held responsible and punished might prevent future crimes. Terrorist organizations and the governments that support them should not be allowed to escape unscathed.
But my hope is that whatever retaliation is made is targeted precisely. I have no ill will towards the people of Afghanistan or Palestine or whatever country this attack originated in. They’re also victims of a terrorist regime.
Whatever retaliation occurs, I can only hope that it is such that those innocents who have died did not die in vain. And that those who perpetrated these attacks did.
Whatever the hell that means…I can’t even think straight any more.
To those who had comments about my mideast peace proposals.
I wasn’t trying to solve the troubles of the world in a 10 minute dope post. I was trying to point out that there are steps that we could take to start defusing the situations in the mideast. These could be instead of OR in addition to a military response.
madeline albright quote:
"On a May 12, 1996 CBS 60 Minutes segment, Leslie Stahl asked Ms. Albright (then our U.N. Ambassador) about half a million
children’s deaths in Iraq due to sanctions. Her response was “We think the price is worth it.” This did not cause an uproar in the
United States and Madeline Albright was not removed from office. " http://www.iacenter.org/seneca2.htm http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/jrn24.html
I think they’re hoping the United States will decide, “Okay, these attacks are horrible, so we’ll stop helping Israel and leave you alone.” It’s not so much that they want the United States to burn in flames, as much as they want us to stop meddling in their affairs.