random thoughts and thoroughbred selections

Thursday, May 13, 2004

Not that you give a shit what I think, but suck it up and read on...

I haven't watched the video.

You know what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about Paris Hilton (seen it, still feel dirty) or Pam and Tommy (seen it, feel woefully inadequate).

All jokes aside, you know damn well what video I'm talking about.

I don't need to see it. I don't want to see it. What happened makes me angry at a world that isn't going to change for the better regardless of our Cowboy Administration's intentions.

Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Saudi children, among children in the rest of the Arab world, are not taught to be individuals. They are not taught to find their inner talents and utilize those talents to contribute to their families, their country, or the whole of the human race.

In that world, you're either born with access to the black gold, oil, or you're essentially facing a hand-to-mouth life of middling consequence. In that world, a child isn't dreaming of a way to make automobiles fly or of how to create that next great video game. They aren't spending their time or money as a person or as a society to make their own worlds better, outside of the opulence and splendor of their Taj Mahal palaces.

That society is controlled by a cabal of ridiculously rich men who are only interested in preserving their status in society in the present and for the future of their sons. Women mean nothing to them outside of possessions, and those outside their families mean even less. Pawns. Grunt labor.

Western thought, American mentality, is more dangerous to these power-drunk cabals than a few million Jews on a few hundred square miles of semi-fertile desert.

This may not be a thought you agree with if you're swallowing everything the media feeds you, but Osama Bin Laden's capture and public execution solves exactly ZERO of our problems. Frankly, with the fetish of martyrdom that seems to siphon common sense right out of these extremists, I'm actually surprised we haven't found Osama's remains scattered across Times Square along with the bodies of dozens of Americans.

Either way, his death - at his own hands or ours - doesn't solve this problem.

Our dependence on oil is the fundamental problem. As the rest of the world continues to catch up to the American model of disposable manufacturing and continuous consumption, these families at the top of the Arab world's food chain will continue to take their pounds of flesh, and keep the rest of their societies in an unceasing circle of servitude.

Regardless of our government's sometimes touchy-feely foreign policy suggestions towards equal rights and societies that allow individuals to determine their own destiny, we just aren't in a position to dictate to the governments/cabals that control our country's flow of oil how they should be running their government. So they get away with it.

Women remain in their place. Men are fueled by dreams of an afterlife that promises them far greater riches than they could possibly realize while in their corporeal state in this world. They are fed stylized versions of their religion, their truth, that interpret outsiders as their enemies. This truth gives them a solution to their problem. Martyr yourself to rid the world of outsiders and you shall be rewarded.

Until the people in power do what they have the power to do with their wealth to dispel this myth and create a society based on more tenable basis for reason in their world, this mentality will not cease to exist.

And it's not likely that this is going to happen.

I really get upset at the thought that we're fighting a war here. A "fight" and a "war" have an outcome, and probably at some point a "winner." I don't think there's a damn thing we can do to make this different or better. It's such a quaint notion that we're going to "bring the people responsible for the beheading to justice." Uh huh. If they don't blow themselves up with soldiers within shrapnel distance first. Even then, prosecuting three people for the mentality of thousands is ineffective, and only continues to perpetuate the image of America as a bloated bureaucracy, not as a rational and careful nation.

In my opinion, the only things that would cure this situation (but cause new problems entirely) would be the reconditioning of the minds (brainwashing) of an entire region of people, or a worldwide ban on purchasing oil from Arabic countries.

Neither "solution" is a possibility, or even a tasteful method of handling this issue.

If oil were as useless to them as the sand they draw it out from under, they would be forced to join the world economy as a society, not just as a cabal of men with the nearly sole control of the juice that makes the world turn.

Yes, I'm angry that men could ever feel that murder is an answer to any problem. I'm frustrated that there's a belief that people take seriously that taking your own life, as long as you can take as many infidels to the grave as you can with you, is somehow noble.

But the root of this problem isn't Osama, and it isn't even really al-Qaeda. It's a world that lets these societies exist in this state without consequence to their leaders and financial executives for perpetuating these myths and keeping most of their world permanently beneath them with no opportunities to learn, think, explore, on their own.

[>>]posted at 7:14 PM by BG - click to email
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