Response to an 'Angry Woman'

(*Note: this letter was emailed in response to a chain letter working its way around the internet from an 'Angry Woman' that effectively condoned the methods & abuses being employed by our Government and military in the 'War on Terror'.)

I can no longer take this sort of nonsense.

Someone on this extended set of mailing lists thought that my worldview was in agreement with the hatred, ignorance & fear espoused in this forwarded “Angry Woman’ letter.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

I am a political centrist. I am a registered Independent that has voted Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian and will always vote for the person who I feel is the most intelligent candidate and the one most suitable for improving my life and the life of my community.

I grew up Republican and would still vote that way with more regularity if the party wasn’t populated by the sorts of numbskulls that author this kind of jingoistic crap. Being a Republican used to be about fiscal discipline, small government and basically demanding that our elected officials stay the hell out of the lives of ordinary Americans. The modern Republican wants to foist unwanted Christian dogma on us, thinks we must be crazy for not giving the Federal government unfettered access to our personal affairs and feels they should be allowed to spend like drunken sailors on shore leave for whatever crony-istic pork barrel project that suits them, particularly under the useful guise of ‘national security.’ Drunken spending used to be the sole domain of the Democratic Party. The idiot presently in office has demonstrated that wasting vast amounts of our tax dollars can indeed be a bi-partisan exercise.

For starters, the implied notion in this woman’s letter that all followers of Islam are violent individuals bent on terror and the destruction of America is simply ridiculous. This continues to be a very common misconception among too great a number of Americans.

We are at war with ideological extremism, not the religion and practice of Islam. Prior to September 11, 2001 the worst terrorist act committed on American soil was perpetrated by a white American of Christian heritage. Have we forgotten the 168 men, women and children murdered by Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols on April 19, 1995 in Oklahoma City? Have we forgotten the responding law enforcement officials that subsequently committed suicide in the aftermath of this reprehensible event? I have not.

When it was revealed that the cowardly executors of that terror attack were Christian Americans, did the world, Christian & non-Christians alike, paint ALL white Christians as violent, hateful terrorists? No, because that logic would be ridiculous. We were obviously able to recognize that this was the organized work of several very twisted and sadistic individuals and these individuals did not represent the entirety of their race or religious background. (McVeigh was also a registered Republican, yet no rational person would suggest by extension all Republicans are terrorists.)

We are at war with the forces that created Osama bin Laden AND Timothy McVeigh.

In a rare moment of clarity right after 9/11, even the Moron-in-Chief himself recognized the difference between a radical wing and the vast majority of a practicing religion, in this case, Islam. In his address to Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001 President Bush declared:

“The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam”

So why is it that the sadistic acts committed by a small percentage of Islamic militants should continue to condemn an entire religion and dozens of nations? Yes, Angry Woman I am sickened when a suicide bomber blows up a market in the Middle East. I am sickened the same way as when a disgruntled kid from the suburbs shoots up yet another American high school or college. These are both acts of terror. Both need to end. (No one has suggested yet we start waterboarding our teenagers to extract information about the next school attack, but if we continue to support to the idea of using it to ‘keep us safe’, how far off can that be?)

Humanity as a whole is at war with the extremist fringe and no one faith has a monopoly on terror. Yes, there are plenty of militant Muslims and they need to be dealt with, but likewise there are violent factions of every ideology from Hindi to Judaism, cults like Aum Shinrikyo and certainly Christians as well. Does the presence of violent fundamentalists in every religion mean that religion itself is the face of terror?

Obviously not. Again, this logic is insane.

What has me the most incensed, however, is the suggestion from our Angry Woman that we ought not to care when we allow the erosion of the fundamental principles of liberty and justice that as a nation we have spent the last 300 years creating. This ‘I don’t care’ attitude is nothing short of abhorrent. Our Angry Woman is all too willing to give away the very essence, the very heart of what makes America truly great, simply to gain some feeling of protection from or vengeance upon this Muslim minority.

As Americans, we invented Liberty. We are (or at least we were) the Gold Standard of Justice and Freedom in the eyes of the world. And we are prepared to give that up by permitting torture? By skipping due process? By waiving away our Constitutional rights to protection from search & seizure? By allowing our rights to free speech to be diminished and tarnished? By pretending that international law we ratified and helped create shouldn’t apply to us when we don’t feel it is convenient?

Are we really that frightened by a couple thousand desert-dwelling religious fanatics that we will turn our backs on the heritage given to us by the Founding Fathers and improved by three centuries of hard work?

Everyday we allow our most hallowed principles to be subverted as Angry Woman would have us do; we allow terror to destroy America. The destruction of America that our enemies seek is not simply the physical destruction of America and her people. They wish to destroy the very IDEA of America. And when we are reduced to not caring about the proper application of Justice that we ourselves created then they have succeeded in harming the IDEA and soul of America.

Buildings, roads, cities, the Pentagon, the World Trade Center – they are physical structures that can be destroyed and rebuilt. But the very ideas on which our buildings, cities and nation are founded – Liberty, Justice and Freedom – for everyone – must be protected and preserved at all costs. This will be much, much more difficult to rebuild should they be lost in the struggle.

This is what I care about, Angry Woman. I care that the United States continues to honor the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truth that all men are created equal that made us a nation in the first place. I care that in this war of ideology, that is, a war of IDEAs, that we continue to demonstrate the superior ideology and unwavering commitment to real justice and democracy. The moment we stoop to the level of thugs and terrorists, we ourselves become thugs and terrorists and not Americans.

Yes, I am aware that my wishing to take a principled course of action in the War on Terror I am making my own life less ‘safe’. But I would rather take the chance of being blown up by a car bomb on 34th Street and die a free man, rather than live in a nation that taps my phone, condones torture and attempts to suppress my opinion and dissent. That isn’t America. That is called China.

For too long, people like myself in the middle ground have stayed quiet and allowed this sort of ignorant blather to go unabated. It is that sort of passivity that allowed the German Nationalists to whip a nationalistic frenzy based on religious hatred and come to power virtually unopposed in 1930s Germany, As such, I can’t be quiet any longer and I can’t sit idly by and watch the heart and soul of America be ripped out, no matter how good the intentions are of the ‘patriots’ in question.

Vote for whom you will in November. Men and women have died and continue to die for your right to vote since the outset of the Revolutionary War and the most disrespectful thing we can do to dishonor their memory is to NOT vote. But I urge you to vote with genuine thought and consideration from your brain rather than the hatred in your heart.

Hatred, wrapped in an American flag, is still hatred. And hatred is un-American.

‘James Madison’

PS – Sorry Angry Woman, I will no longer be hitting the delete button when I disagree with someone and if you and anyone else on this list disagree with me feel free to hit ‘reply’.