| Subject: What will? |
Author:
Rob Dog Bastard
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Date Posted: 22:48:17 06/20/04 Sun
In reply to:
schilda
's message, "korean being held in middle east" on 22:26:27 06/20/04 Sun
We've got options, but none of them easy, and none of them likely.
The problem that we see today has been brewing for nearly a century now and primarily it has to do with the mixing of cultures which do not mix. We (meaning western culture) drew false borders in the sand, enforced our interests in the region at gunpoint and generally ran amock in offense of their way of life and then - whoa - they got pissed.
Some of them got so pissed that they crashed airplanes into buildings, others that they blow themselves up in Israeli shopping malls, and still more who have taken to beheading.
Why did we do this? We had to. We people have an insatiable appetite for stuff, and much of that stuff is petroleum based. Where's all that petrol gonna come from? Somebody else's country - God forbid we'd drill our own precious lands - there's is less attractive to conservationists so let's drill the hell out of it.
What we really need to do is change our lifestyles. It's far too radical to ever work, but doesn't it bother most of you that we have become so dependent on a resource which is about to dry up (about to meaning in the next quarter century or so)? And I don't just mean gasoline for your cars. I mean everything. All petroleum based products. Not buying local is a big deal too - just shipping your favorite GAP jeans from their sweatshop of manufacture is an awful lot of oil used. There's a lot of things we can, but probably won't do.
Of course cutting back on our usage is not what people want to do so what else can we do? Stay there with bigger and better guns? Nah.
If we insist on staying then we must begin to enact a responsible, and respectful educational system. Much of the fanaticism we are seeing today is based on ignorance and blatant misunderstanding of the very religion these folks portend to represent. Also, we have to share. You don't think people will object when ex-pat oil workers live in compounds which resemble 5-star resorts and outside the walls they are starving?
For a while though, as we restructure Iraq and try to create a democracy we will face much much more of this violence. Maybe Iraq will work and it's influence will spread? Maybe - who knows - but there's other problems in the Middle East that democracy will not fix. That is a long term problem which will need to be addressed over long periods of time and through constant vigilance and cooperation with the people who understand those cultures.
In the meantime, people are going to die. I'd hate to say it, but here's consumerism and global economics slapping us back. Here's the big Western economies trouncing the third-world for too many decades coming back at us. Here's the price we will have to pay as we continue to assert dominance and I am short of an answer as to how it can be fixed without us being fixed first.
Don't think this will be limited to the Middle East, however. Watch out for other countries who will begin to sway under the pressure of supporting our extravagances. These beheadings are a perfect example of how small groups can exert huge influence in the world through media-pushed violence. Don't think there won't be more of these, and that there won't be copy-cats who are not in the Middle East, but some other third-world nation trying to be seen and stay alive.
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