America is Sobering Up

I find it a little heartening that America is sobering up. At the same time, I find it immensely, immensely sad that it didn’t happen sooner.

People who were gung-ho for the war six years ago are now doubting it’s wisdom. People who were all for torturing our “enemies” a year or two ago are now beginning to preach it’s evils. And people for whom an impeachment of Mr. Bush even six months ago was anathema are now beginning to speak of how important it is to make a president pay for his wrongdoings.

It’s like after 9/11, we were just all drunk on testosterone (I say “we”, but I mean Americans – I was opposed to this nonsense in Iraq from the beginning) and lynch-mob mentality.

Terry Pratchett, the excellent British fantasist gives an outstanding example of how to calculate the IQ of a mob in one of his books. He says that you take the lowest IQ in the mob and divide by the number of people in the mob and you have the IQ of the mob. That’s kind of where America has been for the last seven years. We were attacked. We were hurt. And we were willing to follow a small-minded, destructive administration anywhere they wanted to lead us. It didn’t matter how many of our freedoms we had to give up in order to protect our freedoms, it didn’t matter how bad we had to be to prove that we were good, it didn’t matter how many devils we had to make deals with to prove how Christian we were. We’re right and they’re wrong, we’re good and they’re evil and that’s it.

Thank God that we’re coming out of that.

One loved one of mine who voted for Mr. Bush both times said of Barak Obama “You know, I kind of wish that he WAS a Muslim. I think that it would do America good to have a Muslim president for a while.” That comment both surprised me and pleased me, demonstrating how much we’ve sobered up since 9/11.

So what do we do now?

VOTE! I’m telling you, brothers and sisters, if less than sixty percent of Americans vote, McCain will win and we’ll be stuck right where we are for another four years. This same friend of mine commented that he couldn’t believe that twenty-five to thirty percent of Americans still support Mr. Bush. This is the same twenty-five to thirty percent of Americans who believe that Saddam Hussein had either something to do with 9/11 and/or WMD. This is the same twenty-five to thirty percent that voted for Mr. Bush both times. This is the same twenty-five to thirty percent of Americans who will march to the polls, election day after election day, come Hell or high water, and vote for whomever the Republican party tells them to vote for. Liberals tend to be a little more flexible in their thinking at election time, so although twenty-five to thirty percent of them vote, it’s not always for the democratic candidate. Al Gore and John F. Kerry proved that.

Learn something about the Muslim faith. American Christians are deeply ignorant of the Muslim faith, and typically arrogant enough to be proud of it.

I’m not going to try to give a primer of the Muslim faith here, only know that most of what you think you know about it is wrong. Jesus and Mohammed were brothers in faith. Mohammed said repeatedly in the Q’uran that he wasn’t revealing anything new, he was only affirming what had already been revealed through Moses and Abraham and Adam and Jesus. So please, just learn a little something about it.

One thing that I will tell you here is that a large part of the Muslim hatred toward us is centered around our military support of Israel. Imagine this… imagine that a foreign nation came in to America and said “You know, the land that you live on now was promised to the Indians by their Gods. Now we’re not going to ask you to leave entirely, we just want you to leave all of the country from the Rockies west, so that we can return that to the Indians as a homeland. And if you won’t move voluntarily, we will bring a multi-national military force in to remove you.” Would you be happy with that, or would you hate these aggressors who chased you off of land that your people had been living on for hundreds of years? Well, that’s exactly what we did to Palestinian Muslims when the nation of Israel was declared in the forties. One thing that we’re not taking into account is that if the God of Israel wanted them to have the land, wouldn’t he take a hand in allowing them to keep it?

Just some stuff to chew over.

Peace.

Randal