: I don't think it's so much a lust for power as much as a
: lust for vengeance. THAT'S what scares me. People can
: be blinded by hate (no, I'm not quoting Star Wars). I
: want to see those responsible pay too, but when that
: happens, I hope that the options of where to continue
: after that are seriously weighed and not by mad
: justice.
What concerns me is a slightly subtler and more poisonous feeling--what might be termed "a liberal attitude toward oneself." A feeling of "I know it's wrong to want revenge, but we're hurting and grieving so badly right now that we can be excused for it. It's part of the healing process, so it doesn't make us bad people."
I've seen a lot of other Americans saying things along these lines, and I think that's about as dangerous a feeling as you can have. To simultaneously burn for revenge and have some sort of moral loophole whereby you can escape responsibility for that feeling gives you an unholy amount of latitude in your actions.
I think it's important to recognize that many of us are bad people at the moment--or at least slightly less ethical and less balanced than we were before Tuesday. That's what traumas like this do to you. If abuse and pain didn't stunt your moral senses, there'd be a hell of a lot fewer terrorists and serial killers in the world. And yes, it's natural that we should be dwelling on thoughts of revenge and yes, we're not to be blamed for such thoughts. But that doesn't mean we should give in to them. Or we're going to go way beyond the kind of curative and preventative military actions that are needed, and we're going to wake up in a week or two with a few hundred American soldiers dead, a few thousand non-Americans dead, and a few million non-Americans ready to do exactly what the terrorists did.
Which is why, I think, we need to cut HGK some slack; we're doing with him what I fear the country as a whole will do with its foreign relations. He says something stupid and insensitive (but hardly as diabolically evil as has been suggested), we jump all over him, pride won't let him back down, grief won't let us back down, and now it's as close to total war as you can get on a forum. When, obviously, he's as sorry for what happened as most Americans ever are for massacres and natural disasters that occur in foreign countries; he was just tactless enough not to keep his mouth shut about it (and to misread many English-speakers' statements on the matter). And now we expect him to back down without our doing the same because, hey, we're really broken up about this, so why should we give any ground? Which, again, is understandable. But it's not going to work.
Learn to forgive HGK, say I. Because pretty soon we're gonna have to start forgiving on a much bigger scale than that, and we could sure use the practice.
--SiliconDream leaps off his soapbox and breaks his ankle
