Life is a group effort.

 I continue to identify Radical Islam as one of the most serious problems facing humanity and the Islamic State is currently it's most virulent manifestation.  Our various security organizations are currently warning of another terrorist attack on our homeland, similar to the recent ISIS attack on the Moscow gathering.  Given the ridiculous open border policy that is currently in place, I do not disparage those warnings, but I am even more concerned that it is a lack of interest within the American public that permits the continued existence of Radical Islamist thought.  As is the case with so many of our other challenges, we are prone to focus on the superficial rather than the fundamental.  A group of idiots in Central Asia or the Middle East decide to stage a brutal attack on one or another country, and we harness ourselves to get retribution.  This involves killing a bunch of “militants” and blowing up one or another of their hideouts in some remote part of the world, followed by a bunch of speechifying that reminds me of the mindless taunts that followed one of my various childhood fist fights.  

We killed Bin Ladin and assorted other radicals, declared that we had won the war with ISIS, and are currently knocking down almost every single missile thrown at us by any and all Iranian proxies, but we still have not given a lick of thought to figuring out how to address Radical Islam - the idea.  Until we do, we are, at best, eliminating one leader or another while strengthening radical thought among an increasingly large group of people about whom we know virtually nothing.  It is only a matter of time before that ignorance stimulates hate toward us to erupt into violence again.  Back in the day, when Christian Knights rode into the Middle East on white horses we were engaged in the exact same strategy.  More than a millennia has gone by and we haven’t learned a single thing, except how to kill more people with more powerful, longer range weapons.  Humans are clever, small minded, greedy, cowards and our deficit in intelligence is going to get us into serious nuclear trouble.  I give you that the population problem is even more serious than Radical Islam, but I do not see nuclear war as being the most intelligent way to reduce overcrowding.

I see the current struggle in Gaza to be the culmination of several millennia of very similar misadventures and the solution currently being pursued to be more rationale for future bloodbaths.  The horrible situation that millennia of stupidity has put us in is that we do have to respond to events such as 911, October 7, and the Moscow Concert Hall attack with force.  What is lacking is any thought about the severity needed in our response, its’ target, and what we should do after that response.  How we manage peace determines the likelihood of war.   I firmly believe that it requires three things.  Maintenance of the strongest military in the world, the will to use that military, and a heartfelt interest in the well-being of all humans.  It is not adequate to continue to kill “leaders” with very fancy weapons from “over the horizon.”  Nor is it adequate to put a bunch of “radical insurrectionists” in rickety compounds in the middle of a desert.  Every single one of them has grandparents that were killed by “the other’s” grandparents and far too many of them have grandchildren that are already plotting revenge for the misdeeds of “the other.”.  In as much as I am one of “the other,” I have a very real interest in what we are planning to do about the mess that we are in.

I completely agree with those that warn about serious tactical problems such as our open border, our inadequate military, and the ignorant daze that purposely clouds our thinking as concerns our next tactical move in Ukraine, Gaza and Taiwan, but I see our complete lack of interest in developing a viable strategy to deal with the larger issues that endanger us to be the more fundamental problem.  As long as we fail to have a strategy to deal with the imbalance between resources and mouths, we will face the threat that one or the other regional conflict will boil over into nuclear war.  The details will always be different, but the basic threat remains the same.  In the past, we could fight a war with somebody and achieve peace for a time, but the nature of nuclear war has made that “solution” inadequate.  Today, everybody loses including you and me and our kids.  Nuclear war will not only kill a lot of people, it will also poison the very earth that we need to sustain life.

Unraveling the mess that humanity is in is going to be difficult, but it is possible if we could get unanimity as to the best way forward.  That requires intelligent thought, compromise, and perseverance and we will not ever accomplish those things unless we start talking to each other civilly about real issues.  Hiding in our intellectual basement, living in the artificial world that we are building in our “devices,” parroting the words of our tribal leaders, and explaining endlessly why “the other” is wrong is not going to cut it.  If humanity is to survive the invention of nuclear weapons, we must get out of the intellectual basement and start thinking about ways to build unity of purpose.  If you say that is too heavy a lift, you are accepting defeat.  If you say that is somebody else’s problem, you are accepting defeat.  The only way to “win” is to figure out how everybody can “win” and that requires everybody to be in the exact same game.  Quit hiding from your responsibility as a member of a democracy, let alone as a member of the human race.  Your non-involvement in thought is what makes both Biden and Trump possible, just as other populations in other parts of the world make Putin, Xi, and the ayatollahs possible.  Life is a group effort, whether we like it or not, and trying to hide in the basement is exceptionally dangerous as well as infinitely stupid.