Gautam Mukunda said:
> But it is about to find out. Pearl Harbor has happened all over again.
> Someone appears to have forgotten what happened to the last people to
> launch a surprise attack on the United States. They will not have very
> long to regret their mistake.
No, I disagree. I'm an American, and of course this is horrible
and awful, but what makes me more depressed is the amount of
death that will likely happen BECAUSE of this. If there was a country
responsible for this, I don't want them incinerated. I don't
want their whole land reduced to radioactive rubble. Obviously
something has to be done, but blasting them off the planet isn't
going to make anything better. Nothing'll be FIXED because of it.
The only thing that will happen is that some OTHER contry that
was sympathetic to the other will then launch some more attacks
on us, and then we'll wipe them off the planet, and it'll go back
and forth and back and forth, and when it's all done, all we've
accomplished is killing more people.
<tangent disclaimer="you might want to ignore">
Think of everything that needs DOING on this planet! There's
a whole world of problems that need fixing SOON (if the
environmentalists I'm sympathetic to are correct) before it's
too late to even keep the whole planet livable. When we start
shifting our focus over to producing more weapons to kill more
people with, and bombs to saturate more cities . . . Then
when all the killing is done and a somewhat weary nation comes
back home to an economic slump, what's there to do but buy more
STUFF and CONSUME and continue the destruction of the biosphere,
because who has the energy to spend on the Earth then?
Dr. Brin's "Earth" said it fairly well (apologies for the
paraphrase): Hungry people don't become environmentalists.
By the same token, I don't think that war-ravaged lands or
war-weary countries are going to be able to expend the
resources to keep our planet going . . .
This is just one example though, and the one that's mostly
been on my mind lately, so that's the one that got put down
here, but it's certainly not the only one!
</tangent>
WAR is not going to solve the problems we need to solve. The
more people we kill, the more we set ourselves back as HUMANS.
Even World War II didn't free us from the chains of ethnic
discrimination. Take a look at the existence of Neo-Nazism.
We need to SOLVE our problems, not just melt them into the
ground.
Yes, I'm sad and horrified at what happened today. I feel
nervous and threatend and sick (and some other part of me
says, "welcome to the rest of the world"), and I hope that
we can find something to do about whoever directed this to
happen, but I DON'T want it to be the mass obliteration of
some country . . .
There's so much we could DO as a unified race. We need to
foster that, not more destruction . . .
-CJ
PS: Hi . . . Been lurking around for a long time now, posted
a few times more than a year ago, but haven't really had
the time to keep up with discussions, so I've been rather
quiet.
