✡ So why are we so surprised by his actions? We have an increasingly violent society as a result of the impatience and vitriol from the right, video games, television, and the crowning achievement? Illogical wars that are morally, spiritually, and financially bankrupting our nation.
Maj. Hasan is our warning and by calling him a terrorist is to miss the point. War takes a major and exacting toll on a society that we seem to forget. But some of us recall what it was like living here at that end of Vietnam. It was not a happy time.
Somehow we have let the neo-cons and the right lead us to exactly the same place: a never ending war against something that cannot be defeated: terrorism.
We also seem to forget that our nation is not one of nationalities or tribal allegiances, but the only thing that seems to hold us together is ideal and values. It becomes increasingly hard for some of us to think those values matter – or that rhetoric is not hollow – when we see the oppression wrought at the hand of this nation. This is true of respecting the rights of all minorities – Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Gays, Transgenders, Asians, Turks, etc…
If our nation isn’t a standard bearer for protecting the rights of the oppressed, we will continue to be sucked in to the crazed logic that by oppressing we are actually helping people (this is not made up, it is a tenet of the neo-con ideascape).
Maj. Hasan is a reflection of all of this. He is a reflection of our best efforts, which have been failures.
“a never ending war against something that cannot be defeated: terrorism.”
Read 1984 again…. there was a continual war going on (against shifting foes) and this was used to get the population to sacrifice whatever the government wanted.
I think we agree here, or I am misunderstanding you. I am slyly proposing here that this is a calculated choice – to make it unwinable so we would always be at war with someone/thing/whatever. The point it the war, not the winning. So I think we are talking about the same thing.