So you are anti-war. You think we invaded Iraq “illegally.” You think we’re over here slaughtering innocents and trying to extend an American empire into the heart of the Middle East. You’ve protested. You want to impeach Bush. You believe America is headed down the wrong path. And you’re completely wrong about all of it. If you’re still willing to listen I’ll explain why…
Ideal World: I sit on my hill in rural Georgia, minding my own business and living peacefully, content in knowing my neighbors and I can pursue completely different lives right next to each without any conflict and that bliss extends outward around the world.
Real World: My ideas and lifestyle are unacceptable to certain fundamentalist groups of human beings who wish to either convert me to their way of thinking or wipe me from existence. Hence, I find myself voluntarily transported halfway around the world to a messy place where people die daily in the battle to determine whose has the superior set of ideas and memes.
This isn’t about Iraq. It isn’t about America. It isn’t about Saddam Hussein and it’s certainly not about George W. Bush.
What is it about? Let me try to explain.
This is about the world shrinking. This is about a clash of cultures that started long before I was born in 1971 and will continue until one of them either annihalates the other or until they can learn to coexist. This is about a new world where isolationism and neutrality are recipes for the destruction of your way of life.
Are you still reading? Good.
Here is how the world works today. In less than 24 hours, someone can move from any point on the globe to your front door and kill you because they disagree with something you believe, something you espoused or something you did. First, you must accept that ideas are viral, and that people are willing to kill over disagreements about these ideas. Second, you must understand that there are entire cultures who espouse killing every other culture wholesale over disagreements about whose viral ideas are superior. Having accepted these two facts, you have to reconsider your anti-war stance. Because if you don’t, you will, sooner or later, be wiped from existence. To survive in this modern world, you must exhibit a will to exist. You must be willing to fight for your ideas because the world is shrinking.
If you can’t, don’t or won’t defend and protect your own culture and society, men who believe their ideas are superior to yours will be coming by shortly with some new ideas which they will happily enforce upon you and those who you hold dear…
Ask anyone who lived in Iraq under Saddam. Ask anyone who lived in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Ask someone from Lebanon, Syria or Iran whose ideas were different in any way from those of the people in charge. If you are still anti-war you are probably a fool, a stubborn jackass or both. You should be repeatedly forced to watch movies of people having their heads sawed off for having the wrong ideas.
Feel free to disagree with me – I come from a culture and society where you are allowed to do so, up to and until you start encouraging others to kill me over our disagreements. When that happens, I’m willing to fight for my right to exist on my own terms.