From this week's New Yorker:
"I see that a man I know to be a ruffian is pursuing a young girl," Leo Tolstoy wrote in "The Kingdom of God Is Within You." "I have a gun in my hand- I kill the ruffian and save the girl. But the death or wounding of the ruffian has positively taken place, while what would have happened if this had not been I cannot know. And what an immense mass of evil must result, and indeed does result, from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen. Ninty-nine per cent of the evil of the world is founded on this reasoning- from the inquisition to dynamite bombs."
After two terrorist attacks on US soil in the last 10+ years, we are now at war with a country that has never demonstrated the slightest inclination for overseas terrorism. Yet fear of Iraqi terrorism is our justification.
Odds of dying from terrorism, 1 in 9,270,000. Odds of one of our kids dying in the Iraqi dessert... growing by the minute. Lets see, we've got ~250,000 kids there, how many have died? I'll let someone else figure the odds, and watch the odds go up as this thing goes on, and on, and on. The waste of young life makes me sick.
Is the cure worse than the (imaginary) disease? It's just fucking politics, and so many of us love our fucking politics.
John |
