J. D. Pendry

I’ve been quite busy this week, without much time for writing.  Feeling a little rushed this Sunday evening and with a hodge-podge of thoughts.  I hope I don’t sound too disjointed.
 

Growing up in the West Virginia hills, you could count on some things.  If you stepped on a Yellow Jacket’s nest, there was a good chance you’d collect a few bee stings.  Each summer, my Mother would hang a jug half filled with honey and water from the end of the clothesline.  By summer’s end, the jug would be full of dead Yellow Jackets and other assorted bees.  Bees that couldn’t resist the lure of the honey, where they died in bunches before they could hurt anyone.
 

When part of the classified National Intelligence Estimate leaked to the press, the gloomy reports were that we were creating more jihadis by being in Iraq than we would have otherwise.  This might not be the champion silly thought I’ve heard coming from the mouths of politicians and pseudo journalists in the past few years, but it ranks right near the top.  Of course, the words that come forth from the mouths of some of those two groups are hard to top on the silliness scale.  No Americans created the people who’ve tried to destroy us before, during and after 9/11.  People in power have made plenty of mistakes through the years.  Mistakes that enabled them or emboldened them to pursue their radical fascist ideals, but we didn’t create them.
 

Hopelessness created these people.  Hopelessness given to them by evil men, most of them wealthy cowards, who have led an entire generation backwards in time while brainwashing them from youth with a hatred for us.  Not just hatred for Americans and Jews, but for all of modern Western society.  They’ve taught young people from kindergarten age that Jews and Crusaders are the reasons they have to live in sewage-polluted ghettos.  They’re taught that their only hope for paradise, their only hope to escape from squalor and provide good lives for their families is to become a martyr while killing infidels.  The best infidels to kill are Jews and Americans.  They believe it.  Unthinkingly.  Maybe they get bonus virgins for us. 
  I’m not sure where we are in this country as far as what we believe, what we stand for and for what as individuals and a collective nation we are willing to fight.  You’d think that once attacked, a nation would come together and relentlessly pursue its attacker until he is no longer a threat - as we did in World War II.  Unfortunately, and to our peril, it looks like we’d rather spend our days attacking one another, revisiting the past and trying to fix yesterday instead of confronting today.
 As a nation, we can’t accept that we are in a religious war because we’ve pulled away from religion, not just Christianity but all religion.  We’ve passed laws practically forbidding even a hint of it in public settings.  A societal belief that’s utterly opposed to the beliefs of the enemy we face.  For them, it’s an unfathomable concept.  It’s obvious to me each time I attend a worship service that there are many more people who do not attend than who do attend.  To accept that our culture is in a religious war would mean choosing a side to defend as a nation.  That’s problematic for a society filled with Rosie O’Donnels that often views all religions with disdain and considers one as bad as the other.  A mentality that figures if you don’t claim a religion then it’s not about you, not your war. 
 Rosie logic is flawed.  The self-described holy warriors we face, who would happily stone to death a homosexual Rosie while chanting god is great, have chosen a religion.  They do believe they’re in a holy war.  A war that concludes with Armageddon and they believe their side wins.  Not only do they believe in Armageddon, men who feel divinely led to bring about the last great battle between good and evil lead them.  They’re at war with everyone who doesn’t have the same religious beliefs as them - even Rosie.  All of us should know where we stand individually and collectively, but I fear we don’t.
 Our problem is that we are too busy attacking one another and maneuvering for political power to confront collectively our enemy.  If that problem wasn’t enough, we are so busy trying to fix yesterday that we can’t focus on what we face today.  We can’t continue to expend time and energy harping on why we are where we are.  Someday, a true historian will sort out the facts without bias and without the influence of the players trying to spin or fix yesterday.  He or she will lay out what happened over the years and the most important facts will be about who did what from today forward.
 First, we hung out a jug of honey water in Iraq.