A reply to my post of 3/22/04

L. Ron Hubbard said:

"The price of freedom:  constant alertness, constant willingness to fight back. There is no other price."

There are many ways to fight back - decapitating one of the main groups sponsoring terror on this planet, in the grand scheme of things, could be viewed as "a good idea".  Unless, of course, it regenerates  anew with 7 more heads.

That seems unlikely.  There can't be all that many completely suppressive, powerful, and well-financed groups of terrorists on Earth.  To go back a few years, even the top Nazis of Germany numbered fewer than a dozen.  The rest of the people acted like them because of the power they siezed and the agreement they were able to extort because of it - but when that leadership was forcefully removed, the average German began to see that being a Nazi wasn't such a good idea after all. And yes, today some of them may still dramatize against us, but they aren't doing so via millions of soldiers wearing swastikas now, are they?  Sometimes the forceful solution is needed.

Is it needed now?

My fear is that we have not seen the worst that the terrorists will do - that we are only at the beginning of the cycle of violence which is their creation.  What happens if Ben Laden nukes Washington DC or San Francisco (an easy target) or LA (even more likely because it is the center of Western culture)?  In the aftermath, would we the people of the United States demand the use of tactical nukes?  Against whom?

I can't rule it out only because we humans are so crazy on the subject of retribution.

Do we tie both hands behind our backs and fight back only through non-violent means?   Like what?  Economic sanctions?  They laugh!  They are already so dirt poor it doesn't matter.  Do we withhold food?  They already starve - it would make no difference.

No.

I think we need to fight back by helping them achieve prosperity and self-sufficiency.  Programs like www.heifer.org and www.twth.org - these are ways to fight back without doing violence.  To undercut the basis of terrorism by depriving them of victims to be exploited, to be persuaded to become human bombs.

Let us fight terrorism by helping those in Israel pass out The Way To Happiness.

Let us give more to Heifer International so that a family somewhere --anywhere people are poor and so stay ignorant -- can own a goat and achieve a kind of prosperity that matters.

One doesn't volunteer to be a suicide bomber if one's goat needs to be tended so that one's family may eat.  As the old song said, only those who truly have nothing have nothing to lose.  Let us raise the havingness of the world.