A Jihad Amongst Us It's September 11 again, and so it seems we've found a new national holiday here in the American confines: nourish pain, suffering, hatred and most of all, blame. Open your heart to caring for people you've never met, cry a little, and get indignant. Then go take out the people who did this. Let's roll, you hear? Fascination with how quickly we linearized this event will probably obsess future historians. At once, there was no need to introspect deeply, or even consider the statements of the new enemy seriously; there must be a reason of character that makes events what they are, and we see this character in the individuals involved. Our leaders underscore this message, whether they be presidents or priests or local businesspeople: "evil men attacked us, and we were wronged." It is amazing how America can maintain a worldview that neatly divides humanity into two boxes, one for the acceptable and one for the negative, yet ignores the "evil" behavior inherent in dividing people along such a line. If evil is all that creates divisiveness in the world and separates us from love, is there no greater evil than believing in evil itself? There are two components to the answer as to why this is tolerated. First, the psychology of language dictates our behavior. And second, it is necessary that we maintain these absolutes in order to keep up our standard of living. These two threads of justification are supported extensively by our religious background, which has for several thousand years demonized the other side in the middle eastern supernatural idealism game. Built inside our minds is a receptivity to language based on its ability to confine certain meanings to a centralized word symbol, and thus to exclude all else from that symbol. When we needed a spiritual father figure who could protect from death, we needed an all-powerful good, something so good that it would contain nothing bad. In order for that to occur, good became not positivity but moral "good," and in order for the artifical distinction of good to remain pure in a world where bad happens, a separate classification for bad - very bad, or "evil," had to be invented. While these judgments seem harsh, they are of an absolutist type which makes it easy for our system to secure us the type of lifestyle we currently enjoy. Declaring ourselves moral allows us to push aside concern for other things: other people, other ecosystems, other nations. Our way is right, and therefore by process of elimination, they are not right, or at worst, wrong. Our religion emphasizes this process because it is one way to make people feel spiritually "right" and thus good about themselves; when they feel good about themselves, they can be highly effective, even in destructive situations with degenerate results. When you are sitting in church or temple or ashram at the end of the week and the religious leader at the front tells you about how some are good and some are bad, you consider yourself among the good: after all, it is your intent to be good, and that's why you are at worship. And the rest of your week is free from questioning. As we are seeing with the September 11 festivities, this kind of thinking can be extended to politics as well. The bad people hurt us, but we're doing good by building back up and bombing the hell out of a third world country. Only a bad person would commit terror; it's not that one side has tanks, cannon, bombs, planes, nuclear weapons and cruise missiles why the other have rocks, AK-47s and plastic explosive. There's no situational desperation involved. The "bad" and "evil" people simply have no voice in our decision-making process. The result is that we make the same mistake over and over again, with one new wrinkle that will be explained in a moment. The first round of crusades started in 1096 and lasted for almost 200 years. Religious warfare over divisions in the church, one side being orthodox and the other reformist, raged across Europe until the end of the colonial period. After a brief modernization, Europe was ravaged again by the "war to end all wars," which was in reality a war against those seen as war-starters. Like brutal slapstick comedy, the societies of modern humanity launched into one crusade after another, including the Viet Nam conflict in which a "police action" became a dirty process of attrition in order to hold territory unrelated to anything but the large corporate investments in the area. Anyone who disagreed with our ability to profit from the third world was obviously a communist; and communists were without god, and did not believe in good and evil, and therefore, were evil. Today the blame game continues. For every flag you put up, or sentimental macromedia flash presentation you distribute, the emotions run higher than the logic. An old enemy is demonized, and those who do not follow the crusade join the side of evil. When there are no enemies left, we will find them within. Like a cancer, the consumption will continue. And at some point, we will wake up and realize we killed the remaining people who could stop the process. http://www.anus.com/columns/index.html
