Time To Be Trampled?

They struck us September 11th because they sensed we were weak. Maybe they were right. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” said their leader, “they will like the strong horse.” He wasn’t referring to the United States as the strong horse. He was referring to Radical Islamists like himself who dared attack us because we were a “paper tiger,” a country with a powerful military, but without strong enough belief in itself to sustain a fight. Maybe they were right. Perhaps they know us better than we know ourselves.

They watched as “progressives” among us rooted religion out of our culture while the rest of us stood around and allowed it. Radical Islam’s aim was to impose their religion on every person in the world or kill them. They listened as our university professors blamed the evils of the world on Western Civilization and that was one thing Radical Islamists agreed with. They watched and listened as our intellectual and media elites bewailed selected victim groups among us and they learned that if they portrayed themselves as victims, they would get sympathetic coverage in our media.

It’s enlightening to look at ourselves as our enemies see us. They’ve observed us as we blame capitalist, white-guy leaders of Western Civilization - not only for the miseries of victim groups in the US and the Third World - but also for destroying the planet itself with pollution, extinction and global warming.

As our liberal leaders in universities and the courts do all this - purge religion from the public square, lament the miseries of victim groups, and condemn the depredations of capitalist warmongers - they overlook glaring contradictions in their own rhetoric. What about the old idea that we were created by God to have dominion over the earth? No, they say. Only fundamentalist simpletons believe that. We evolved just as any other species in nature did, and we’re no more special than they are. But if it’s true that we’re just another ordinary part of nature, why do we blame ourselves for killing trees or wiping out passenger pigeons? Wouldn’t that be nature acting through us? Beavers are part of nature when they flood an area and kill off trees, right? Aren’t we being our natural selves when we cut down mahogany trees in the rain forest? If a threatened species can’t make it, shouldn’t it disappear to make way for more adaptive species? That’s what Darwin taught us, isn’t it?

The guy we nearly elected president six years ago travels our country preaching “The End Is Near” in the form of an impending global-warming catastrophe. Some of us listen and ask ourselves: Who caused the global warming that melted glaciers of the last ice age ten thousand years ago? Was it those evil cave men making their campfires too big? And what about the first three ice ages when evil white guys hadn’t evolved yet? Who caused the global warming back then?

Though 99% of all species that ever existed are now extinct, whichever ones disappear while we’re around must be our fault. If we look deeply enough, we’re sure we’ll discover that Dick Cheney and Halliburton were somehow involved but have covered it up.

It’s pretty obvious we have forgotten who we are and what we’re about. We don’t know where we came from and we don’t know where we’re going. Meanwhile millions or Radical Jihadists around the world are willing to die to kill us. They’ve declared war and attacked us in the most dramatic fashion - and we don’t seem to realize what’s going on. They gather by the thousands chanting “Death To America!” and “Death To Israel!” They’ve infiltrated Europe, Canada and the United States. They’re blowing themselves up to kill us and plotting to do it on a bigger scale with nuclear weapons.

How do we respond? Do we concentrate on defeating them and saving our civilization? No. We look in the mirror and wring our hands. “Why do they hate us?” we ask. “It must be something we’ve done!” Instead of figuring out how to defeat them, we’re worried we might discriminate against them.

They call us the Great Satan. Their goal is to convert us to Islam or kill us. Meanwhile, what’s our goal? It looks like we’re trying to figure out a way to surrender without it looking like surrender. It looks like our enemies know us well. We can’t sustain a fight. We wimped out in Iran in 1980. We pulled out of Lebanon in ’83 and Somalia in ’93. Now we’re getting ready to pull out of Iraq. The country that defeated fascism and communism in the last century hasn’t got what it takes any more.

As Martin Luther King said, “If a man has nothing he would die for, he isn’t fit to live.” Maybe it’s time to lay down and let the strong horse trample us.