1/03/20: Losing the War on Terror

At the beginning of this new decade, I’ve been looking back at the last two decades that have been dominated by terrorism, and the political fallout from that terrorism.  It’s on the tv news daily, it’s in the movies, it has seeped into our hearts. I see America winning on the battlefield, but the terrorists are winning the war. 

They have changed us, changed the way we think, the way we live each day. Terrorists have created such fear in our guts that it has dominated everything we do. That fear has given birth to hate, and that hate has driven our society to rip away people’s rights, rip children from their families, dump children into cages, and place a hateful, lying, egotist at the lead office governing our country. Not since the war/race riots of the 1960s have I seen such division in our nation. 

All the social declines we’ve witnessed in the past decades stem from this fear that terrorism nurtured in our hearts. Now I see a country of cowards—people willing to make others suffer so they can feel safe, so they can keep their big cars and flat-screen TVs and iPhones. And what I see sickens me. People suffering needlessly sickens me, literally.

When one child suffers I suffer, even when it is not my child. When one family goes hungry, you and I are poorer, even if we are not all related by blood. We must move beyond this fear. We must make healing our sisters and brothers and neighbors our first priority. And by doing so, we will lift up our entire country in brotherhood. We must fight terrorism by increasing our compassion for each other. It is the only way to win the war on terror. The only way to defeat our enemy.