Politics

On 2001-09-13 I wrote the following in response to the terrorist attacks and subsequent debate over how to react.

An Eye for an Eye vs. Turn the Other Cheek

A few days ago, if you had asked me, “Should we ever bomb our enemies?”, I would have given you the pros and cons of shooting weapons at people: destroying your enemy, but occasionally killing innocent victims. It was easy for me to distance myself from the so-called ‘collateral damage’ because I didn’t have to be bombarded with the imagery of, say, innocent Yugoslavian people jumping from the burning buildings on which we had just dropped a couple of missiles. But everything is different now, everything has changed; we are now the victims, and we have a choice - to treat our enemies as they have treated us, or to turn the other cheek, so to speak, and to refuse to stoop to their level.

Before the invasion of Iraq and the Oscars, I went to a theater to view Martin Scorsese’s film, “Gangs of New York.” Set in tumultuous New York City in the mid-1800’s, the opening scene chronicles a battle between an Irish immigrant group known as the Dead Rabbits, led by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), and the pre-existing Anglo group calling themselves Native Americans, led by Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis).

The meme about the emergence of a global consciousness through the medium of the internet is rising into the general awareness. I don’t think the people who make these pronouncements spend much time actually communicating on the web or other locii of public discourse. The ignorant, brainwashed, and willfully malignant are, if anything, more pronounced online, perhaps because they normally hide behind social niceties in “real” life.