June 2nd, 2009 by Omnipotent Poobah
Terrorism is an ugly and vicious act, but on 9/11 the United States reacted as though terrorism were something new. Until then, we understood it only in the abstract. Terrorism happened somewhere else, somewhere not as mighty or as pious as us. Almost to a person, the country condemned that single act and vowed vengeance in the truest Old Testament sense of the word…and went right on believing that taking your shoes off before boarding a plane would keep us safe.
The pre-9/11 view of terrorism at arm’s length was a convenient fiction – something that allowed us to go about being carefree Americans who didn’t worry about loons box cutters killing us. But when things spiraled into reality, we empanelled commissions and allowed civil liberties to be abridged. We investigated, reorganized, and thought up grand schemes to keep ourselves safe. And, we did it all in the service of a War on Terror that by definition, can’t be “won” and that showed no recognition that terror could come as easily from down the block as from the mountains of Tora Bora.
Terrorism isn’t new. It’s been around for centuries. While we learned the hard way that it exists, we didn’t grasp that it often comes from within. Our domestic terrorists are just as vile and ugly. The only difference between foreigners crashing airplanes into big buildings and lunatic fringists killing doctors in their churches is the scale of the death and the flashiness of the explosions.
Murdering the Murderer
This past weekend there was another in a long line of cowardly terrorist acts – one from within. An anti-abortion zealot, Scott Roeder, killed Dr. George Tiller, a provider of late term abortions. While some anti-abortion organizations condemned the act outright, others stopped short, saying only that they didn’t condone the act. However, some anti-abortion organizations justified, even celebrated, the doctor’s murder because murdering the unborn is justification for murdering the “murderer”. If you think this last sentence is torturous, it accurately reflects the mind of someone who murders to stop murder.
Of course, it isn’t the only warped thinking that applies to acts of domestic terrorism. The same people who think it’s OK to murder adults resist anything that might prevent unwanted pregnancies to begin with. No condoms. No birth control. No sex education. They only offer the Bristol Palin plan – abstinence. It would seem that not doing anything to stop the pregnancies is aiding and abetting the “baby murders” they condemn at the hands of people like Dr. Tiller.
These domestic terrorists and their fellow travelers frequently carp about high crime rates and how their tax money is used to care for legions of unwanted kids. They see the money it takes to keep a mother and child afloat, especially when the child is handicapped, and say that’s mom’s problem, not theirs. To them, the only result of these unwanted births is for clearly incapable mothers to keep the babies – thereby ruining two lives – or put the child up for adoption. Yet, I don’t see many of these people clogging the adoption system to take on an abandoned 15-year old gang-members, or crack babies, or horribly deformed kids who need round the clock care to simply keep their heart beating.
Where’s the Indignation?
The other thing I don’t see is the same sense of indignation and determination to stop domestic terrorists. Apparently it’s OK to hunt down foreign terrorists – particularly Muslim ones – like the vermin they are, but let the vermin be homegrown and it’s OK to excuse it as the case of a single mad man, or worse yet, cheer because someone lies dead in the pew of their church.
My mother, sister, and grandmother were all schizophrenic, so I have more than a passing acquaintance with a sickness that robs people’s mind and replaces it with the world’s hardest walnut. You can’t approach psychotic people with logic, no matter how simple. They are as incapable of hearing it as you are of making them understand. Walnuts don’t think they just exist.
Unfortunately, there are the crazed among us who act with the logic of a walnut and are goaded by those with equally hard walnuts in their heads. Either way, Dr. Tiller is just as dead as the fetuses he aborted. Nothing has been accomplished and nothing has changed.
Except the trees just produce walnuts just as thick and just as deadly as the ones we already know.
Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!
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Citation: Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Mars) and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-Asshatistan) for their speeches on the House floor opposing new tobacco regulation.