Usdk wrote:
So the rednecks will die defending what is there's and the bleeding hearts will turn traitor for profit. Ironically we both know which you and I will pick and we are both ok with our choices.
Mns wrote:
I bet there are a lot of people that you'd call terrorists that are actually doing (read: not some ridiculous starry eyed parody of reality) the same thing right now.
Perspective's one hell of a bitch.
Mayo's 100% correct.
Your "perspective" is the product of being sheltered. You have no idea what it is to be under the thumb of an occupying power, or to live in a country that is at the mercy of stronger nations. It is not so simple a thing you can run outside with the rifle you have hidden under your bed and fight the good fight or whatever.
Who would you shoot at? Chinese and European nationals who live safely behind fortified walls, just like Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan? You really think you're so awesome you're going to meet with any more success than those Afghans who get instagibbed by professional soldiers? You really think you cool bro with your AR15 and maybe half a dozen Vietnam-era grenades is going to do anything against a fortified compound with 15-foot-high concrete walls and professional police/security forces? That's the world the Palestinians live in, you think you're going to show them all up?
You are also ignoring the fact that, in the final analysis, violence wouldn't change anything because, as we've observed in this thread, America is its own worst enemy. How would attacking unspecified bogeymen do anything to alter the political, social and economic realities that have led us to this point - the budget deficit, the inequities of American society, the lies promulgated by the media?
Your "starry-eyed fantasy", pretty damn apt description, IS the easy way out. It is a much harder thing to work with the difficult realities of a situation, to try to turn a country around. Go look at Greece.
Who are the real heroes in Greece, the morons throwing gasoline bombs in the street, or the few, quiet, determined hardworking entrepreneurs and honest lawmen trying to build real wealth and justice for their country? Who's to blame for that country's fate... the mobs of shallow and cowardly Greeks looking for the easy way out - to blame anyone but themselves for their own national incompetence.
If Greece has any chance of getting back on its feet, who is building that chance and who is tearing it down?
What to you defines "turning traitor"? Those Iraqis who are fortunate enough to speak English, or have the skills to perform some service for the Americans? When we occupied Japan 60 years ago, who were the real heroes, the dead-enders who decided to go kamikaze the day before the armistice, or the ones who went to work rebuilding the country paid by American loans?
A hundred years ago, India was a British colony. Today India is far stronger than England itself. Do you say those Punjabis who preferred British English to Hindi (and still do) are traitors? Or just the practical men who are building their country up?
And how did the Indians get out of that bind? By blowing shit up? Or by doing far, far more challenging acts of courage?
Go look at Yugoslavia, or whatever that country calls itself today. THERE's a country after your spirit. A bunch of gun-toting "heroes" of a loser country who don't have the balls to do the difficult thinking about why they're in such a predicament in the first place.
I made reference to
Agricola and
Things Fall Apart because both books are about individuals in that sort of situation - trying to help their people against both their own countrymens' smallness and the cruelty of overwhelming power. And needless to say, for the protagonists, it is not nearly so easy as you would like to think.
