jims musings

Yes­ter­day, I heard words come out of my six-year-old daugh­ters’ mouth, words which I wasn’t expect­ing for at least another six years. I was flum­moxed. I looked at my wife. She was look­ing at me, eyes large.

Made­line was telling us of a con­ver­sa­tion she’d had that day with a friend, Aubrey. Aubrey wanted to be bap­tized, and her Dad didn’t want her to. Made­line was recount­ing the con­ver­sa­tion to us: “…and then I told her that it was very impor­tant to get bap­tized, and that it was her life, and that she could do what­ever she wanted to do.”

Well. Six years old and already feel­ing empow­ered. I need to send a big Thank-You note to Glo­ria Steinem.

In other news, I see that all sorts of excit­ing things are hap­pen­ing around the world. More mahem in Iraq, a coup attempt in the Phillap­penes, and Iran con­tin­ues its work towards nukes. And that is just the top of the fold. My com­men­tary on it all: this is how the next gen­er­a­tion is going to be. With the col­lapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, things have changed dra­mat­i­cally. Nobody needs to pick sides and hide behind one of the two big boys on the play­ground any longer. Once again, as it has been for most of world his­tory, it is every man for him­self; the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is not really new.

What is dif­fer­ent though, are three things: 1) Nukes (Iran, North Korea) 2) Reli­gion (Mid­dle East) 3) Fast-paced infor­ma­tion movement.

Nukes: We real­ized at the end of World War 2 that a nuclear pearl har­bor would be unsur­viv­able. It was imper­a­tive to always keep a ready mil­i­tary to pre­vent a pre-emptive strike. Nukes quickly came to be used in a defen­sive mode, almost like the walls of a medieval cas­tle. The more war­heads you could stack around your coun­try, the higher the pile was, the safer you were. Now, Iran is behav­ing as though it would be will­ing to use nuclear weapons in an offen­sive mode, going so far as to threaten to nuke Israel if the United States attacked it. (This is the ulti­mate in hostage tak­ing, by the way.. the next step is to say Israel will glow in the dark unless the U.S. with­draws from Iraq. This sort of behav­iour will not be allowed to last very long.)

Reli­gion: Many impor­tant issues here, but I think we are see­ing the for­ma­tion of a new reli­gion. Like the early catholic church which found reli­gious rea­son to sup­port, endorse and encour­age war, fun­da­men­tal­ist islam will likely con­tinue on this path for quite some time. The cru­sades spanned over two hun­dred years. Item #1 will prob­a­bly shorten, but inten­sify, the excite­ment to come.

Infor­ma­tion Move­ment: I choose these words care­fully. The inter­net allows data to move quickly, but often times that infor­ma­tion is less than accu­rate. Pri­mary media soruces like to point out how they are bet­ter and more author­i­ta­tive, but they are gen­er­ally slower and still make seri­ous errors. (Deaths and rapes in the Super­dome after Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, the forged national guard doc­u­ments on 60 Min­utes.) Infor­ma­tion trav­els fast. Cor­rect infor­ma­tion trav­els slowly. Peo­ple for­get this, and often act on the first data (yes, some­times they have no choice) only to find their infor­ma­tion was wrong. Wars have begn this way.

I’m a lit­tle sad­dened for the good men who sac­ri­fced so much to bring peace to the world decades ago. I’m guess­ing they are less than hope­ful for com­ing gen­er­a­tions, given the out­look ahead. To them, I must say, trust in that God who saw you through your dark days. He will be there for us, too. I have faith in that.

The Islamic world is still in an uproar about the car­toons pub­lished in Den­mark. The sit­u­a­tion is an inter­est­ing one; a reli­gion which will not bend its stan­dards con­cern­ing Muhammed, and a soci­ety which will not com­pro­mise its free­dom of speech. A rock and a hard place, so to speak.

Some thoughts:

1) Why do moslems in the mid­dle east (and Indone­sia and the Phillip­penes) riot so vio­lently, whereas in other areas they do not? (Paris notwith­stand­ing…) In gen­eral, it seems that when Islam con­trols the polit­i­cal machin­ery as well as the reli­gious, these sorts of things hap­pen with greater fre­quency and energy. Ergo, the gov­ern­ments of the involved coun­tries are at least com­plicit with these events, and there­fore respon­si­ble for the deaths and destruc­tion. Given the rel­a­tively poor con­di­tions in which the cit­i­zens of these coun­tries live, it appears to me that Islam, as a polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy, is a fail­ure. And when a por­tion of a reli­gion fails…

2) I’ve often won­dered how dif­fer­ent things would be in the Mid­dle East, par­tic­u­larly in Pales­tine, if peace­ful resis­tance had been advo­cated? Had the Pales­tini­ans fol­lowed the road paved by Ghandi/MLK, I sus­pect world opin­ion would be very much against the Israeli actions. But see­ing how their pri­mary goal of ‘wip­ing Israel from the map’ was a hair shy of peace­ful, maybe this wouldn’t have worked after all. Can some­body explain to me exactly why the nation of Israel is such an affront to mus­lims?
3) Maybe we shouldn’t refer to ter­ror­ists with their word ‘jihad’. It implies we accept their notion of holy war. Maybe we should use the ara­bic word for ‘mur­derer’ or ‘moron’.

4) The riot­ing doesn’t help Iran’s PR effort regard­ing nukes. If you are walk­ing down the street and a rav­ing, wild-eyed man appeared, wav­ing a gun, you would be quite wor­ried about your safety. On the other hand, you would think noth­ing of pass­ing a police offi­cer, car­ry­ing a sim­i­lar weapon, on that very same street. Iran, and Islam in gen­eral, is mak­ing itself appear as a dan­ger­ous rav­ing man. Nobody will trust them, now, with nukes.