Bad recipe

For our brothers and sisters in arms in France, and Britain, and Spain, and Germany, I pray today that you are safe.  You are situated on a front line of your own making, brought on by compassionate hearts. It is a bad recipe in which you have not been responsible for all the ingredients.

I know what has driven the situation that you find yourselves in.  It is occurring in our country as well.  We have a huge refugee issue already living in our country.  The vast majority of which are decent, law-abiding and hard working people just wanting the best for their family.

However, as is true in any population segment, there are convicted criminals, sociopaths, psychopaths and other dangerous people mixed into the otherwise peaceful mass of people.  It does not make coming here illegally okay, because they are, in the great majority, decent folk.  But, they do not makes us any more unsafe, by and large.

Hidden within this hidden population, are the seeds of great danger and concern.  There are radicalized individuals, and not just all radicalized Islamic jihadist.  We forget that narco-terrorists, who serve the drug lords are responsible for hundreds of more deaths than all of the Islamic jihadists combined in America.  Eco-terrorists have conducted more successful bombings and “attacks” in America, than all the major Islamic terrorist groups combined.  They have not been as deadly, but that is largely a matter of luck and scope.

We use them as a scapegoat, lumped in with the Islamo-terrorists, to ignore looking at our ingrown terrorism issues.  We have crazy people, with huge stockpiles of weapons, ammunition, and really dangerous and discouraging dogma, sprinkled throughout our country.  They almost slipped up and got famous at one point, but have since maintained their operational discipline, and started to filter back into the night and darkness.

They call themselves “militia” groups, as if the patriots that founded our nation would approve of them and their designs.  They are dangerously ethnophobic, though they do not recognize it.  They are dangerously sociopathic.  They are dangerously psychopathic.  Because of that, they are communally paranoid, communally insular and commonly reactive.

These are not folks that just believe in the Second Amendment.  These are folks that congregate on compounds, that are continuously patrolled and kept as secret as possible.  They communicate in code and secrecy.  They are disassociative of our core values, while claiming to represent them and preserve them.  They are given to publishing manifesto, have been violent to maintain the secrecy and “purity” of their order, and disregard lawful intervention and oversight as tyranny.  They believe in what they believe, and will enforce those beliefs at the point of arms on those who do not share them.

Who does that sound most like?  The Ruritans or Al Qaeda?  We have them, reportedly, in a majority of our states, on the fringes of society and gaining in popularity.  They are an ever present danger and an increasing security threat of much greater urgency than exterior forces.

What does this have to do with Paris Joe?  Glad you asked.  Before we condemn Europe for taking a known risk and responding to a significant human rights catastrophe, before we refuse to continue to honor our core American beliefs and assist in responding to that catastrophe, before we ignore our overwhelming responsibility in creating much of this crisis, consider our own backyard.  In this world, there is no shortage of crazy, no shortage of disturbed.  Some of it is charismatic and attractive, and the weak willed and damaged get drawn in.  There is nothing more dangerous than a damaged human being that is convinced they are trapped and have no choice but to lash out.  In the Middle East, they turn them into suicide bombers and mass shooters.  We have not settled on what they will be turned into here in America.

But, we should know that they are coming.  Living free in a communal society requires accepting some risk.  I do not condone criminal activity, and it should be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law.  But, if you buy into the premise of personal freedom, individual rights and a people-empowered government instead of a government-empowered people, there are risks.  It means that those with criminal tendencies, with secretive and paranoid natures, with anti-social diseases are difficult to monitor, control and deal with.

The price of freedom is danger.  Why were so many people willing to risk starvation, attacks by natives, privation and isolation, all over the world?  Because it meant freedom from whatever constraint motivated them.  I mean all over the world.  A hundred thousand years ago, it drove crossing of the Siberian land bridge.  Even the Yeti did it, if you believe in that sort of thing.  If you don’t, it drove the Exodus from Egypt, and the conquering of the Promised Land.

We should not be surprised that it motivates millions south of us, living in squalor, and I have been there, it is inhuman in large part.  If you lived in those conditions, you would do whatever it took to be free of those economic and social constraints.  We celebrate our heritage of brave forefathers, forsaking their homeland to be free of socio-economic tyranny.  Yet, we look down on people all over the world, today, that are motivated in the same way.

It is not okay to do it illegally.  It is not okay to do it with sociopathic goals.  But, it is going to happen and happen and happen, because there is no better place to be for our neighbors south of our border, than in the US.  There is no better place to be for Syrians, Egyptians, Libyans, than Europe.  Whatever criminality, abuse and discrimination are wrapped up in that, it is still an order of magnitude better.

And, we should not condemn that.  We should not allow the criminal element imbedded in a peaceful population to drive us to treat that peaceful population shamefully as a whole.  It is not just unAmerican, it is unChristian, unJewish, unMormon, unScientologist, unMuslim.  If you do not know your personal dogma well enough, contact me and I will help you find the proof of my statement within your belief system.

We are required to address the illegality of the situation.  We have to do that to protect our citizens, and those who are here illegally and just as endangered as we are.  That means that freedom does not necessarily look the same for our citizens and our uninvited immigrants.  But, there is still some amount of rights that these illegals are entitled to receive.  They are entitled to be physically safe, if in our custody.  They are entitled to make their case for sanction and asylum due to political and religious persecution.  They are entitled to be treated as a human being, not an inconvenient truth.  These protections do not make us weaker and more endangered.  These protections make us far stronger and more secure, and are the only sure path to find, detain and remove the criminal element that is so dangerous to us.

This is not going away tomorrow, no matter how many drone strikes we launch.  No matter how many boots we put back on the ground in some craphole, and make that craphole even crappier, it will not solve this issue.  We don’t need to hand things out, but we need to understand that some of the most potent war making we can accomplish, is to ensure and enlarge the economic reality in places our enemies congregate.  If we continue to make their lives better at home, we do not look as attractive as a destination.  Even for the crazies and criminally motivated.

We absorbed a huge, unbelievable, number of people after and between the World Wars.  We destroyed Europe, in the making of those wars, and as a result, we became the attractive place.  During and at the end of the Hundred Years War, we saw a similar phenomenon.  These are not new social behaviors or events.  Our complete inability to manage to grow and understand them is what truly sucks.  We forget our past, and try to focus internally, in isolation, to solve something that requires mighty action on the world stage.

It scares me, because we do not look at our own internal engine of issues, and recognize what is driving the external phenomenon that scares us more intensely.  We do not understand motivations that drive actions, nor do we care to dig very deeply to understand it.  That results in activity that amplifies the issues and drives further crisis.  It is a cycle that has been perpetuated since the end of Bush the First’s Presidency.  Midgets on the world stage, from both parties, have managed to convince us they are giants.  Their insular and ineffective actions have just continued to amplify the issue.

Translation, there was a reason Bush the First did not take over Iraq.  Creating that economic nightmare in the center of that hotbed of infant Facism, would only create a nightmare that the world was not equipped to handle.  Bush the Second, and Clinton before and Obama after, were not able to divorce themselves from the idiots whispering in their ears.  And, they managed to do the only thing worse than having Saddam and Kadafi in place, and remove them from power. Yay us!!!

We are reaping what we have sown.  The whole world is reaping what we (the whole world) have sown. We should consider that as we move forward.  This is important.  It is happening to our east, west and south.  We had better get the recipe right soon.  It tastes bad enough now.