Re: OT: Inflammatory Post of the Week

Jim wrote;

"I'm frustrated because we're not fighting the same way. Send in a hit
team, under cover of darkness, and take Zarqawi out... and deface the
body in any fashion necessary to make sure he goes to Islamic Hell...
and make sure it gets on al Jazeera TV. If they refuse to carry the
news, blow 'em away too."

If that's how you truly feel there's no possible argument to change
your mind. Emerson realized as much, "Sometimes a scream is better than
a thesis." People are forever finding novel reasons to kill but there's
no fundamental reason to value life. It's not reason but a sense of
compassion and love that determines what we value in this world. Nobody
slaps their head and suddenly "gets" compassion. So to see you write of
spending Thanksgiving with your grandchildren in the same thread you
that you talk of a lust to murder other people's equally innocent
grandchildren puts me in mind of the begonias tended by camp commandant
Hoss' wife just outside the northeast wall at Auschwitz.

"Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their
hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and curelty, and in their
kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this
is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling
and intelligence. Virture and vice were warp and woof of our first
consciousness, and they will be the fabric of or last, and this despite
any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy
and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off
the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean
questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?"
John Steinbeck, "East of Eden", Chapter 34 (2nd paragraph from the top)

I wrote:

> (blah-blah)...that we Americans care so little for the liberties bestowed
>upon us by our forefathers that we'd immediately cast them aside for
>the sake of some real or perceived gain in temporary safety.

To which you replied:

"Read some Benjamin Franklin."

Jim, I can guess what quote you're thinking of (it made the rounds on
the Internet a while back) athough I can't figure out why you'd mention
it - given that it explicity restates the point I that I was making.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." B. Franklin,
Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor, Nov. 11, 1755

Regards,
Mike

.

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