And If You Did Know?

I have been watching the 9/11 commission hearings and one thing that keeps coming up for me is how much we are looking for who did something wrong which led to the tragedy of that day. I cannot help but think that it was one of those unavoidable things that happens in the world. It was a terrible thing and I do not think we can just accept that things like this happen without there being some way of stopping it. The problem with that is that the only way to stop it is to curtail the freedoms of everyone to the point where we are under surveillance continously. I hear a great deal about the Bush administration not taking the treat of terroism seriously and because of that the attacks happened. I think this is truly a case of not wanting to accept that awful things happen and that there is not a lot we can do about it. Because we do not live in a world where everyone knows what her or his actual needs are and how to fulfill them, we are going to have people doing things that impinge upon the rights of others to get their needs met. I look at the ways some Muslims are willing to sacrifice themselves for the promise of rewards in heaven and I think what a tragedy. What if their leaders were helping them develop into the best person they could be here. What if they were helped to love themselves and others and to put their energy into solving the problems instead of hating and wanting to destroy enemies.

Of course I look at our society and think that we are trained to be consumers and good little workers. What if the focus here was about loving self and others and looking for ways of making the world safer and more user friendly. So much of our energy is used up working to make money so we can have things. These things do not mean much and yet we spend most of our time and effort trying to have more stuff. There is not much money to be made in trying to make the world safe and happy, instead we are mostly motivated by fear. So we see the world as being scary and awful.

I know that governments are usually run by people who think it is their job to protect us from some real or perceived menace. For years here it was the Soviet “Red Menace” so the government was essential to protect us from communism and the threat of nuclear attack. We never really came under attack and we did not need the nuclear arms race to be safe, but once we began it was hard to stop, we had let the genie out of the bottle. So now we have huge stock piles of weapons that we do not need. We are also very afraid that some terrorist group will get a weapon and use it on us. Gee, could this have been averted by not developing these weapons in the first place? This is not an easy question and it brings up a number of other questions. One of these questions is how many weapons do we need? We have a military-industrial-congressional complex that seems to exist for the sake of itself now. They are always looking for ways of making more weapons and more money. They do not exist to make us safe. We do not need huge stock piles of weapons to be safe, and yet they continue to manufacture them. We put more money and energy into developing weapons than we do into anything else. What if we spent that money on developing ways of using our natural resources and the planet in such a way as to help it sustain us?

Some Muslim countries seem to try to turn their people into weapons, we seem to try to turn our resources into weapons. What if we used that energy differently? It is something to think about.