I stole this graphic from MetaCrawler. I'm not sure if there's any kind of copyright restrictions or such on it, but I'll just keep it here until someone tells me to take it down.

First off, I must say that of course I am shocked and disgusted by what the terrorists have done. I can't even begin to imagine the horrors of the innocent victims. From the panic-stricken passengers on the hijacked planes, to the people buried in the rubble...it's just gruesome, and these terroists were less than human to have been able to so coldly, so callously end innocent lives in such a brutal manner.

However, I'm also worried about how America is handling all this. The US government is missing the point entirely, and the populace seems to be in agreement. The attack seems to have stirred all-out bloodlust. Go to vote.com and look at the polls relating to this event...the vast majority of people want to end the ban on assasinating foreign leaders, deliberately ignore the risk of killing innocent civilians in foreign countries, declare war on Afghanistan, declare war on Iraq while they're at it just for the hell of it, and so on. And no, I'm not making any of that up, go check those polls out and see for yourself.

Americans aren't concerned about justice, or even revenge. What's driving them is nothing short of absolute bloodthirstiness. Why can't they realize that this just puts them exactly where the terrorists are? For example, let's look at the desire to deliberately not care about innocent foreign deaths. Americans want to strong-arm countries harboring suspected terrorists, bombing them to oblivion. They only want to care about the main objective, as well as maybe completely leveling the "enemy" countries while they're at it. Just for the sake of bloodlust, they want to blow up buildings, they want to burn things to the ground, they want to kill, kill, kill.

Is this not EXACTLY what the terrorists wanted to do? They blew up buildings and brutally took innocent lives. In return, Americans want to blow up buildings and brutally take innocent lives. This is wrong...no one, no government, no military division, no private citizen, should ever take an innocent life. I'm all for the US capturing and punishing those responsible for the September 11 attacks. What I'm not for is for America to raze and pillage entire countries while it's at it. Don't destroy innocent people, a vast number of which are just as shocked, horrified, and disgusted by what these terrorists did as Americans are.

Yes, there are people in foreign countries who are "on our side". The American media seems to be trying to dehumanize entire countries that the US is about to attack, by only showing the anti-America demonstrations, the flag burning, the people supporting the Taliban and chanting "Death to America". But that does not reflect the opinion of everyone in those countries. And even if it did, what of it? The US has pissed off several countries with its imperialistic foreign policies, as well as pissing off many of its own citizens with its smothering domestic policies. Should it round up all dissidents and "take care of them"? Of course not. That's what Nazi Germany did. That's what the bloodthirsty monarchs of the eighteenth century did, and that's part of why America rebelled in the first place. To call the king a tyrant was a capital offense. Is America to rebel against that policy only to implement it itself?

Even when America's citizens are fully complacent, they are being persecuted anyway. Not only are bigoted laws still intact (gays can't give blood, even though they want to and America desperately needs blood after the attacks), even more policies are being introduced. Anyone of Arab descent is now a walking target inside the US. They could be pounced on by a fierce mob of vigilantes with anti-Arab sentiment. They could try to escape that and seek help from the police, only to be pounced on by a fierce mob of POLICE OFFICERS with anti-Arab sentiment. Proposed "anti-terrorism leglislation" reflects this attitude, basically all but subjecting Arab-Americans to the same types of horrors the Japanese-Americans were subjected to during World War II. I won't get into the exact details of the legislation, but the Libertarian Party's homepage does a good job of explaining them.

Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free...and I'll beat them severely and send them back home because they're not white enough and they worship the wrong God. Let's hear it for the Land of the Free.

Politicians say the terrorists are trying to attack our freedom, that this is a war on democracy, that America has to protect its freedom and stop the terrorists at all costs. But what if the cost IS America's freedom? By imposing these fascist sanctions on its own citizens, America is following the lead of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and the Taliban's Afghanistan. The US is effectively sending terrorists this message: You can't rob us of our freedom. We're fully capable of doing that ourselves.

America has gone through a lot of wars. It has fought the war on Alcohol, the war on Hitler, the war on Communism, the war on Drugs. Now that politicians are calling this a war on Democracy, America should stop and ask itself which side it's on.


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