Posted by
SDS on Sunday, August 13, 2006 11:05:28 AM
t is a tradition at performances of Peter Pan for the whole audience to
affirm their belief in fairies at the end of the performance. And the
tradition seems charmingly childlike and positive. Surely no harm
comes from that. But it is not so good to take that belief out of the
theatre with you.
The real world is full of hard choices and evil people who are not so
easily defeated as Captain Hook. And when we face them we need to make
clear eyed adult choices. The choices we face with regard to dealing
with Islamofascist terrorists are like the choices we face on a
diagnosis of cancer.
You go to see your doctor because of a sharp pain here or there and
some discomfort. You go in for the recommended colonoscopy or
mammogram. You haven't been feeling really great, but you haven't been
feeling really bad, not at all. You hoped the doctor would prescribe a
pill or two and send you on your way.
Instead, your doctor tells you you have cancer. And he says, here are
your choices-- go on with your life and feel progressively worse over a
short period of time and then die prematurely in great pain, or have a
painful surgery right now, followed by chemotherapy that makes you
sick and makes all your hair fall out and face a reasonably good
prospect of a cure and a much longer life. I have known many people who
have faced that choice and nearly all of them choose to undergo the
immediate pain, discomfort and nausea-- not to mention the monetary
cost-- of surgery and treatment as the price they have to pay for a
longer life.
Those are the choices we, as a nation, faced, on September 12, 2001.
Islamofascism is a cancer on the world. It has already invaded and
taken over whole countries like Afghanistan, Iran and Somalia. The
doctor at the Whitehouse has told us what our options are and we chose
the right one but now, like a bunch of angry teenagers, a large number
in our midst have begun to hate the doctor for all the pain he is
inflicting on us, forgetting that that pain is the price for our
freedom and our long term security.
In the meantime there is a party out there that takes advantage of the
human desire to avoid pain by selling the public a bunch of
fairytales. Like so many snakeoil salesmen they tell us they point out
that before the surgery we were feeling pretty good, after all and now
we are feeling way worse than we did when we went into the hospital.
"We never should have tried to fight this cancer", they tell us. "It
was a bad idea" they tell us. "It wasn't cancer". They tell us.
"just a benign and peaceful tumor that wouldn't harm anyone." In our
hearts and guts we know that what they are saying is not true, but like
rebellious teenagers, some of us hate the doctor for inflicting the
only known cure.
We need to keep going back to the basics of the war. Our options are
1) a long and painful fight which we might not win or 2) letting the
Islamofascists take over the world without a fight. The idea that
Osamas and Al Zarqaqwis will just stop fighting if we leave them alone
is about as realistic as believing that your cancer will go away if you
take a lot of vitamins and believe in a cure.