As the world has passed me by in the intervening days, I’ve sought some sort of response to its events. For some reason, it’s been like another 9/11 for me, my eyes dimmed, my heart sad. May God grant me just a moment to get out what burdens my heart:
I am no dove, understand. I believe war is a sad reality that will be with us until humanity’s life is snuffed out. As has been said, a person may be intelligent, empathic, and willing to compromise, but people on the whole are xenophobic, scared, and violent. People wish to acquire as many resources and as much power as they can, which is just peachy until encountering another such group. Thus, war is reality.
Nicholas Berg died this week, in full color, on tape. I have not seen the footage, but from descriptions, he was forced to make a statement to a camera before his hooded captors, and then he was beheaded. This was no guillotine or headsman’s axe: His head was sawn from his body by a knife, slowly, then shown to the camera as proof. Like Daniel Pearl, he’s a victim of a minority trying to scare an opponent with no stomach for war, a people divided against their own leaders.
And they are succeeding, by most accounts. The United States is at once the epitome of power, and yet the essence of impotence. Unlike Persia, Alexander, Shaka Zulu, or Castillian Spain, we fight our place in the world: We are de-facto hegemon of this planet, and yet we hate ourselves for it. We think ourselves better and more enlightened than our current station.
Thus comes my message: Suck it up. Until such power comes upon the world stage that it drags America into hell itself, it’s time we lost these illusions. This is the 21st century, closing on 200 years since the Monroe Doctrine, and it’s time we added another corollary: If you pose a threat to us, we’re coming after you.
Berg died horribly. Yet, so did soldiers on the American frontier, skinned alive, disemboweled, and left to die in the hot sun, the stench of their own rotting flesh their sole companion to eternity. So did the Boers of South Africa at their first encounter with the Zulu. So did the soldiers in Bataan. And Andersonville. And in the deserts of ancient Egypt when Pharoh ordered 10,000 men’s penises cut off and cast into a pile.
This is WHO WE ARE, people. Is it horrible? Yes. Is it profane against God? Yes. And yet, any society that has endured to the present has endured and inflicted the very same in its struggle for survival. Did not the children of Israel lay waste to Canaan? Land, resources, and freedom is rarely free for the taking, and likely won’t be again until we colonize other planets.
Make no mistake: I grieve for this man. I bemoan the state of humanity. And yet, if we are to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, we must find the resolve to absorb such horror as the price of our survival.
We *must* deal with it.