What's In a Name

We should not spend much time debating the various aspects of the new book, Going Rogue, by Sarah Palin. I only want to say that Palin makes the point of all those who believe she was not and is not qualified to be a high level political leader in the nation by the very title of the book. Who is is that wants a Vice President or a President, or even a Governor or Senator to "go rogue"? There are about 6,465 better images than this for someone who was nominated by what was a major political party for the office of president. Enough said and we should forget the whole thing as a bad moment in the life of the nation.

Ft. Hood Violence is No Surprise

There is and will be a raging debate about what lies behind the killings at Ft. Hood. Putting all the specific theories which might turn out to be true, aside – a man who needed therapy, a man converted to radical Islamic Jihad, a man made desperate by both the stories he heard and his own orders to report to duty in Afghanistan – the larger picture is more simple and more scary.

If you train hundreds of thousands of men and women to kill, it is not surprising that they do not always kill who you trained them to kill. Some will kill themselves, some will kill innocent bystanders, some will kill others of their own army. Add to this that these men and women, trained to kill, are asked to fight in wars based on lies or wars without any end in sight, or wars that have no apparent reason for being fought and the odds go up. Add to this that the wars in which these men and women who are trained to killed fight are of the kind that accentuate the normal desentization, alienation, trauma and outright craziness that is necessary to fight a war and to kill other men and women and the odds get even higher that these men and women will kill themselves, innocent bystanders and even their own comrades in arms.
The question is where the madness lies: within these men and women or within the society that invites and pays them to be trained to kill for reasons they do not understand and in wars that, even within what is the craziness of war, are more intense, dangerous and cruel than ever before.
Here is my point. The person who pulls the trigger is responsible for the killings and that point should never be lost because "responsibility" is also the reason not to kill. But, we are also to blame. We pay for, permit and sometimes even encourage our nation to make killers out of these men and women and put them in situations where the violence we have sanctioned has neither moral direction or makes political sense. Eventually, we become the victims of our own sanctioning of the killing. This is another lesson we have not learned from previous wars, the most excrutiating example of which was Vietnam where the damage done to soldiers and, in consequence, to our own society was immense. Thousands of persons destroyed physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually whose illnesses of mind or spirit then cause additional damage upon immediate loved ones and friends and the community at large.
This is the uncounted cost of war: thousands of traumatized persons whose training in violence cannot be controlled by superior officers or higher moralities but explodes against themselves or others with ripples of negative effects traveling out into the community in all cases.
This is not an argument to excuse the actions of Hassan, or to imply that we take less seriously the damage that can be done by religious or ideological fervor that sanctions violence against others. Hasan is responsible. The religious and ideologies that sanction violence are responsible. And, so are we until we tell our government, our leaders to quit condemning us to self destruction by fighting wars based on lies, without reason, without end, without any measurable benefit to human beings. Only Hasan will be held responsible and pay the price for his actions. We will exonerate ourselves, hoping that we can continue to find others to pay the price for our irresponsibility.