One more time....why do they hate us?

Isn't it a joke, actually, to think that the WTC was attacked by a small group of people covetous of our way of life? Especially when one considers the attackers were such fervent believers in a perverted form of their religion that they were willing to sacrifice their lives to strike a blow against a nation they considered to be the "great Satan."

No, it wasn't envy of our freedoms but hatred of our policies that drove them. They felt they had legitimate, un-redressed grievances against the United States for its years of meddling in their respective countries' geographic sphere. Certainly a catalog of such complaints could be compiled -- the principal one being the establishment of a settler nation in their midst that created a mass of refugees -- but no matter how large the anthology, it could in no way justify their bombing of two skyscrapers and the taking of nearly 3,000 innocent lives.

George W. Bush and his assemblage of policymakers have tried mightily to perpetrate a fraud against the American public by shifting the focus of attention -- from their inability or unwillingness to secure diplomatic progress in the trouble spots of the world -- to the victims of those failures. "They hate our freedoms" is simply a way of appealing to innate, chauvinistic tendencies that lurk in the American culture. As has been shown time and again, the public can be easily whipped into patriotic fervor, primarily because we are a pugnacious lot to begin with. We just love a good fight, as witnessed, on any given weekend of professional football, by the roaring of millions of fans for the hit that knocked the quarterback into a concussion-induced stupor. Face it, America; we love violence whether it's in movies, video games, sporting events or far-off battlefields.

...Of course, there have been millions of words written about the events of the last two years and one cannot help but grow weary of them. Many of us desire to turn down the volume, to stop having to read about the dying and wounded soldiers in far off places, to ignore worries about our veterans and their lousy health care and shrinking benefits, to abstain from thinking about our diminished Bill of Rights, to ignore the ruckus about rigged elections, to pay no attention to plans for a repeat performance complete with no voter paper trails, to refrain from being disaffected by the constant stream of propaganda being spoon-fed to us by the agitprops Ashcroft, Cheney and Rumsfeld, to not think about yellow or orange alerts, and to not give a damn about budget deficits and if the war on terrorism will ever end.

It's way too much to think or worry about without including why there are so many people around the globe who hate us. Let's just accept the premise that they resent our materialism -- our big cars, fancy abodes, disproportionate consumption of resources and fat bellies -- and a justice system where a person is judged innocent until proven guilty. Right?

Are you ready for some football?

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