And Now, Back to the Outrage

The news coming out of Europe is bad indeed.  I'm getting this strong feeling that much of the world is now joining the United States in getting absolutely fed up with terrorists.  Why now? Why not a decade ago?  Why did it take so long?

I don't rightly know.

Maybe it's just that terrorism, in most cases, simply fits the "not my problem" category.  After all, even 9-11, as much as it shocked our nation and effected the course of our world for the past 14 years, was still just a "so sad for you," kind of moment.  The French are wondering right now if the rest of the world really understands what they're going through.  I have heard impassioned pleas from Nigerians for help in dealing with Boko Haram, but even their own government seems to think that the thing can be contained.

Maybe it's that all too familiar bugaboo: failure of empathy.

Maybe we really will put up with far too much as long as it doesn't directly effect us.

Maybe this has gotten to a point where so many people have lost their innocence in this regard, that there is going to be a reprisal.  That's the dark undertone one might hear if you listen hard, even from among Muslims, there's this sense that the terrorists have gone too far.  There seems like there just might be a truly brutal clamp down coming, or the sort that bends even the most noble intentions into vengeance.

There was this movie from a while back called Starship Troopers, it was the story of what happened when earth was attacked by a race of giant insects from some planet far away.  The bugs are terrifying, really terrifying, and all of humanity finally unites in their quest to defend Earth against the menace.  You see all races and creeds working together to fight the bugs.  In the course of the movie, you get the gist that the director is making a point about our inhumanity when we get scared, we get violent.  You could very easily see the bugs as evil and once you do that, pretty much anything is fair game, any kind of violence, torture or genocide.

The question asked by the movie, which is otherwise not a very good movie, is also asked by the more recent Ender's Game, do the ends justify the means?

Will it really advance the collective glory of our species if we rise up as a global community and curb stomp the terrorists?

It would certainly make me feel better, for a second.

The problem is that I suspect a new evil would rise: remember how we "defeated" communism, we actually did so with fairly non-violent means (though we had the constant threat of mutual annihilation all the while).  But when Communism was gone, we were left with the twisted offspring of the cold war, and they turned on us.

We trained the Mujahadeen to fight the Soviets, and the Mujahadeen became the Taliban.  Osama Bin Laden cut his teeth fighting for Afghanistan, and when that was done he turned his sights on the next great Satan... that would be us.

Boko Haram, ISIS, the Taliban, they all need to be stopped, they're twisted and violent, they're the next incarnation of the hatred and fear that has driven the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, but how they are stopped is important.  The superhero approach is not going to work.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the world is fed up with this sort of nonsense, Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Atheist, we're all freaking tired of the mess.

But how do we clean it up without making a bigger mess?

How do we wade into the quagmire without getting stuck?

It's pretty clear that we need to get the bad guys, but can we do it without becoming bad guys?