Ideas Are Good…

Posts Tagged ‘healthcare’

There have been 2,929 terrorism-related deaths around the world since the attacks on New York and Washington. (Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5889435/). There are also 45,000 American deaths each year associated with the lack of insurance (Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/09/18/deaths.health.insurance). Why do we spend BILLIONS in a war that kills so few? How does a fiscally suffering country find the money to fund such a war?

I have had this post for some time and never posted it but after seeing this article on Fast Company, I felt compelled to put it up.

It is February 2010 and we are still at war against “Terrorism”. Not a country, an evil dictator or alien invasion… terrorism. We are at war against terrorism because there is a very small group of people that scare us with their means of destruction but honestly, they are not very good at killing people. These small groups have been called terrorist because that is the tactic that they employ. Terror. A war against a tactic can never be won. When at war, there will always be the tactic of terror with which to cope. That is why a tactic, rather than a country, has been selected to fight. We will fight terror forever!

A war against anything intangible (like a tactic) will never be won and is not supposed to be won. That is why there has not been a war against anything but “situations and symptoms” in our country’s most recent history (i.e., war on drugs, war on obesity, war or illiteracy). A war against a person, a country or entity of some kind may be fought and even won. Such a war can be won by the removal of the person(s) in power, by killing them, assimilation of culture or other means that removes the ENTITY from being the cause of some threat. Terrorism has been deemed the enemy of our time because the people that profit from war understand that there is no other entity with which to go to war on earth. America will be at war against the tactic of terror until the last day there is an America.

If we are going to be terrorized by anything, be terrorized that while we fight a war against a tactic, we are held in its very grip. The American dollar is weak amongst sovereign nations and yet we find BILLIONS to fight against a small band of renegades in countries without running water and paved roads. American privacy and civil liberties are being eroded away to nearly nothing for the sake of banishing low-tech fanatics in places of the world our school children can not find on a globe. We have become the victims of the mere threat of terror and not entirely of terror itself.

If terror as a tactic is worthy of fighting because of the harm it can cause, there are far more scary things to think about when considering death and harm. Consider that most people die in America by way of our diet that our Government subsidizes and legalizes. Consider that more people die by heart disease, cancers and any number of illnesses than tactics of small extremist groups. Allergies, autism, cellular mutations and various forms of rampant disease are affecting more lives every day than terror ever will. Consider that symptoms are fought in America and never the cause. Consider that more people die in America as a result of insufficient health care than any number of terrorist attacks in the history of the world. Problems are always profitable for those that can perpetuate them. Consider for a moment that this perpetuation of the war on terror is done for the sake of profit and economic control by the richest people in the world.

If anything should scare the living daylights out of you it should be the greed that drives leaders to use fear against free people as a means to divert attention and accountability from positions of power and authority. If we are truly at war, why are laws enacted against the people of America? Should not our way of life and liberty remain intact while under attack from these “terrorist”? I am sorry to tell you this, but they are not. If America is worth protecting, why dismantle our way of life one new law and amendment at a time? Why are more laws and bigger Government needed to fight a small number of extremist in desolate places of the globe? If there really is a war, where is the tally of lives that represent even a fraction of a single-digit-percent of the lives taken by disease, abortion, accidents and the misuse of resources and technology for the sake of human beings? Take a moment and Google death statistics and you will be amazed how small of a problem terrorism is as a cause of death amongst human beings.

Killing people to stop people from killing is so primitive and backwards, words escape me in conveying my frustration. And isn’t that why we fight terror, because they might hurt someone? Wars are tools for profit and building governments, not taking care of the actual causes of human suffering. There is no terrorism beyond the fear we have that someone is going to hurt us or our family. The good news is, terrorism is the least of our worries. You will most likely die of heart disease or cancer.