Monday, April 9, 2018

“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.


From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst
9 April
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that Abraham Lincoln is planning on running for President in 2020, not against Donald Trump but against Senator Phineas T. Windbag. How would he treat the great issues of our day?
Take terrorism - 9/11, for example. If Lincoln had experienced 9/11 he would have seen what you and I saw:
    19 guys with box cutters changed the course of history;
    they were motivated by bottomless hatred;
    their "success," although a fluke, was massive, and we can't afford any more such “successes;”
    the reaction of the West, based largely on fear, was universal, namely, kill ‘em all.
I would suggest Lincoln would have seen more than that, namely,
    that one-step fear-driven reaction, having little in the way of logical progression, is both incomplete, ineffective and dangerous;
    there's little difference between the live-fast-die-young kid who destroys for Isis in the Middle East and the live-fast-die-young kid in Chicago who guns down some other Chicago kid - "you disrespect me, I'll disrespect you!" The anger of both sets of kids has at its base a despair spawned by a life of economic deprivation.
    Lincoln, maybe quoting Gandhi [“Poverty is the worse form of violence”], might very well propose attacking that economic disparity, on the assumption that redressing economic inequality will dissipate the appeal of Isis for otherwise despairing Middle-Eastern youth, as well as street gangs for otherwise despairing US youth.
But then, if Lincoln happened to be a candidate for President in 2020 and proposed such a policy, his opponent would paint him as a heartless proponent of Isis/gangland violence.
And you and I might howl in agreement.
[But what if Lincoln were right?] 

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