If We Were All Terrorist Targets, We Would Know It

It’s not really a secret, but the Kansas Curmudgeon was born in Nebraska. In Omaha, to be exact. The same Omaha that was the site of the shopping mall shooting earlier in the week. I had worked right across Dodge street from the Westroads Center for quit a while before I moved, at a tender age, to California. Incidents such as that one are so senseless. The shooter was obviously a disturbed young man. The dearth of mental health services available in our heartless right-wing-led society doubtless contributed to the deaths of these innocent people.

It does help to reinforce my belief, last stated here, that not very much has changed in America since the 9/11 tragedy, at least in terms of security. This time a mentally disturbed youth has killed 8 people in slightly more than a heartbeat. Although it took a bit longer, another mentally disturbed young man killed 32 at Virginia Tech earlier this year. Although incidents like this are not commonplace, they happen often enough to show that a single person, even (or especially) a mentally ill one, can kill multiple strangers quickly with relative ease.

So far, most of these incidents have been accomplished with guns, requiring at least some degree of marksmanship. What if our shadowy terrorists were well-organized, like they are in Gaza, and were using explosives instead? If that were the case, it would be even easier to kill even more people in our country. Yet, America is not full of secret bands of terrorists plotting such suicide missions here, or people would be getting blown up left and right and we would be bombarded by body counts from American terrorist incidents on the news every night.

That is not happening because the terrorists with whom we are involved in the so-called “War on Terror” are not well enough organized, not professional enough, or in this country in sufficient numbers to out-terrorize even a couple of lone, disturbed individuals who killed forty people in two very sad instances, despite a known history of mental problems that went untreated. The 9/11 attack occurred six years ago. It was a one-off, a very lucky enterprise. It was “lucky” in that law enforcement agencies were not on the lookout for such an attack, and it was lucky to succeed regardless, before somebody paid attention to all those internal warning memos and reports.

The little Bush has been lying to us about terror. The incidents perpetrated by a few mentally ill people show how easy it is to randomly kill people in this country. If there were terrorists trying, there would be bodies everywhere. The hatred of Middle-Easterners for America started long before the Bush administration scared the crap out of America with its lies about terrorism. In the twenty years of their hatred, we have had one large attack on our shores.

But George still has us running scared, giving him everything that he needs to become King George, by mongering fear in our country. This is ridiculous. Americans are not supposed to be this stupid. But apparently about half of us are, or George would have been laughed out of town the first time he ascended the national stage. Stop being stupid. Stop the little Bush maniac. And save some of the money he is squandering to treat people with mental problems. A tiny bit of money doing that will save more lives than the billions that the little Bush squanders weekly on his “wars”.


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