KILLING FIELDS

Notes of Concern…

   …Jack Blair

KILLING FIELDS

Almost every day I awake to learn of new carnage somewhere in the world. Sixty four dead here, 5 dead there,beheading a priest, attacking a Mass, hundreds wounded, people being more cautious in their travels, our government telling our citizens abroad to shelter in place because going outside could make them targets.

These stories get huge play on social media, in the printed news and on television.

I try to remind myself that in the overall course of events these tragedies are small, they do not compare to the dead counts when we are actually at war with another country. Somehow it is a matter of the expected and the unexpected.

Every life counts and when I read of the loss of even one my heart breaks.

But I do not believe we have a credible solution to ending these kinds of killings. We don’t know where these enemies are. We don’t know which of the various radical groups has gotten to them, invaded their brains, and sent them out as mercenary killers. More importantly, we don’t know which of the mentally ill Americans are being radicalized simply by reading and watching.

Until we do find a way to track terrorists  and put them down this is going to continue unabated. I suggest that some of our own Judaeo Christian heritage prevents us from making the hard decision to meet them with the same kind of indifference to life that they demonstrate. And readers, our enemies count on our thinking that way. Our morals, beliefs and traditions are their most effective weapons.

Bottom line: their religion celebrates murder. Our religion condemns it.

When they kill they are going to paradise. 

When we kill we are going to hell.

If we are to survive these wounds, these multiple knife wounds and bullet deaths it will require some revisiting of our own thinking. Do we have a duty to keep killers from killing and, if so, does that mean our killing is noble. Or is the killing, no matter the reason, simply unacceptable.

To those who find killing unacceptable under any circumstances, it is incumbent on you to put forth a different path for ending this horrible course of action taken by sworn enemies of ours.

For those of you who would consider the killing of the killers of innocents to be appropriate, it is incumbent on you to select people to run our government who have the strength and commitment to carry out policies of identify, discover and eliminate.

Not easy decisions morally or religiously or politically.

But the head in the sand approach isn’t going to work.