Thursday, February 07, 2008
Beautiful and Frightening
Some of the best blog pieces I have read are at the same time beautiful in regards to style and frightening in regards to content. Such is the case with the following post from my good friend Omar Alrikabi over at First Born Son. He is currently doing college ministry at the Wesley Foundation in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I envy the kids who are privileged to sit under his teaching. Check out his post here. And say a prayer for peace on earth.
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2 comments:
wow, interesting. Is Omar the husband of your seminary friend Jenn? I guess I had lost track of her.
Anyway, I read the blog and it is very hard for me to KNOW how to feel about that. I do believe that our government MUST have some extraordinary powers of surveillance in order to protect us against the extraordinary tactics and technological abilities of terrorists whose goal it is to reak havoc and/or destroy us. And I'm not talking even about the taking of a few airplanes and the murdering of a thousand innocents.
I believe that if a terrorist organization COULD murder millions of Americans on our own soil through chemical or biological or nuclear warfare, that indeed they would. And I wonder if this country's security procedures can ever keep up with their growing network, methods, and technology advances. There is nothing that America could ever do to make this fanatical fringe suddenly or even gradually like us, no matter what we do. I believe they will always hate us and will always want to kill us. But the problem of knowing WHO to monitor and who to leave alone seems to be one without a solution. I am personally willing to give up a little bit of my privacy rights in the interest of anti-terrorism efforts, but I know it's a slippery slope. I also know that if I ever suffered a serious invasion of my privacy by a government entity, as have Omar and Jenn, I would probably feel violated, and have a different opionion. I can understand why a person would disagree with me, I just would ask anyone who does, how they propose that our government can keep us safe without these kinds of surveillance activities. Thanks for sharing this thought-provoking story. MomK
It is a very hard issue which is one of the reasons I posted this - I think we need to think about it. Certainly protection is crucial and I think that I often take for granted the freedoms that I enjoy without pausing to think of the sacrifices. I think that I do this because I am constantly also trying to remember that, despite the rhetoric we hear all of the time, freedom is not the greatest good. Union with God is.
I don't pretend to know how Omar feels but I should think it would be pretty awful to be assumed a "bad guy" because of one's race or heritage. In reality, Omar is a strong Christian (as, so I understand, are many Iraqis) which goes to show that we have the dividing lines in our time all wrong. We hear that America is good and terrorists countries are evil. But it is much more complicated than that.
But I think that there are nonviolent means to thwarting terrorism. I always wonder what would happen if we as a nation sought better to live peaceably, to (gasp) remove our military from all of the countries we are in, to replace them with relief workers, and to spend the billions and billions that are going to our defense on helping other countries develop (not to mention the tremendous poverty problem in our own country). Would we be more easily attacked? Perhaps. But perhaps also we would begin on a path to where the motivations for terrorists actions would be removed. This in the long run would save many more lives, both combatants and non combatants, both foreign and domestic.
Incidentally, the only presidential candidate that I have heard seriously thinking along these lines was Ron Paul. And the other candidates laughed at him.
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