Cowardly Patriotism
Last week, driving through Washington state, I saw this bumper sticker: My first reaction was anger. I remember well how, following the 9/11 attacks, my country went insane with bloodlust. We wanted desperately to find someone, anyone, responsible and teach those monsters a lesson. We wanted to bomb their camps, invade their countries, obliterate every human being who was in any way involved with any organization that might have had something to do with this attack on America. And when rooting out the actual terrorists proved more difficult than we'd bargained for, and capturing the mastermind of the atrocity an elusive goal that was to prove, for more than a decade, unattainable, we found a different target, and rained down our fury on Iraq, a country that had had nothing at all to do with the attack, but did have a real jerk for a president. Just to be clear: for all the empathy I may have felt for that reaction, I opposed it. I was living in a community called the Pe...