Thursday, May 15, 2008

Spreading Comfort and Succor to the Poor of the World

Dear George,

It is axiomatic that the weak always slander the strong. One of the slanders being directed at the United States is that we have become a warrior nation. It makes for good press and interesting books, but it is simply not true. The warrior is a gore beslimed behemoth carving a bloody path through the enemy with his broadsword.

Picture, if you would, a clean-cut young man sitting before a laptop in an air-conditioned command center somewhere in the Nevada desert. His fingers dance across the keys as he controls an MQ-1B Predator drone. Through its camera he sees a mother shooing her children into a house occupied by militants who have been firing on a coalition patrol. He presses a button and an AGM-114 Hellfire missile screams into the house and reduces both it and its occupants to rubble.

I ask you, is this the portrait of a warrior? After all, he really didn’t kill anybody; the Hellfire did that. All he was doing was following orders.

I bring this up as our brave troops are engaged in some constructive urban renewal in Sadr City, a blighted and unproductive slum in Baghdad. Rather than risk the lives of our brave boys by storming militant strongholds, the Pentagon finds in more cost effective to call in airstrikes and destroy the buildings all together.

A military spokesman contrasted our humanity with the enemy’s inhumanity when he pointed out that, “The sole burden of responsibility lies on the shoulders of the militants who care nothing for the Iraqi people” because they insist on defending their homes that are located in the crowed slum, thus making it necessary for the U.S. military to level their homes in order to pacify the area. The spokesman then went on to ask, “What does that say about the enemy? He is heartless and evil.”

Unfortunately, the author of the above article fails to understand the rationale behind our assault on Sadr City when, in speaking of our troops, he says, “Now, they are headed for nowhere, for the heart of a slum city which they cannot hold in a guerrilla war where the taking of territory and the occupying of neighborhoods is essentially beside the point. They are headed for oblivion, while trying to win the hearts and minds by shooting missiles into homes and enclosing people in giant walls which break families and communities apart, while destroying livelihoods.”


What this writer fails to understand is that you are a thinker who thinks the big thoughts. And one big thought you’ve thought is the dilemma that is now facing humanity: the world population is growing as its resources are shrinking. There is no longer enough to go around. Humanity is afloat in an overcrowded lifeboat. Sacrifice is called for.

There is but one solution to this dilemma, and that is to reduce world poverty by euthanizing it. Our endless war is not against terrorism, nor is it against drugs. Instead, you have fired the first shot in our endless war against the favelas of the world. Food goes further when there are fewer mouths to feed.

Why should we, as a civilized nation, allow a child to die an agonizing death from disease and malnutrition when we can end its life in a split-second with a well-placed explosion?

You are the world’s new Mother Theresa, bringing succor and comfort to the downtrodden and impoverished by giving to them the gift of an eternal life spent in paradise. Surely, God is smiling on you.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

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