The best of the best is guarding the Christmas tree in Berlin this Christmas (“Mass of Christ”), in an attempt at a promoting normalcy in a world without rules. A Muslim played bowling for Christians with a truck by driving it straight through a crowed of Christmas revelers a couple of days ago.
How much demolition will it take to wake slumbering Christendom? What are we waiting for? The Ayatollah booted the Shaw out of power almost 40 years ago, signaling the beginning of the modern revival of a fundamentalist Islam that we are still dealing with today. What are we waiting for? Rows and rows of battle lines forming for a full frontal attack? That image is the definition of “war” to most Americans
. Asymmetrical warfare at the global level is so unfamiliar that does not satisfy our need for certitude. We want to know who the bad guys are and that they are a real threat before we commit to swinging the battle ax. So we wait. We wait for the big battles and rows of tanks to confirm we are good and “they” are bad and need to be neutralized. If this is the case, if we are waiting for some familiar set of circumstances to fire the starting gun, we are screwed.
How fragile is the Culture of the west? Must we imagine and engineer fields of obstacles to skirt the Washington monument, Wall Street or the White house? Do we forget the paralysis that followed 9/11? An entire nation grounded as all airports in the U.S. were shut down. Where there was but one passenger plane left in the air above American soil? This single aircraft carried our president. We were at war.
It is not foolish or particularly paranoid to be vigilant when there are millions of willing human bombs just itching to kill themselves for their religion.
When do we make our move? Will the clear and present danger only be recognized by a mushroom cloud over a major American city?