HOW TO END TERRORISM

It occurs to me that whatever the supposed political ideology of a terrorist is, they all have a few things in common. One, they are zealots for whatever ideology they espouse. Two, especially among suicide bombers, they believe that their greatest accomplishment, their guaranteed ticket into heaven or wherever, will be to sacrifice their life when they obliterate their target. This is the ultimate fatalism. A suicide bomber has no real feelings of self-worth when being alive--they are deadly tools to be wielded by whoever commands them. Three, terrorists may be highly intelligent, but in the same way that Tucker Carlson can be highly educated yet say some of the most ignorant things imaginable, a terrorist's education is limited to a certain worldview focusing on very narrow beliefs which reinforce the propaganda of whoever it is that seeks to wield them. Think about it--if a terrorist really stopped to think about what they were trying to accomplish by blowing themselves or others up, if they thought about how terrorism succeeds in speading terror but rarely in overthrowing the force it is used against, if they looked or truly understood the socioeconomic background of most of those that practiced terrorist acts then, well, they almost certainly wouldn't be terrorists.

To sum up, a poor, brainwashed, undereducated person with low self-worth and no greater worldview makes an ideal terrorist. Therefore, it is education, true education, not "misinfomation", that could be the greatest force to end terrorism in the world, more so than any bombs or bullets or even bucket fulls of cash. (There is plenty of money in the Middle East, and there are homegrown terrorists in the United States, the richest country in the history of the world.) Instead of "targeted assassinations" countries should be targeting minds. Every man, woman and child in the world should have easy access to the Internet, to books, to a safe classroom with the resources they need to understand math, science, philosophy, history and social studies and more. How do we do this? I don't know, but there's a world full of people smarter than me who must have some ideas. We can't let them get drowned out by people who preach hate, war and exploitation in the name of God, Allah, the almighty dollar or some combination of the three.

Now what a wonderful world that would be--a planet full of people smart enough to know their self-worth, people who know they have brains that could accomplish much more because it's not blown out of their skull.

Peace...

Note: This post was originally published by this blogger at http://rdonkey04.blogspot.com under the post, "How Not to Blow Yourselves, or Others, To Pieces".