The superficial bright and shiny skin of our progressive technological civilization cracked under the harsh reality of these times to expose its true festering rotting underbelly last week.  America, a country supposedly founded under the grace of a supreme deity and seemingly protected by His divine power—until now, fell victim to a force of terror utilizing and attacking the very symbols of the supposedly great accomplishments of the twentieth century.  But the 21st Century has usured in a new and terrifying time where nothing is sacrosanct and no one is safe.
               In reality, the rest of the world has been living under those conditions for quite some time.  The United States, assured of its supremacy both politically and ideologically, has not only carried the policies of manifest destiny forward on the global economic front but has assumed the mantle of judge and jury for every traditional religious, political and socio/ethnic national group abroad in the matters of individual freedoms, perceived injustices, and tyranny for many decades.
Our 18th century American descendant roman-euro-anglo-christian perceptions of the outside world have led us into taking on the role of world policeman, confidant, banker, confessor, and professor to every undeveloped struggling third world country with resources deemed important to our interests.  And while we may decry the horrific consequences of the immoral acts of the recent past we must accept the responsibility for having done our part to teach the rest of the world just how to perform such acts.
              For 50 years the American government and corporate America has held hands in supporting countless terrorists and insurrections to promote our own international interests.  Under the guise of political and economic idealism we have assassinated leaders, supplied monies, weapons, and advisors to train “idealistic thugs” to pursue their goals while furthering our own.  The death and destruction of these acts has accumulated far more victims than recent days but attracts less attention because we have utilized less sophisticated methods, no less brutal in their results than airplanes and jet fuel.  We provide cash, weapons and training to soldiers of fortune in Mexico to murder and terrorize Indians who initially wanted nothing more than the right to plant communal plots of corn.  Then we bristle when they organize and begin to retaliate labeling them insurgients in their own land.  Always we view those helping to further our interests as patriots, and those opposing us as terrorists.  We stay out of struggles between european whites, as in Ireland, yet involve our-selves immediately if non-christian peoples are involved—as in Serbia/Bosnia/Croatia.
              We give our former allies against the Soviets in Afganistan, the vehemently anti-American Taliban, 43 million to declare opium farms, (one of the few cash crops available to poor Afgani farmers), “against the will of God”.  to get press for our anti-drug efforts when we are really trying to pave the way for our large corporations  interests in the oil pipeline that must pass through Afganistan from rich Russian fields.  At the same time we consistantly involve ourselves with their sworn enemies the Israelies, station troops in the region maintaining a large military presence, and then act surprised that  Bin Laden, harbored and supported by the same Taliban, would be so audacious as to be responsible for the acts on our Eastern shores.  Where once we considered him a valuable ally and patriot,  now he has become a terrorist and few ask why or what turned him so passionately against us.
              In the long run, the truth might be better served examining who stands to gain the most economically and politically from these tragedies.  Surely the CIA knew what was in the wind.  The plan was presented in detail a few years ago by a pilot who trained with Bin Laden, when he was arrested in the Phillipines.  He outlined a plan to hijack and utilize a commercial airliner to facilitate a suicide attack on CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virgina.
             Who is so naive that they do not believe that there are those capable of withholding vital intelligence to further other covert interests?  It would not be the first time..
              The simple answer—to blame it on fatalistic fundamental fanatic Islamists is almost too expedient and convenient to be acceptable.  And though it may turn out to be true, it is also the most hoped for answer to the question of responsibility.  Americans love having an evil enemy or empire to war against almost as much as fanatic Islamists love to teach their children about the “Great Satan” America, the Babylon of the modern world.
              For those Americans naive enough to wonder what we have done to engender such hatred and labels, we must remind them that while our purposes may or may not be altruistic, we are the great “meddler”.  Our economic favors are usually only bestowed on that small segment of the population in a direct position to help us control or access the resources we desire.  In the Middle East, our development of their petroleum makes a few vulgarly rich while giving the remaining populations, wallowing in poverty and envy—or attempting to hold on to traditional ways—a genuine reason for despising us.  Further propaganda and our obvious wealth makes us an easy target for those who have lost loved ones in the many conflicts over oil, not to mention our alliance with their longtime enemy—the State of Israel.
             Globally, we are known to do “whatever it takes”, utilizing our vast resources of economic power and military might overtly or covertly to support and  further our interests.
             “In 1973 the people of Chile watched in horror similar to our own, as their capitol building was bombed, their elected President assassinated, and their friends and family herded into the National Stadium and other detention centers, then battered and killed by the thousands. U.S. Agency files more than establish the deep involvement and responsibility of the CIA for the Pinochet coup and its violent aftermath. The CIA is also responsible for the bloody 1954 coup in Guatemala, and the  frightening repression which followed. The United Nations Truth Commission report of 1999 severely criticized our intelligence community for its close collaboration with and support for the Guatemalan military throughout its counter-insurgency campaign. The army was found responsible for some 93% of the war crimes, which included the torture, murder and “disappearance” of some 200,000 civilians and the massacre of some 660 Mayan villages.  The U.N. also ruled that the army was guilty of genocide; the same army the CIA had chosen as its close friend and partner. These actions were not taken to protect American lives from terrorists, but rather, to coldly guard our cash flow.”(*J. Harbury)
             The “War On Drugs” is by far the largest international conspiracy to affect the policies of foreign nations for purposes other than the one so obviously stated.  Another far-reaching conglomerate goal, the pursuit of intensely profitable heretofore unavailable fossil fuels, utilizes much of the covert support offered by US intelligence agencies and black ops groups, often without the knowledge or consent of those who we suppose to be representing the “People” of the United States.  It has been well documented by former military and government personnel as to how far covert national groups are willing to go in their support of terrorists and thugs to further “our” economic or political agendas abroad.
             Often we put forward the concept of free enterprise, aiding economic and political terrorism, the result being that everywhere the common foreign citizen is left hating our comparitively wealthy guts for supporting tyrannical forces of terror and coersion while we pour money and military resources into the already well-to-do self-serving upper classes, who are getting pumped full of the same same TV commercial propaganda for consumerism and cultural homogenization that we are.
             The question, “what do we do about terrorists”, should lead us first to the mirror—to examine the dirty laundry not only of our distant but of our recent past.  Our commitment to this technological and economic homogenzation of the world that so many traditional peoples object to is what engenders so much resentment.  Traditional people do not automatically assume, as we do, that the world is a better place for this technological, consumeristic, and predominantly Christian-led civilization.  It is arguable whether the supposed advances we have created and accumulated have increased the quality of our lives.  It is certain that it has not led, for a greater part of the world, to a safer, more comfortable life.
              It is only here, where generations of fattened Americans have led safe and ‘civilized’ lives of plenty, that people have the time and energy to intellectually debate the finer points and elements of our condition.  Only in the wealthy areas of the world is there talk of the social, political, and spiritual evolution of our species. Elsewhere the world is consumed by the realities of a dangerous and unassured future, compounded by the lack of peace and necessities in their daily life.  There are many whole cities that resemble the aftermath in New York, where people live in daily fear, and have for many years.
             We have been led down this dangerous path by a few wealthy conglomerate corporations and entities who sell consumerism as the God of the 21st century.  Aided by the premeditated utilization of  world television to further the goals of a civilization committed to a willy nilly global expansion of international commerce dependant on finite and therefore extremely profitable resources, they pursue their goals ruthlessly, using covert entities within all the major Nations and especially the US, to maintain their powerful grip on the throat of the world.
              The civilization is sick at its very center.  We have only begun to see the tip of this iceberg.  Technolgy has far more terrible weapons waiting on the near horizon than airplanes.  And there are many more Bin Laden’s waiting in the wings.
If the People of America want immediate solutions—
1) end the international war on drugs and put the money into compassionate treatment and rehabilitation;
2) put an immediate end to the commitment to further develop fossil fuels and put the monies toward research and development of renewable energy;
3) support commercial free public broadcasting forums as an immediate alternative to commercial media outlets (especially TV and radio);
4) demand that all overseas corporate interests be responsive first to the interests of Native Indigenous National Peoples, before they can go forward with the exploitation of natural resources.
              No?  You say this is not feasible? Then learn to live with events like the World Trade Center catastrophe, as the rest of  the world has, and expect these kind of events to touch each of us (who haven’t been already) in a very personal way.
It is a tide that cannot be turned without embracing the responsibility to endure sacrifice, and make radical changes not only in our world economic view but in our values and common goals.