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I'm no fanatical patriot or ethnocentrist, but a question crossed my mind this morning that, in light of the current situation, I thought was interesting: why aren't there more American terrorists? I mean genuine WASP terrorists?
There was that one guy a year or so after Sept. 11 who was found to have trained with Al Qaeda for a bit, but other than that you never hear about an American terrorist. I'm not talking about American terrorists going out and attacking other countries. The answer to that one is that we have a hugely powerful military that pretty much already beats the hell out of anyone that an American might disagree with. I'm talking about American terrorists that terrorize Americans. Like McVeigh or Kaczynski. Where are all the McVeighs?
What's baffling is that this lack of American self-hatred doesn't seem to teach any kind of lesson to the terrorists in the rest of the world. They probably just think that we're extremely conceited and blinded with power; whereas we just see them as extremely religious and blinded by fanaticism.
I think to myself, "don't they see that we don't hate ourselves for a reason? That we aren't strapping bombs to ourselves and blowing each other up all the time?"
Bush would say that we don't hate ourselves because we're free and that the "evildoers" hate us for exactly the same reason.
In fact, the evildoers probably hate us because they see us as restricting their freedoms (Palestine, anyone?).