West is a notorious right-wing crazy. He sees bogeymen in every closet, behind every tree and under every bed.
People like West--and my former friend Doug--are guilty of stereotyping and over-generalizing. They live in a fantasy world of their own making.
It is very weird that they don't see objective reality. As someone once said, "We don't see the world the way it is, but the way we are."
This is extremely true of Allen West and other right-wing nuts. My former friend Doug called the Koran "a terrorist manual." He believed there were hundreds of secret terrorist cells across the USA, and they were going to launch coordinated attacks to kill thousands of Americans, all at once, say on Super Bowl Sunday or some other such time.
Of course, this has not happened. I doubt if that has dampened his ardor. He thought liberals were dangerous because we didn't see the danger all around us.
I used to make fun of him. There goes a terrorist now. Oh, wait, it's just the mailman.
Doug was scared to death of anyone who didn't look like him and speak like him. He was scared of The Other. So is Allen West.
I have been trying to develop some sympathy for people like West. But that is hard to do. So many of the nation's mistakes have been based on such fear fantasies.
The U.S. war in Vietnam and the U.S. invasion of Iraq were based on paranoid fantasies. Oh, the communists are going to take over the world. Oh, we're going to see a "mushroom cloud" over Washington, D.C., if we don't invade Iraq.
Now Vietnam is our trading partner and we have left behind billions of wasted dollars and thousands of wasted lives after accomplishing nothing in Iraq.
Fear has driven us to destroy parts of the world and parts of ourselves. It is amazing how much destruction these paranoid fantasies have caused.
No doubt there are real threats out there. A few, not as many as the fear mongers imagine. So let's find them. Let's qualify our targets, as military people say. But let's focus on real threats, not imaginary ones.
-- Roger
Copyright
© 2013, Roger R. Angle
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