What Worries Me Most

The Downing Street memo and other evidence is piling up and proving Bush et. al. lied their way to war. The heat is getting turned up on them.

American generals in Iraq are saying that we cannot defeat the insurgency, while the administration continues to say otherwise. The insurgency continues unabated and more American soldiers are killed and maimed daily.

Afghanistan, the war that everyone in the world supported because we went directly after the terrorists, is a basketcase, forgotten, ignored, and increasingly under the sway of warlords and a resurgent Taliban.

American military recruiters are experiencing significant reductions in monthly recruitment targets.

The price per barrel of oil continues to leap upward, just as all the experts have said it would.

The cost of our military adventures, homeland security, and "fighting terrorism" has become such a burden that we cannot sustain it without substantial disruptions in those areas that affect Americans the most: wages, taxes, benefits, social services, travel, heating costs, and retirement benefits.

American opinion is turning against Bush and his war. The people are waking up. George Bush's legacy is on the way into the toilet, along with Karl Rove's, unless something happens. And that is what worries me most.

While no American could imagine (except for a few military and intelligence people who concentrate on this stuff all the time) that 19 men could gain control of American airliners and crash them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it is not difficult for me now to imagine what might happen to reinvigorate support for George Bush and help preserve his legacy.

Here is all it would take:

an eighteen-wheeler, filled with the same ingredients Timothy McVay used in Oklahoma City to blow up the federal building, driven into the middle of a crowd of July 4th fireworks spectators in Anytown USA and exploded. In hundreds and hundreds of small towns and cities across the country, on July 4, there are crowds of 3000, or 5000, or more, watching fireworks, usually in places readily accessible by truck, on streets that are blocked by flimsy wooden roadblocks and guarded by some local sheriffs or police who are watching the fireworks themselves. 5000 people might easily be killed.

I bet we can all imagine many other scenarios equally horrible.

I can also imagine some international event or crisis that would propel America into yet another situation wherein our national security was threatened and we needed to respond.

In either case, domestic or foreign, a new draft would be implemented immediately. In fact, the plans are already in place.

Bush needs something to get him off the slippery slope. Otherwise, his presidency is doomed.

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Postscript

"Happy Saturday" is the comment made to me by my daughter after I read this to her and my wife. She meant it sarcastically, and both of them were upset that I would write such a thing. They asked me, why can't I imagine peace, instead of something so horrible? Why is it that men have to think about and write about such terror?

They are right, of course. I wish I was imagining peace, instead of this. I wish we were living in a peaceful world, led by peaceful humans, and by an American President who cared about peace, social justice, democracy, and charity at home and abroad. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world led by American corporatist ideologues who believe in American dominion, who seek it through an imperialist military and the marriage of government and corporations. We live in world dominated by men who feed on terror and fear. I can only hope that once the American people realize what an awful world these people have built, that we can finally get rid of them and elect women and men who can build that other world that my wife and daughter want.