This got me going tonight: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/12/1/study-finds-unprecedented-diversity.html
Note the last sentence in the quoted paragraph:
""According to the data, the average age of those arrested is 26. The vast majority — 86 percent — of recruits are male. About 40 percent are converts to Islam. And, rather than immigrants or refugees, “these are people born and bred here,” Vidino said.""
The world needs to bring them in out of the rain, dry them off, feed them and make them welcome: hug the children to assure them they're safe.
We are part of that world. Our humanity or lack of it is in full view. Even if it weren't, caring for them is still the right thing to do.
They are not our enemies. They are us, experiencing different circumstances. They're not unlike our neighbors who after 2008 were forced out of their homes. The lucky ones went to live with family. Thousands, sadly, lived packed in cars, washing up in public bathrooms. We ignored them, too. And we still do. In Chattanooga, some 1600 homeless are children. It's the same across the nation. We should understand their plight by now.
In the past, those we identified as our enemy were those we could see, or imagine in some tangible physical sense. In days gone by, the enemy wore uniforms and were easily recognized. Likewise were we to them.
Today, our enemies are harder to see. The enemies of the nation are not the refugees. By and large, they're not even foreigners or strangers in a strange land. They're our own elected officials, the ones who line their campaign war chests with donations and vote for the benefit of their corporate masters.
If it were not so, we would not be going to Nashville to change a law that limits the destinies of ourselves and our neighbors, indeed the entire state.
If it were not so, we would be feeding our children and tending to their needs at early ages so they could attend school ready to learn.
Instead they withhold broadband and high speed internet, the newly recognized public utility, as important to society as electricity, water and highway infrastructures. They jeopardize the futures of over 30% of our children in rural communities and, indeed, in some parts of our major cities. They threaten the livelihoods of small business owners already under threat for lack of connectivity.
Instead, they willingly neglect our children, so that they can within a decade or two become wards of the state or residents in for profit prisons. Invest now, or pay later.
Instead, they sally forth to sign agreements that will strip our local, state and national sovereignty so that within a generation, we the people of the United States will have no laws that protect our water, our air, or our soil; that safeguard our food supplies; that guarantee generic drugs at reasonable prices.
In the final analysis, though, it is we the people who allowed this to happen. It is we the people who chose the criminals we elected to office, the ones who made legal all the laws that deprived us of our once inalienable rights.
In the end, fully ninety percent, or more, will not even know how it all came about. Because fully 90% of us failed to pay attention to what happened around us. Yet, fully 90% of that 90% will proudly display their ignorance and wear it instead as a badge of honor.
For those of us who can see it coming, though, there is no ignoring the corruption. We are compelled to call it out, not only for our children and theirs, but for the children of others and those children's children. We stand to announce the impending tsunami because it's the right thing to do.
Know your enemy. Save yourselves.
Unprecedented diversity of support for ISIL in US, study says
Note the last sentence in the quoted paragraph:
""According to the data, the average age of those arrested is 26. The vast majority — 86 percent — of recruits are male. About 40 percent are converts to Islam. And, rather than immigrants or refugees, “these are people born and bred here,” Vidino said.""
-----------------------------
People are running away from war, many complete families, their lives disrupted by conflict, the beginnings of which were instigated by GWB et al. The world needs to bring them in out of the rain, dry them off, feed them and make them welcome: hug the children to assure them they're safe.
We are part of that world. Our humanity or lack of it is in full view. Even if it weren't, caring for them is still the right thing to do.
They are not our enemies. They are us, experiencing different circumstances. They're not unlike our neighbors who after 2008 were forced out of their homes. The lucky ones went to live with family. Thousands, sadly, lived packed in cars, washing up in public bathrooms. We ignored them, too. And we still do. In Chattanooga, some 1600 homeless are children. It's the same across the nation. We should understand their plight by now.
In the past, those we identified as our enemy were those we could see, or imagine in some tangible physical sense. In days gone by, the enemy wore uniforms and were easily recognized. Likewise were we to them.
Today, our enemies are harder to see. The enemies of the nation are not the refugees. By and large, they're not even foreigners or strangers in a strange land. They're our own elected officials, the ones who line their campaign war chests with donations and vote for the benefit of their corporate masters.
If it were not so, we would not be going to Nashville to change a law that limits the destinies of ourselves and our neighbors, indeed the entire state.
If it were not so, we would be feeding our children and tending to their needs at early ages so they could attend school ready to learn.
Instead they withhold broadband and high speed internet, the newly recognized public utility, as important to society as electricity, water and highway infrastructures. They jeopardize the futures of over 30% of our children in rural communities and, indeed, in some parts of our major cities. They threaten the livelihoods of small business owners already under threat for lack of connectivity.
Instead, they willingly neglect our children, so that they can within a decade or two become wards of the state or residents in for profit prisons. Invest now, or pay later.
Instead, they sally forth to sign agreements that will strip our local, state and national sovereignty so that within a generation, we the people of the United States will have no laws that protect our water, our air, or our soil; that safeguard our food supplies; that guarantee generic drugs at reasonable prices.
In the final analysis, though, it is we the people who allowed this to happen. It is we the people who chose the criminals we elected to office, the ones who made legal all the laws that deprived us of our once inalienable rights.
In the end, fully ninety percent, or more, will not even know how it all came about. Because fully 90% of us failed to pay attention to what happened around us. Yet, fully 90% of that 90% will proudly display their ignorance and wear it instead as a badge of honor.
For those of us who can see it coming, though, there is no ignoring the corruption. We are compelled to call it out, not only for our children and theirs, but for the children of others and those children's children. We stand to announce the impending tsunami because it's the right thing to do.
Know your enemy. Save yourselves.
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