foreign policy

Over a week ago, someone who reads my blog and with whom I regularly correspond, someone who knows I don't support the current war, asked me an honest question: "What specific US policies led to the 9/11 attacks?"

I've been thinking about this all week. Other than the obvious fact that 9/11 and Saddam Hussein are not related.....but that was not the question. I talked with Paul about it, and he said that there is no easy answer that we can point to, but rather it goes back to the myth that all little US citizens are taught from birth--that we are the United States and therefore we are more deserving than others.

It wasn't until tonight that the answer became quite obvious to me. I was thinking about the Chinese immigrants that I blogged about at the end of my last post. I was thinking about Hiroshima, where we killed 75,000 people, mostly civilians. I was thinking about the Japanese interment camps, where we put innocent Japanese people after Pearl Harbor just because their ancestors came from Japan. I thought about the racial profiling we did after the 9/11 attacks, where just for being Arab, men got the privilege of being arrested and held for hours and days without as much as a phone call.

What have we ever done to discourage terrorist attacks? It's like the school bully pouting and saying "why doesn't anyone like me?"

I blogged earlier how keeping slaves meant that the slave owners were also in danger of being killed or hurt. This is true now, of the United States. We are not safer because we are being the bully to the world; we are in more danger because we are not nurturing healthy relationships with other countries. Give and take....seems we only know how to take while they give.