Tiptup said:lordjedi said:Right. I didn't read about it, but that doesn't mean I didn't care about it. Why should I waste my time reading about something that I can already guess about? I heard about a terrorist attack on Mumbai. Should I go read about it or just assume it's the same terrorists as usual? Personally, since it's in that region, I'll assume it's the usual. And it turns out it was. No point in wasting my time reading that some terrorists were targeting Americans. Same old same old. To me, it's nothing new and only serves to continually reinforce the point. That point is that we weren't being attacked because of our President and his policies. We were being attacked because of our beliefs.
I would've been shocked if it had been some westerners attacking Muslims. That would've made me read even more about it. As it was, it's nothing new.
It's not that I don't care about the people that were attacked. I absolutely care about them. What I don't care to hear is the reasoning for attacking them (based on where they were from). I don't give a shit what reason some damn terrorist gives for attacking these people. I care about the response and what happened to the people that got attacked. The response wasn't reported much. Just the dead and wounded numbers. I can either continually get pissed every time it happens and go on a rant and rave (kinda like right now) about how the assholes need to be hunted down and killed or I can just not talk about it. I prefer the later.
So, you believe, then, that all your actions are completely in line with a supreme model of daily perfection? I understand you're a person that generally take things seriously, but, if you were to honestly analyze every action and attitude of your life, you don't believe that there is even one tiny change that you could make with yourself to potentially be even better? :)
Of course not, but I don't go around planning and executing attacks on people simply because of where they're from. Hell, I don't plan and execute attacks period. There's plenty of people I disagree with, but I would never wish death on them or try to kill them myself. I don't believe these actions are in line with daily perfection. I believe these actions are in line with a civilized society.
Supposedly "caring" in our heart of hearts about rightly apposing terrorism is well and good, but if that caring doesn't really affect our most substantial actions for the better, then what good is it? I think that we don't really, truly care, in the fullest sense possible for human beings, because then our actions would be very different. If we were all actually acting with such purity I think our effect on the world would be much greater, don't you?
I live on the West Coast of the United States. The easiest thing I could do to "care" for these people would be to send money. The best thing I could do would be to drop everything in my life, hop on a plane, and go there and help. I have a wife and son (and one son on the way). Taking care of them is my first responsibility. So if I were to do the purest act possible to show that I care for these people, I'd have to leave my family to do it. There's no other way (outside of sending money) for me to show that I care. Talking about the incident doesn't show anything other than the ability to discuss the situation. It doesn't show that I care. It just shows that I have the ability to watch the evening news and then carry on a conversation about what I saw.
I'm not saying the world is an easy place to figure out, and I'm not even sure where we would start acting better, but when I honestly look at myself, I know I'm not working with pure motives or pure judgments. To automatically assume I have achieved perfection when it comes to caring about people that face the evils of this world is not something I can do.
I'm not even going to suggest that all of my motives and judgments are entirely pure, but nothing about them involves wanting to take the lives of others simply because of their ideals. What I said was that those muslim terrorists deserve what they get because they are terrorists. Just like all terrorists deserve what they get. They aren't fighting for freedom or anything else. They made this attack on people "from the West" simply because they were "from the West". What did those people do to them? Nothing. Did they deserve to die? Abosolutely not. Yet we have one terrorist who was involved with the deaths of many saying "I don't want to die!" Neither did the people you killed.