September 19, 2014
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If it’s not your job to be over there, get outta there. Volunteering to help a third world country is like walking on to a beach and committing to wash each grain of sand. It’s a mathematical impossibility. These countries can only help themselves and all charity does is fund corruption or put Westerners in jeopardy. The rescue of Jessica Buchanan makes for an exciting episode of 60 Minutes, but what the hell was she doing there? Wait, what? She was “demining“ Somalia with the “Danish Refugee Council”? Thanks for coming out, Jessica. I”m sure SEAL Team Six appreciated having to risk their lives so you could make a small part of Hades a tiny bit safer. There are mines in America, you know. They”re called Bloods and Crips and if you walk around South Chicago, Detroit, Compton, St. Louis, or even Ferguson at the wrong time of night, you”ll experience a lot worse than blowing up. Why are these people taking a plane to Armageddon when there’s a highway to hell right here in the United States?
Naïveté is a large part of it. Westerners, especially Americans, especially liberals, tend to be so self-righteous, they think they have a magical force field of justice surrounding them. They”ve been telling us xenophobes that other cultures are equal for so long that they”re actually starting to believe it. We saw this with the Arab Spring and the riots in Egypt. The media’s take was all flower power, and in their minds some totally cool students were fighting for their right to be free. No, they weren”t. They were fighting for their right to get the fuck away from Jews. When Lara Logan jumped into the fray during the Egyptian riots with her blonde hair blowing in the breeze, anyone born with half a brain went, “Uh-oh.” Within a few minutes of her report we heard “Jew Jew Jew” and she was gang-raped. I don”t think Logan set out to be a martyr. She honestly thought she was in midst of the kind of groovy revolution your professors laud in college.
With journalists such as James Foley and volunteers such as David Haines, I”m not so sure. Foley certainly knew the consequences of what he was doing. He”d been through this before. Haines worked with the Royal Air Force and had spent time in the Sudan. Surely he knew what’s up. Am I blaming the victims? Yeah, sorta.
If a woman walks down her own street in red leather short-shorts and she gets assaulted, we throw the bastards in jail. Americans can wear whatever they want and walk down any street they choose. However, if a blonde floats her long locks around savages in a riot or a journalist returns to the area in which he was kidnapped or a man very familiar with war decides to abandon his children to go help Syrians, is it “blaming the victims” to say they asked for it?
If you visit the Middle East today and you”re unarmed, you”re going to become a martyr. If you go armed, you”re going to create martyrs. I”d rather make one than be one. It’s more effective.
