The Poet's Eye 
       commentary by Lightning Rod

the Poets' Eye is skeptical
without being cynical, innocent
without being naive and
critical without being
judgmental

Nightmare In Russia
for release 09-06-04

The Poet's Eye
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This morning I was awakened by a timid tap on our bedroom door. It was still dark and I heard our eleven year old calling her mom. She had experienced a nightmare. I comforted her and asked her about her dream. She said she was at a friend's house and there were gunshots and police with flashlights and that she was locked in a room and couldn't get out.

Later this morning I asked her if she had heard anything about the problems they were having in Russia concerning the school children. She is more likely to be using her TV time on MTV than CNN so I wasn't surprised when she said that she didn't know anything about the schoolchildren in Russia. But these things have a way of working their way into the dreams of young girls.

When Russian troops stormed the school in Beslan, North Ossetia, yesterday, ending a two-day siege by militants demanding independence for neighboring Chechnya, at least 322 people, half of them children, died.

Events like this appear in the nightmares of little children. Strikes against the most vulnerable are the truest and the cheapest and probably the most effective strain of terrorism. It makes you fear for the lives of your children and it makes children fear for their own lives. It echoes the Oklahoma City bombing where the day-care center was destroyed.

But that is the premise of terrorism, to attack at the weakest points.

The Poet's Eye notices that the places where terror proliferates bear a certain commonality. These are places like Palestine and Chechnya, where the residents feel hopelessly oppressed and dis-empowered. The Chechnyans are under the thumb of the Russian Army and the Palestinians are dominated by the much superior forces of Israel. It's a David and Goliath situation.

David resorted to primitive weapons and deadly aim in his asymetrical conflict with Goliath. The simplest weapons were used to the greatest effect. Like a box cutter, a rock or a sack of fertilizer.

By using simple and ubiquitous weapons and attacking targets of opportunity, the terrorist fights a war that is impossible to defend oneself against. Terror only manifests as a result of a desperate cause. The only solution is to remove the cause.

All the concrete walls and razorwire and x-ray machines in the world cannot defend us against terrorism. Nor can we defend ourselves by precaution against insanity or calamity or natural disaster. If some nut thinks god wants him to strap a bomb on and walk into an elementary school, there is really nothing we can do to stop him. Terrorism is the insanity of desperation.

But what we can do is this: We can remove the major complaints that spawn desperate acts like the ones we have seen in Russia in the past two weeks. What the US government should do, if it really wants to curtail terrorism is to exert pressure on the Russians and the Israelis to stop their domestic oppression of Chechnya and Palestine. And it wouldn't hurt if we cease our military and economic occupation of the muslim world, either.

The Poet's Eye sees that little girls will be having nightmares, not until terror is vanquished because it can't be vanquished. Terror is a tactic, not a person or a force or a principality. Even our President said as much recently in an off-hand remark (which his spokemen tried for two days to explain away). The nightmares will stop only when we have vanquished the Causes of terrorism.

:
From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

--Traditional Scottish prayer

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