During my
high school years my parents owned a lodge in the mountains of Colorado where
they would occasionally have country western dances on a Saturday night. The mixture of cowboys and alcohol can be
dangerous at times but we had pretty reliable insurance against such problems
in the form of my father who had grown up in the area and who had a legendary
reputation as a skilled fighter who tolerated no nonsense in his establishment
(unless, of course, he was the instigator of said nonsense). Now and then,
however, there were newcomers who either didn’t know about my dad’s reputation
or who felt compelled to test it, and things would get interesting. On one such night two young men who were new
to the area started a fight with a third man in the bar while my dad was
outside. Other patrons attempted to
intervene and stop the impending mayhem, but the two young men were not to be
talked out of the fight. Someone went to
get my dad, explaining that a fight was about to start and the instigators were
acting crazy and couldn’t be reasoned with.
“We’ll see about that,” said my dad as he entered the building. Now, my dad liked to collect interesting
objects to decorate his bar. One of
those objects was an old, petrified tree root shaped like a club with large,
pointed spikes covering the round end.
This deadly conversation piece hung behind the bar, and as my dad strode
in he grabbed that club and catapulted himself on top of the bar in one quick
motion. “Now you’re gonna get the hell
out of here,” he said, and there was nothing but calm resolution in his
eyes. He was more than ready to use the
club if anyone dared to defy him. The
Indians who had been deaf and blind from rage two seconds earlier were
magically transformed back to sanity.
Now keenly aware of their surroundings and the imposing figure with the
spiked club who was poised for action, they suddenly changed their minds about
fighting and quietly left. Go figure.
The moral to
the story is this: people like to fixate
on the psychology behind violence and imagine that the best response involves
some attempt to manage those psychological forces through reasoning or
propaganda when really the best antidote to violence is the real threat of
greater violence in return. I have
watched with great interest the reports of young men (and a few ultra-foolish
young women) migrating to the Middle East to join ISIS. The attention that ISIS is getting has had
the predictable effect of attracting young people from around the world who, in
another place and time, might have become members of the Weather Underground or
the SLA. It’s the same mentality: people who yearn to feel powerful by inciting
fear and exercising violence against others.
They are the disaffected young adults deeply unsatisfied with life in
societies that won’t tolerate their need for power and attention. You cannot rationalize with such people, and
what’s really in order is a big dose of shock and awe coupled with a steadfast
resolution to eradicate them from the face of the planet. That’s what the U.S. strategy towards ISIS
should be if we are serious about changing the trajectory in the Middle East
and sending a warning to barbarians; but of course, Obama is not.
It’s a funny
thing about shock and awe. It has the
unique ability to separate the die-hard believers in a cause who will fight it
out to the end (hence the term, “die-hard”) from the disaffected attention
seekers, many of whom will magically forget ‘the cause’ when the going gets
rough. Then, if they are lucky enough to
survive their foolishness, they can migrate back to the U.S. and embark on
lucrative careers in higher education.
~CW
