Transcript
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another DailyJim. It's Monday, February 5th, 2024. Today. I want to talk about.
How I don't see people as terrorists. I see people as people who intend to make other people feel terror often because they are feeling terror themselves or terrified. I'll clean up that title would actually post. So this came about because I was reading something on Twitter. It was talking about how many people have been killed in Palestine and how many people have been killed in Israel and Gaza these areas. And it got me thinking about something I watched on TV. The other day, there was a news clip, uh, this man Dan Crenshaw, I believe his name is, um, former or current representative, I think former representative in the US. He was being interviewed and they asked him what the US should do in response to the attacks by, I think Iran backed Houthi rebels or something. I'm not sure if it was Houthi or not. Um, there were attacks that killed three, American soldiers in Iraq, I believe like a week ago. And so we asked, what should we do in response? And his, I his answer was that we should escalate the attack so much that it deters um Iran or the other side from attacking back. So his answer was almost like if somebody comes at us and takes our eye out, we should go and we should destroy their whole family. So it's kind of ignoring the whole eye for an eye law of Hammurabi back in the day, which was hailed as progress for humanity. Um And then let's not even talk about how Jesus said, you know, turn the other cheek and the whole it was a Gandhi or Jesus or somebody said, you know, an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind. Um So we had apparently some progress on that, but it comes back to this idea that if somebody hurts us, we should hurt them even more to deter them. What does deter mean? Typically, I think deter is to instill instill so much pain and therefore fear in them that they don't want to do it again in the future. And I think a lot of the laws in the US are built on this or people think they're built on this. We, we put certain things in place and we put punishments in place. So as we deter other people, therefore instill fear or maybe terror in them so that they don't commit this act ever again. And I talk about it this way because I think so often I see people go, ah, this person is a terrorist and it becomes like. A battle between, this is a good person if they're a bad person and I'm a good person, and we attach these labels, you are wholly bad or you're wholly good instead of looking at the action that they did because more often than not a lot of the claims of hypocrisy are like you did the same thing that you're fighting against. But I wonder a lot of times people don't if we don't fight against things but we're fighting against people, we're not fighting against their actions or their behaviors, we're fighting against people. And so for me, one of the things that keeps, I think my sanity in relationships in looking at politics and looking at things. Some of this stuff is that to not label somebody as a terrorist but say that they did an act of terror or more likely their behavior and their intention with the behavior was to instill terror into a different group. And then to realize probably they're doing that because they feel terrified. And scared and they want the thing to stop. There's anger, there's fear in there, there's pain because you have this, uh, Dan Crenshaw saying, what we need to do is we need to go escalate the conflict so much that these people feel deterred. Which again, isn't that feeling that they feel terrified? So, the way to beat quote unquote terrorists is to terrify them. Maybe they're quote unquote terrorists because they're already terrified.
So it reminds me of back in the day, John Oliver had an episode where I think he was playing clips from a kid from maybe Afghanistan, somewhere in that general vicinity who was talking about how they were afraid of blue skies because that's when the drones would fly and drop bombs. And so he said, congratulations America. We've made little Children afraid of blue skies. And so even if you're living in Gaza and you aren't quote unquote part of Hamas, if you're there and you see bombs dropping from the sky in your neighborhoods blowing up, how do you not feel terrified?
And is that our goal is our goal to make other people feel terrified? Why do we want to make other people feel terrified unless we are feeling terrified ourselves? So how do we work on this fear? It's ok to feel terrified. It's ok to like, I feel terrified of a lot of things. But how do we accept that? I wrote a blog post many, many years ago. It was called the war on feeling terror because I think a lot of times we're actually just fighting against the feeling of terror, not in wanting to get rid of the things that are making us feel terror. This thing makes me feel terrified. So therefore I'm going to squash it and get rid of it. I don't know. I just, it frustrates me when I see people say, 00, they're a terrorist. I'm like, but you're both doing the same activities in some ways. You know, if some guy walks into, with a suicide bomb vest on and blows up a, a mall, how is that different than somebody coming in and dropping a bomb from the sky onto a mall? I mean, and maybe it's not a mall. Maybe instead it's a hospital or maybe it's a neighborhood regardless if I'm in a place where bombs are dropping from the sky. I'm probably gonna feel terrified just like I feel terrified if I see that there's a mass shooting in my neighborhood, um, or if there's a bomb going off in, you know, in a couple of miles away or a couple cities away. Um, and so I think the labeling of people as terrorists doesn't necessarily help us come together and resolve the main problem, which I think the main problem is doing things in reaction to attacks. It is reacting and responding with the intention of causing other people to feel terrified.
Why, why are we doing that? It reminds me of when somebody gets hurt in a relationship and they go, well, I want him to know exactly how I feel. I'm like, why don't you tell him, uh, well, then he won't know exactly how I feel. He needs to feel it or they need to feel it. I'm like, but, but you can just tell them how you're feeling. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, because they'll never understand and they need to feel it. But, but even if you do the action, they're still not going to fully understand the exact same scenario. So why do it, do you think it's going to reveal, like, relieve your sense of fear, your sense of? Not necessarily honestly, if somebody punches me and I punch them back, I'm probably going to be more afraid now because maybe they're going to come and punch me with two or three people or maybe they're going to escalate it like Dan Crenshaw suggested. So. For me, I just, I really try so hard to look at behaviors and not at people's individual self worth, if I don't like labeling people with a terrorist or saint or like any of these adjectives that give them a good or bad label and they're wholly good or they're wholly bad. I mean, I tend to think everyone's kind of a saint but that if I'm going to label, I'm going to label everyone as a good person and then look at their behaviors and look at my behaviors and see how maybe we're doing very similar things to hurt each other. So I don't know if this helps you at all, but I just wanted to share a little bit more on my perspective is how I'm looking at some of this news cycle that comes out and, and talking about what's going on in some of these places because I have friends on both sides of a lot of these conflicts. Um, I mean, I have friends in Israel, I have, I have Israeli friends. I have Palestinian friends, um, or we can say like Arab Israeli friends and, and Jewish Israeli friends. I have friends in Ukraine. I have friends in Russia. I have friends in lots of different places that are. Demonizing each other and I'm frankly tired of it and I wish we would just see the common humanity and recognize how we all are, often contributing the same behaviors to cause the same feelings in the other side. All right. Well, that's nine minutes. Oh, goodness. I'm going way too long on these things these days. So I want to try to tone it down to maybe seven minutes tomorrow and, uh, we'll go from there so talk to y'all soon.
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