A Few Shiny Pebbles

By Minta Marie Morze February 14, 2007

Right at this minute, as I look around me, practically everything I see is the product of human minds and hands. Even the outside world, seen through my window, was designed by a landscaper and maintained by gardeners. The building I’m in, my computer browser, the pear beside me that was grown by a farmer, the laces on my shoes, the bandage on my arm, the swim suit I’m wearing, the chair I’m sitting on, even the filling in my tooth and the song I’m humming—human beings are in every aspect of it. Depending on what it is, human beings thought of it, designed it, produced or manufactured it, packaged it, transported it, wrote it, advertised it, sold it, bagged it, put it in my mouth, mowed it, planted it, took it places in any number of vehicles, carried it into the room I’m in or to the yard I’m looking at, or in some way or other handled it so that it is at this minute part of my life.

At any time of the day or night, in order for me to be where I am and doing what I’m doing at that moment, I and everyone else around me absolutely requires two things.

First, I need to live in a society that allows me to do any number of things, such as become educated, acquire a place to live and things to do, buy products I enjoy or need, use a computer to go to Internet sites that I choose, gives me the opportunity to spend some of my time using the computer and browser and communication lines set up by others, and even allowed someone else the freedom to put onto the Internet the information I want to read or see. I need to be allowed to own property, to leave my home when I need or wish to, to be protected by a whole body of laws and protocols and procedures, and to count on my society to provide the police, courts, a military, the secret ballot, and all the things that a person such as I have in my society. There is a whole nexus of human interactions already structured to establish, maintain, and protect those human rights and freedoms. I am a female, but in my society this same nexus belongs to the males here, too.

Second, I need it to be an already established fact of life that there is in my society a complex structural interaction among many people who involve themselves in all the aspects of bringing products and services into existence and in making them available at locations where I and others can avail ourselves of them, so that I can have that bandage or that chair or that pear which is so much a part of my life at this moment. This means that there must be another whole nexus of human interactions already established to be in the business of locating and obtaining the energy necessary for all aspects of the production and distribution of things such as computer keyboards, ambulances, microwave ovens, needlework floss, toothpaste, and enough fuel for that flight my neighbor’s cousin is taking from North Carolina to New Zealand to see his brother married.

Much of this energy we need comes from petroleum products, and so oil is an essential part of the economy. Even though we use other forms of created energy, the United States alone requires around 19-million of barrels of oil each day, but it doesn’t even produce half that amount; it must import millions of barrels of oil each day to keep our economy running. And of course, the Industrial World needs more and more oil every day. China, India, the entire Third World requires more and more oil each day.

Obvious, right?

Now, the group of us absolutely depends on a complex called Western Civilization to do all that establishing, maintaining, and protecting of that body of human rights and freedoms we believe in. This includes, when at its finest, at its best, an equality of those rights for both males and females. At this very moment, whether we want to recognize it or not, that “Western” complex is under attack by a different group of people who believe in a different complex of ideas and behaviors, including a big fat dividing line between what males are allowed to do and be compared to what females are allowed to do and be. At this moment, the most dangerous of these people are called Islamists, Islamofascists, Islamist Terrorists, and so forth. If I lived among the members of this group, I could have done none of the things I started this discussion with, and it would get even worse for me under the most fanatic of the members.

Moreover, the group of us absolutely depends on the energy complex that locates, produces, and distributes oil as part of the energy necessary to do all sorts of things that people who enjoy the benefits of Western Civilization want to do. All over the world, people who live in the “Western” way, require oil in order to make their civilization work. If we consult a world map that shows where the vast major percentage of available oil is located, we find that more than 60% of the world’s oil is in lands whose primary religious and political systems are Islamic, (most of that oil is in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the U.A.E). If some groups of Islamist Terrorists gained control over just these countries, the Western world would be in terrible trouble. These people believe that those energy resources should serve their interests, interests of a totally different complex of ideas and behaviors, (including adhering to that big fat dividing line between what males are allowed compared to what females are allowed). Any group of Terrorists controlling over 60% of a product the world requires day-in and day-out could seriously damage the economics of any country or group of countries they wished, even though, as everyone seems to say, they will want to sell their oil so they will. But at what price and to whom? And with their profit, how much terror could they cause in the part of the world that is “Western”? By judicious use in blackmailing, terrorizing, maintaining different price structures for different areas of the world, by controlling and destroying over time the economy of the Western world while spreading their own ideology, they could hope to succeed. They could do terrible damage in their attempt.

Now, when I said above that you need a certain level of human rights available to live your life, and you need a certain level of energy available to the people involved in all the aspects of bringing products and services into existence and in making them available where you can avail yourself of them, it looks like these two vital requirements for Western Civilization are under attack by the same people. They absolutely believe that they will be able to create by terror and conquest the greatest empire the world has known. The first major step in that plan was accomplished in 1979 when Iran became ruled by Islamists, thus giving them access to assets and resources, including people and oil profits and land, that they could use to further their own ends.

They cannot be negotiated with, because they want us dead or under their total control through conquest and fear. They do not want or believe in peaceful co-existence. They cannot be ignored by us retreating into ourselves, because then they will use our retreat to move even faster on their way to swallowing the entire Islamic world. While they are doing so they will continue to terrorize us, to keep us in our place. By running away, as we did in Vietnam, we would prove that we really are impotent people, who after a time will fold up and back away from any conflict in fear and ignorance. Then, when the Islamist Terrorists control over 60% of the oil in the world, and control by force and persuasion a population of 1.6-billion Muslims, they will turn on us with all their might. Any moderates in their own world who oppose them will be slaughtered or terrified into acquiescence. Hitler knew, and wrote, that fear can allow a small handful of people to control thousands.

We rely on human rights and freedom, and on those around us who believe in the same things. But history has told us that through indoctrination, education, and experience, there are those who think not only different thoughts, but have totally different valuations on life and freedom. They are not an ethnicity or race. They are not a nationality. They are an ideology, a small subsection of people that interprets one of the world’s great religions as justifying their narrow ideas on laws, behavior, and values. Because of this, they cut across all nationalities, races, and, by conversion to their particular religious rhetoric, across all possible peoples of the Earth. In the last century alone, history has looked upon Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and others who used followers of their ideologies of terror to destroy and murder millions upon millions of people. Terrorists cannot be negotiated with. They cannot be run from and ignored. They cannot be allowed to come to control more and more of the land, peoples, and vital resources of the world before they are stopped. The people who had to deal one-on-one with the followers of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao could not stop them with argument, sentiment, appeals to justice or to family or to religion. Well over a hundred million people were slaughtered without pity. The enemies we face now, who think nothing of bombing a marketplace or wedding, who think nothing of taking down buildings that hold thousands of people, who think nothing of taking over a school and attaching bombs to little children, who think nothing of planning to take down dozens of airliners filled with people or trains or bridges or tunnels. . . .

They must be stopped, over longer time frames than we have ever had to maintain a conflict, by methods that are agonizingly difficult, by people who fight courageously for us and must be supported in every possible way. If they are not stopped, then the Terrorists will engulf first the oil-rich Middle East and then, slowly, inexorably, the rest of the Muslim world, and finally the Western world itself, extinguishing the human rights and freedoms we unconsciously rely on. Our birthright will be taken from us by a power that we allowed to grow and grow and grow into an unconquerable monster.