What if?

I turned off comments a couple of days ago, just to be ornery. No one seems to have noticed, though, which means that either what I've been saying lately is boring, or at the least not suggestive of comment. I'm sorry about that. I'll see if I can do better.

I was driving home today when I had a startling thought. The newsfolk were doing a piece on the Middle East, again; every day they do something about that sad area. Today they talked about a guy who was born in Oregon and is now a propagandist for Al Quaeda. I listened for about ten seconds, enough to hear the harsh insanity of the guys words 'We love peace! But if we cannot get what we want, then we love war!' before I turned it off. Who needs that kind of crap while driving? But then I turned it on a little while later, and heard someone saying that while we would listen to that and think it silly and not at all effective, the people to whom it is aimed find it quite interesting. Which gave me the shudders, a bit. How stupid are these people, I thought? And then I thought Or, how desperate are they?

That second thought would not normally have occurred to me but that they had previously done another piece about another explosion in Baghdad, this one at a university. They spoke very, very briefly about one man of many who was missing -- he sold candy and soda from a stand near the university, he was poor, and he couldn't be found -- not with the living, in the hospitals, not with the dead, in the morgue. His wife was searching for him. What must that be like, I had thought, to have that level of desperation? To be living at that level of poverty any way, and then to have it snatched away like that?

So I was primed, perhaps, to think a little more than normal about what’s going on in that area, in Iran and Afghanistan and all of that, and though I didn't have any great thoughts, I wondered, to my astonishment: what if what Bush is trying to do is actually the right thing? And I shivered, because I have so little use for him that the thought that he might actually be right about something would be like doubting my own sanity. But what if he's right? Right for the wrong reasons, persistant because he's stupid, and all of that, but still -- what if he's right, and we should flood the place with troops, spend billions of dollars there, let our people be killed in its defense, all without so much as a casual thank you? What if...

I tell you, its enough to give you the shakes.