Becoming that which you are against

I have long thought and spoken about the irony of becoming what one is against.

For example, Eco-terrorism sprung from a fanatical desire to preserve ecosystems. Problem is that eco-terrorism results in damage to the system and to humans, too. Mothers Against Drunk Driving...there are a few members who were caught driving drunk, we still have drunk drivers on the road and little to nothing has been done about the causes of drunk driving. Because whatever would the well-heeled, part-of-the-political- landscape national organization do if there weren't drunk drivers? If there weren't drunk drivers there would be no MADD, so in order to exist, MADD must have drunk drivers. In order to have a war on drugs we must have drugs. In order to be right someone has to be wrong.

Which leads to perhaps an understanding of why the US is where it is today. We have become that which we were against and now find ourselves as the new wrong in international terms.

We were most defined when we were against communism, i.e. Russia. They were at one philosophical end and we were at the other. They were the ying to our yang, the spice to our sugar. They had little freedom, we lauded ours even when it hurt us. We had political discourse, because they had none. We had ethics and review systems because we viewed them as steeped in chrony-ism and black market activity. We particularly had religious freedom and even regarded the freedom to not hold to a religion, because that too was preferred to forbidding choice on religious beliefs.

With them out there, we knew who we were, what lines we could not cross for fear of becoming them. They as the penultimate political evil were our balaste which kept us in place. And visa versa.

But without them, we are drifting and moving closer to where they used to occupy the continuum.

Our current enemy is slippery in defining what to be against. Much of what they believe we also believe. Much of what they hold as canon, we also find in our texts. Paradoxically, if we accept that our enemies are hyper-religious folk who long to die for the cause and laud those who do, who are we in our beliefs? Do we, in comparison appear not as religious? Are we perhaps on the soft end of a new continuum?

And therefore is it not those who do not worship, or stand in question of strict religious dogma who are weakening us?

The confusion and heave to the right might just be the fight to deny the need to be against religious fanatics. If we are to be against them then we would have to be at the other end of the continuum, which would be....no religion.

So in order to determine an us/them right/wrong, we step onto shaky ground with hair's breadth distinctions on morality, virtue, and one faith vs another. Many denominations of faith spring from adherence to one interpretation of one verse among thousands of others. And this is when the political pie or ground to gain becomes so small, the battles result in more intensity, more blood shed and more rigidity.

What we are fighting to gain is moral ground and in a war over religion, war is the deadly virtue.

If we get back to the idea that there is a right and therefore a wrong, something clearly to be against, but we see we are not polar opposites in this religious war, we then are now them.