By Donald V. Watkins ©Copyrighted and Published on July 24, 2018
This time has come for some straight talk in America. We are in the midst of a new war that is very different from anything we have ever known in the past. It is seemingly random and each act of violence is killing scores of innocent civilians and injuring hundreds of others. The combatants do not wear military uniforms and do not respect territorial boundaries. They attack soft targets in the general population without warning. They kill men, women and children without hesitation. They are terrorists.
Their ultimate goal is to acquire and detonate a nuclear bomb inside the U.S. or one of its territories. Except for America’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 during the final stages of World War II, no other group has detonated a nuclear bomb on a civilian population.
Today’s headlines are filled with terrorist attacks inside the U.S. and around the world. They are increasing in regularity and deadliness. Make no mistake about it, America is the Number One enemy on the list of the world’s known international terrorist groups. In their view, we represent all that is evil in the world. To them, we are the “infidels”.
We have to stop the spread of global terrorism. We need every ally we can get in this fight. Failure is not an option. Everything else is secondary.
The most effective step in fighting terrorism within our borders is solidarity as a nation. Remember, our enemies do not see us as rich, middle class, poor, white, black, Hispanic, male, female, straight, gay, young, old, rural, urban, Christian or non-Christian Americans. They see us as Americans. They kill us as Americans. In the eyes of terrorists, we are all indiscriminate targets for death.
During the closing day of World War II, Japanese pilots flew kamikaze missions in which they crashed their planes into U.S. warships. This was the last desperate play in the Japanese playbook to stem the tide of the war in their favor. It failed. Today, a single terrorist is prepared to give his/her life to take ours in great numbers. This is the first play in the playbook of terrorist warfare. They are getting better at it and their numbers are growing.
Americans no longer have the luxury of putting down, mistreating, or demeaning fellow Americans who are not members of our racial, religious, gender, or socio-economic group. When a terrorist strikes, we will never know which American is the one who might save our lives during such an attack. It could be the homeless man we stepped over on the way to church, or the woman we ridiculed after she complained about sexual harassment on the job, or the black teenager we thought was a thug simply because of the color of his skin and way he wore his hair, or the gay man we snickered at as he passed by us in the restaurant, or the Muslim man standing on the corner waiting for the bus.
We have the close the ignorance gap that feeds our propensity to lightly dismiss the legitimate concerns of fellow Americans simple because we are operating from a position of political strength or we are catering to the whims of our own racial group and/or socio-economic class. The quicker we deal with our personal prejudices, the sooner we can start uniting to effectively fight terrorism, domestically and abroad.
In the war against terrorism, the side that is the most committed to unity and victory wins. This is the only way we can defeat suicide soldiers. We must see each other as Americans. We must not divide ourselves into categories of rich, middle class, poor, white, black, Hispanic, male, female, straight, gay, young, old, Christian or non-Christian Americans. Fighting each other is a distraction that allows the terrorists to win.
We cannot win the war on terrorism if we remain divided along racial and gender lines and we continue to hate on our fellow Americans because they are different from us. Our strength as a nation has always been in our diversity and unity. Immigrants from all over the world built this country. Some were brought here as slaves; some came as prisoners; others came as indentured servants; but most came as freed men and women. We have to set aside the artificial distinctions that divide us. We are all Americans.
Native Americans were here first. The rest of us are permanent guests in their country. Christopher Columbus did not “discover” America because it had already been “discovered” by the indigenous population thousands of years before Columbus arrived here. Similarly, I could not go to a populated territory during my international travels and claim to discover and own this territory by the divine right of the Watkins Family.
Regardless of how we became Americans, we are all citizens of this great nation. America is the greatest civilization the world has ever known. This fact, together with other geo-political matters, makes America the Number One enemy of international terrorists.
We must stop looking at each other as the enemy. Peaceful protestors are not our enemies. Mainstream news media organizations are not our enemies. America's intelligence gathering agencies are not our enemies. Political adversaries are not our enemies. Terrorists are. They have no hesitation in killing us. Let’s focus on stopping them.
PHOTO: Map of global terrorists attacks, as of 2015.
