A phenomenon I encountered while at the Berkeley Free Clinic makes me think a bit about what Al Qaeda, and perhaps a certain Iranian president might be doing. Let me ‘splain. At the BFC, we were always trying to recruit people, and unsurprisingly, we got alot of idealogues. And there was alot of talk about empowering the people to make their own medical decisions, and down with physician tyranny. But the truth is, we loved and trusted our physicians, and were pretty heavily oriented towards the scientific method-tested ways of doing things. We got funding from and worked with government health boards. So, why the “down with the medical establishment” talk? <\/p>\n
It’s a recruiting trick. Our organization did alot of good work, and we did have an ususually democratic decision making structure. But we didn’t really do anything too radical in terms of challenging the system. <\/p>\n
This brings us to terrorism, “the greatest threat to western civilization” (it’s far, far from it). And the rhetoric that surrounds it. Whether it’s our own leaders saying the terrorists would destroy us if we weren’t doing our very best to brutalize them in any way possible or bin laden talking about how he’ll ultimately bring us to our knees, there’s alot of highly overblown rhetoric involved. <\/p>\n
Let’s be clear, pollution and congestion cause more problems in the united states than terrorism did. This was true before, during, and after september 11th. It’s just diffuse. <\/p>\n
The first goal of terrorists is not to kill. It’s to get attention. If all 3,000ish people that died, 5 years ago, had died of unexplained natural causes in their bed. If twice that number had, the terrorists would not have been happy. Our deaths are not goal. They are a means to an end. Remember that. Terror is the goal. Panic, destabilization. It’s a psychological game. And they are winning the game on their terms. We don’t seem to know the terms of our game, and that more than anything else, is why we are not winning. <\/p>\n
But telling us “they pose a serious threat to us” is a) false. We kill more of our own in car accidents and destroy more dollar value in property in any year than they have in their top year. Did I pull that out of my ass? Yes. Do I doubt it? Not in the slightest. b) fear mongering of the first order.<\/p>\n
Do we have things to fear other than fear? Of course. But it doesn’t do us any good to fear them. And sweating your odds of dying in a plane crash is just plain stupid. The last thing we should be doing is buying into their overblown rhetoric. We don’t want to be playing the game by their rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A phenomenon I encountered while at the Berkeley Free Clinic makes me think a bit about what Al Qaeda, and perhaps a certain Iranian president might be doing. Let me ‘splain. At the BFC, we were always trying to recruit people, and unsurprisingly, we got alot of idealogues. And there was alot of talk about … Continue reading “Overblown rhetoric”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}