Has anybody heard The World Today? On 9825 at 0200 they had a report on
the psychology of suicide bombing. Basically, the expert said that the
bombers are disaffected young people fed up with the current social and
religious constructs under which they live, and subsceptible to utopian
dreams. When the promise of 72 virgins in Paradise for eternity is
compared to what they see around them on the earthly plane, Paradise
starts looking pretty damn good. They also mentioned that in Iraq
different factions of Muslims are going into the mosques of the opposing
faction and blowing themselves up.

What all this adds up to is that no place is safe, and everybody between
the ages of 13 and 25 is a potential terrorist. It's the same impulse
that gave birth to the 60s counterculture, only much more damaging. What
we're talking about is a threat not only to Western Civilization but to
the basic building blocks upon which human interaction is built. If
every teenager in the world decides that suicide bombing is better than
earthly living, and the goal is simply to kill as many people as
possible wherever and whenever they may be found, then the human race is
probably doomed.

We each go out into the world trusting that the people around us are not
out to blow us up. Imagine if children start killing their parents, if
bombs go off on school buses, if life becomes one long litany of death
and destruction that can come from anybody, anywhere, anytime. Human
society would tear itself apart trying to secure itself or trying to
grab the scraps of existence before they too are blown up. The killing
would continue until it ran out of people to kill, like a virulent virus
that doesn't die until it has exhausted its host population. By the time
the virus of suicide bombing ran out of participants, humanity would be
no more.

There has been lots of talk on this newsgroup about the threat we face,
and the costs of losing. Well, here it is: we face the threat of having
the building blocks of human existence come unraveled, and the result
would be that the human race would cease to exist. We still don't know
if there are other sentient species on other planets, and we may never
find out. If humanity is truly alone, then its extinction would be the
greatest loss that the universe has known in 20 billion years.


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