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Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Who Will Be the Footnote?

I commented on how history is made by those who live through it and make the history their children will read about:

History seems so inevitable. Heck, they write books about it. The finality of a well-footnoted book is overwhelming. Current events, by contrast, are chaotic and our future is uncertain.

We read that this happens and that happens. This is an underlying cause and that is an immediate cause. The events reflected a trend of this and that and flowed seamlessly to the next event. History had to happen the way it happened because that is what happened.

That is wrong, of course. History is what happened, certainly. But history was made by people who made decisions. They made the decisions as current events and they did not know what the future had in store for them.


Nothing is inevitable.

Orson Scott Card writes on this theme as well:

Fanatical Islam is not a religion. It is the lust for power and control over other people. It is a destructive, evil force that will sweep away all that is good and fine in this world.

And right now, if we only have the courage and will, we -- and only we -- can save the world from that dire future.

So the question remains: Are we too stupid to learn from history? Must we, on the verge of victory, turn our future over to the fools and appeasers?

That's what the polls are saying right now. Those polls will change. But, as with England in 1939, the polls will change too late. Without leadership, the people do not see the danger in time. Americans just want to be left alone. Our enemies are determined not to leave us alone. But our media, our intellectuals, and the Democratic Party are trying to soothe us and assure us that we don't actually have to fight anybody. We can win just by sitting still and ... being America.

America didn't get to be America by sitting still.


Hoping the mullahs with atomic weapons won't be a threat is simply allowing the maniacs in Tehran the opportunity to write our history.

Will the West become a mere footnote? In Farsi? Are we so ready to surrender the freedom and prosperity that Westerners have built for us over centuries of hard struggle?

What exactly would we celebrate on the Fourth of July?

UPDATE: Here's one man trying to make history. Do we really want the likes of Islamic Rage Boy to make our history?

UPDATE: Good grief, Rage Boy is a bigger loser than I imagined. The dude would be enraged at the complexity of a ziplock storage bag, people. This is the type of man who deserves to be a footnote in history, not the type who writes it.