The Future is in Our Past

Terrorism is slowly creeping into out of the way places and it can only get worse. In Glasgow, Scotland, recently, a group of medical doctors, the brightest and the best, entered the terrorism game.

The shock value of this new take on terrorism can be seen around the world. No one expects doctors, who have sworn to save life, to do an about turn and try to destroy it. We have entered another phase of the terrorism game, and there's no end in sight.

Now, people everywhere will be looking over their shoulders for the boogeyman, even in the world's hospitals, where we have believed we were relatively safe from extremists. The only extremists one would expect to see in the healthcare system would be a religious fundamentalist trying to harm an abortion doctor.

While many are surprised that young doctors, who have nothing but a lifetime of ease and comfort in front of them, can throw it all away for a cause, it shouldn't have came as a surprise. Intellectuals are often more idealistic than mainstream society.

The truth is the young are becoming increasingly disillusioned by the philosophy of war. If one engages young persons, anywhere, in conversation, they will tell you that they understand, more than their parents, how politicians run by a war machine are exploiting them. You will hear them talk with ease about the military industrial complex, and how the MIC feeds on war in order to increase the wealth and power of a select few families worldwide.

The Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program says the world's richest 500 individuals have a combined income greater than the world's poorest 415 million. Youth are able to see the lack of social justice inherent in this statistic. Their parents' generation have been blinded by the platitudes of a society whose only aim is to keep everyone in check and working hard.

Parents bought the line that if their children were bright and worked hard they could have it all all being more hard work and more consumer goods to keep the pockets of the rich filled to overflowing and more drugs to prevent them from thinking of little things like social justice.

Young intellectuals are realizing that they're in a corner. Why, when we feel we are in a corner, do we resort to violence? Is there even the remotest possibility that we will begin a difference conversation about peace, a conversation that doesn't revolve around winning and losing? The word peace has been around long enough to have had some impact, but even though we love the word and the philosophy built around it, the practical application doesn't seem to change.

The more one thinks about it the more one realizes that we're programmed to be selfish and expect our own way. We believe the best way to achieve our goals is to strike back. The big question, according to psychiatrists and psychologists, is whether we're born this way or if we learn it at our parents' knee.

Why is our first instinct always to destroy? Yesterday there was a moth cocoon developing peacefully on the inside of a glass bottle, which contained pecans. It was a pretty innocuous little thing, harming no one. So why was it snatched up and destroyed, when the actual moth would not have been?

As soon as the action was completed, it started me thinking about how destroying that which we don't know or understand is a powerful instinct. What was destroyed was part of the web of life and an intricate component of all that keeps human life flowing. Humans don't live in a vacuum. We depend on all the other living interactions in order to survive.

Actually, destroying the moth cocoon helped me to think about abortion in a different way. My position on abortion has always been that even though abortion would not be my personal choice, it is important that women be given the freedom to choose.

Yesterday, it became more clear to me that once a baby is conceived it is life. It can be argued that it really isn't living until it is outside the womb and takes its first breath. Yet, there seemed no doubt that the moth cocoon represented life, just as the embryo represents life.

There is no change in my position that women should have control over their own bodies. Yet, perhaps, there needs be more discussion around the way we are socialized to perceive what is important and not important. The killer of the abortion doctor sees the life of the doctor as less important than the unborn child; the American soldier sees the Iraqi dissidents as the enemy. And now the Canadian soldier sees the Taliban as the enemy. We see those outside our own groups as less important.

As the Glasgow incident tells us, we can install security everywhere, but those whom we regard as the enemy aren't so easily detectable. Are we now going to regard all foreign-born doctors as suspect? Let's hope not. For fear is more frightening and destructive than bombs.