The recent terror "attack" got me thinking about why that type of crap happens and what can be done to solve it.

The root problem of "terrorism" is poverty. It's not that these incompetent nimrods are Muslim, or come from a different culture (well, it's partly the culture thing); no it's poverty. It's the stinking heaps of crap as landscape type of poverty or the so-hungry-your-stomach-is-eating-itself type of poverty, or worse, a poverty of the mind, where imagination and life and love have been so ground down you can't be anything but angry and selfish, these feed "terror". If a person gets whittled down so far as to have any of those forms of poverty, but especially the last one, that person is ripe for feeling that the universe somehow owes him one. And he is ripe to be used by others, by those with a sharp axe to grind and who aren't willing to go grind it themselves. Life becomes cheap and disposable, and these nimrods are the ultimate nihilists.

So poverty is the problem, then ending poverty is the solution, right? Whoa there cowboy, not so fast. There is no panacea for "ending" poverty, no silver bullet, no magic elixir (but oh, wouldn't that be nice). Ending the poverty of hunger requires ending the poverty of environment, which requires ending the poverty of the mind, which requires ending the poverty of hunger...you get the idea. Maybe we're fucked. Maybe not.

Increments. We attack the problem on all fronts at once. This would of course waste a lot of resources, and a lot of people would whine that these resources would be better spent solving the less urgent problems of the industrialized world. This is a strategy where we'd lose a lot of battles but could eventually win the war (or maybe not, but I think it's worth a try).

Now about war: yes we know that Vietnam failed, at least for us, because the Vietnamese were scrappy and had more to lose than we did, that Napoleon couldn't conquer Russia because the Russians just *really* did not want him there and had the time and vastness to let all his bluster fizzle, that we won our own revolution because we really wanted it and the British soldiers weren't personally invested and probably just wanted to go home anyway -- all these wars are the same war, and it's the war we might currently be on the losing side of. We just don't give a crap about what happens in the hellhole armpit countries that breed "terrorists" until those brief weeks after we are newly inconvenienced at the airport.

We should give a crap. We should care about humans wherever they live, no matter how badly they treat us or think about us, or rather we should care about the generations to come, and the misery they might face if we don't act, wherever those generations exist.

I disagree with the President on Afghanistan. I think he was cornered by the military and hamstrung by a necessary focus on domestic issues. Don't get me wrong, I support the troops and all that, I even support continuing operations in the area, but what I don't agree with is that he put little attention to rebuilding (or building, as the case may be) Afghanistan and other countries. Schools, hospitals, streets. Infrastructure peeps. Sure, even if we build roads there will be IED's and some of those roads will be destroyed by the people they're meant to help, just like a rabid animal shitting where is sleeps, and sure, there will still be schools blown up and girls harassed for wanting to learn how to read, and sure the hospitals will be understaffed and undersupplied, and sure, we'll get tired of building and rebuilding and rebuilding, but overall, over time, over decades perhaps, the infrastructure will take root and stabilize. There will be less poverty.

Build.

This is a value. This is one of my personal values. I like to make things, both tangible and intangible. It brings me more joy that just about anything else. I think it applies to the vast majority of people, but I could be wrong. Making something, building something, shaping something, is far more fulfilling than buying something, using something, discarding something. I think it's a value we need to involve more in our foreign policy, and frankly as individuals. We need to stop seeing status as how much money we have, what our job titles are, where we live, or what we drive (I drive a monthy buspass btw. Just saying).

We also need to spread this value globally, as it's something sorely lacking (or vulgarly twisted) in those armpit countries. The same for these next two values.

Learn.

This should be self-evident as something that is extremely useful, but most people don't act like it. Learning doesn't stop when you drop out of highschool or graduate college. Learning is something the brain does naturally it's entire life (unless it get's clogged up with alkaloids, but that's another blog post). We need to embrace this trait. We need to nuture it, and keep the fire, as Cormac McCarthy said (or at least that's what I took that to mean). Learning can be hard, but it can be fun, and if you reach the goals you set yourself, the euphoria is pretty unparallel...well at least for me. Learning is a good and useful tonic for poverty, and not just poverty of the mind. If we each learn to be aware of our environment we can figure out fixes there, and with alleviating hunger too.

One thing that struck me early on in the "war on terror" were some PBS documentaries showing the so-called schools in places like Pakistan and Yemen. These schools were for boys only and they only learned to read the Koran. Over and over, for years. One book. A book that was meant mainly as a work of religious philosophy, a subject that at best, could inform you in how to deal with maybe 10% of your waking life. The Koran, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, whatever, won't tell you how to plant a garden. They won't tell you how to irrigate a field, they won't tell you how to build a house, or heck, even to build a fire. They won't tell you how to play sublime music or care for an infant. They won't tell you how to treat the flu or prevent rickets. They won't tell you anything about the vast expanse of stuff on the other side of our atmosphere (and personally, ironically, they won't tell us much about the sheer beauty of the natural world, what most religious people I know say they think is 'God'). At best, these tomes are 90% useless for dealing with the everyday issues everyday humans encounter in a lifetime. It was clear that these boys were going to grow up into a poverty so twisted and endemic that they would be lucky if they didn't end up blowing themselves to goop in the middle of a bazaar somewhere.

Learning is not just good for the brain, it also helps keep society together. At a basic level we all have to learn language of some sort, and this is a natural almost unstoppable process, and language binds us together and allows us to form relationships, families, groups, tribes, homeowners associations, city councils, states, nations, and a functioning habitable planet. And there are other skills and constructs that we learn and layer on top, for more efficiency, more justice, increased safety, more happiness and even better toothbrushes. The more we learn, the more we can build.

Teach.

This goes hand-in-hand with learning, but there's more to it. We should all teach. Sure, some of us would end up teaching utter shit (like anything excreted by Kevin Trudeau for example), but overall, by evolutionary constraints, the good information will persist over time and the bad information will slouch slowly out of the human cannon.

Teaching isn't just the complement of learning, it is also an advanced form. Teaching includes things like argument and peer-review; it's a give and take, and maybe the odd compromise. It is enriched learning. We should value it more.

As for how teaching relates to foreign policy, I'm not suggesting we go build schools in armpit countries and then dictate the curriculum. If we are the enemy, what reason do those students have to trust us? And can we really be sure we're not just putting a our own superficial stamp on them? We can teach some subjects that are relatively free of politics, like agriculture, medicine, and accounting, but we should steer clear of literature, language, religion, politics, and even perhaps more fundamental sciences, which could be perceived as western indoctrination. Once a basic school structure is established, the learners can become the teachers, and we can gamble to leave them to their own devices about what they want to learn and teach beyond that. The only thing that we ought to indoctrinate in all who we encounter, is build, learn, teach.