Altleftto

Here's a thought experiment they don't teach in American schools. Imagine a foreign power, significantly stronger than the United States, decided after a disputed intelligence assessment that the American government posed a threat. It assembled a coalition, invaded, removed the government, disbanded the military, releasing hundreds of thousands of armed men into unemployment, and installed a transitional authority composed largely of exiles who had been living in the foreign power’s country for twenty years. It then spent the next decade conducting night raids on American homes. It ran detention facilities where Americans were held without charge and in some cases tortured. It operated checkpoints in American cities where American citizens were stopped, searched, and sometimes killed by foreign soldiers who did not speak English and could not distinguish a civilian from a combatant and in many cases did not particularly try. A generation of American children grew up in this environment. Would you describe those children's resulting hostility to the foreign power as: (A) A rational response to their lived experience or (B) Evidence of a cultural pathology that requires theological and anthropological analysis? You already know the answer. You knew it before I finished the sentence. The exercise is only necessary because the question is never asked the right way around.