ISIS is not a CRISIS.This will sound like the most incongruous thing ever uttered by the Colonel -- from a not-so-deep well brimming with the Colonel's unfathomable incongruities -- but hear him out.
The so-called Islamic State is bad news. Very bad. Their ideology ranks right up (or down) there with the worst from history's library collection of inhumanities.
But, ISIS ain't no crisis.
21st Century America, sitting on the beach, well above the high water mark, too timid to touch a toe even in the shallow surf for fear of a micro-aggressive jellyfish, thinks ISIS is a crisis.
But, ISIS ain't no crisis.
Some perspective, please, people.
Thirty years ago, the Colonel -- then a thirty-year-old Captain of Marines -- was earnestly preparing to fight a THERMONUCLEAR WAR with the Soviet Union. Said preparation involved training to fight afoot through the fog of battle present on a European battlefield macro-aggressed with radioactive fallout, chemical agents, and biological toxins.
That, my friends, is what a real crisis looks like.
Oh, and by the way, by the time the Colonel was training to fight 'em, Soviet leaders had accounted for more dead than a half-dozen Hitlers, leaving very little doubt that the Politburo, ensconced in a bunker deep beneath the Kremlin would have any compunction to push the button.
ISIS is no crisis.
At most, the jihadis are a mild case of jock itch. Irritating as all get out, but hardly a life-threatening condition.
President Obama was right -- even a broken clock is right twice a day -- when he said that the Islamic State did not pose an existential threat to the citizens of the United States. They don't.
The Colonel does not mean to make light of the pain and horror suffered by those targeted by psychopaths inspired by the jihadi jerkdom. His blood boils with righteous indignation at their every affront to human decency. Their inhumanity provides a textbook definition of the term.
But, in the grand scheme of things, the Islamic State is little more than a boil on our collective backsides. Man up, lance it, slap a bandaid on it, and keep on trucking.
So, can we please stop all the hand-wringing over how we are so frightened to be raising children in this day and age?
Seriously? Remember "Duck and Cover"?
For those of you whose perspective is challenged by lack of age, "duck and cover" was the nuclear attack drill (in addition to fire drills) for school children of the Colonel's generation.
For more perspective -- terror attacks have killed less than 100 American citizens on average annually since WWII. Care to guess how many American citizens die in automobile accidents every year?
The number averages somewhere north of thirty-thousand. Three zero, zero zero zero.
You thirty-somethings, worrying about raising children today, want to keep 'em safe? Don't let 'em drive until they have children of their own.
Want something serious to fret over?
Let's start with how to assimilate the populations of the Southern American Hemisphere when we finally decide it is in all of our best interests to form a pan-hemispheric republic under the Constitution of the United States.
