Is There Only One Kind Of Terrorism?

Today is a new month, July 2008. This Friday, we Americans celebrate our independence from the English that dates back 232 years. In that 232 years, the United States of America has grown and developed into a modern nation of great wealth. Protected on each coast by two oceans, the United States with great natural resources had the luxury to grow and prosper for almost 400 years. Aside from the American Civil War, all other major wars have been fought on foreign soil. After the Second World War, the United States was a world power as Europe and Asia had been the battlegrounds of WW II. What happened to the United States in the last 60 plus years since the end of WW II?

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, terrorism has been tossed around by politicians to the point where we hear words like “soft on terrorism” in political speeches. Nothing in America is too sacred not to be used by politicians whose main objective is to get elected or reelected. But, is there only one form of terrorism? Are we as a nation not experiencing another form of terrorism today? What about economic terrorism?

Our economy is in serious trouble today. Oil the life blood of our economy has risen to such a high price that just about every American, except the wealthy, is facing a kind of economic terrorism in their everyday life. Terrorism is usually sudden, but terrorism can be slow and unrelenting. The price of oil has been going up sharply for over a year, and the politicians and our leadership have done nothing to address this crisis. This one thing, the price of fuel, has taken a lot of the air out of our economy to the point that it has complicated all the other economic problems we face. The price of gas and diesel has directly affected the country's ability to meet its mortgage payments and its credit card debt. This has further impacted the financial crisis that has already complicated the nation's economic recovery.

The Democrats are often accused of being the “tax and spend” party. But, the “war” in Iraq does not come cheap. With the most recent bill passed and signed by the president, the “war” in Iraq is costing the United States well over $600 billion. Fighting a war in Iraq to make Americans safe from terrorism of the sudden kind, while the terrorism of the slow moving kind continues to eat away at the families that we say we are protecting.

To listen to the political discourse, you would think Iraq was on par with the former Soviet Union as a challenge to the security to the United States. The nonsense never lets up especially in the year of a presidential election. While the rhetoric about terrorism is thrown about much the same way communism was the “terrorism” of the Cold War. How bad are the Chinese Communists now if we are doing so many billions of dollars of trade with them?

This 4th of July, wake up Americans. You are being feed a bunch of fear about terrorism while at the same time you are being strangled economically at the gas pump. Whether you realize it or not, your family and your budget, your job and your home are facing a kind of economic terrorism that has not been seen in this country since the Great Depression.