Terrorism exists. Ask any American who had to witness the horror of 9/11/01, and watch the TV as people jumped out of a melting skyscraper to a certain death, so they could escape the excruciating heat of their burning confines. The surrealistic image of a huge airplane slamming into the World Trade Center, and the simultaneous attack on the Pentagon, burns a painful memory into the brains of anyone who saw it, whether live or on the television.

Spain, London, and war torn Iraq are not strangers to terrorist acts. The citizens of Iraq deal with terrorists on a daily basis, people who walk into a crowd and detonate an explosive device strapped to their body, killing themselves and whoever happens to be unfortunate enough to be in the area at the time. These senseless acts, beg us to ask- Why does terrorism exist?

There are many different faces and styles of terror, and there are just as many reasons or justifications for it, at least in the minds of the people carrying out these acts. The biggest threat to the US right now, deals with an extremist Islamic belief, that anyone not a follower of Islam and Allah, are to be brutally wiped from the face of the Earth using any means possible, the more violent the better. These are warped individuals with a narrow mindset corrupted by brainwashing and propaganda. To add fuel to this fire, there is a growing worldwide sentiment, and resentment against the US, for it's aggressive foreign policy initiatives, making us seem like we believe we are to be the makers of global policy, the baby-sitters of third world ignorance, and the controllers of world-wide resources needed to sustain life as we know it. And in the face of all this, there is the blatant corruption of our own government, the corporate profits of war, old-boy networks granting favors to associates, and the endless taxation of the citizens whose sweat and blood create the revenue that pays these politicians to lead us down this path of self-righteous aggression.

This environment of politics and policies, creates frustration and desperation in people on our own soil, and some of these people like Timothy McVeigh, go to extremes to make a statement decrying these decisions, creating a scenario where our own countrymen have become terrorists against their own government.

Not all people are in agreement about the justifications for some of the decisions our government makes, and the efforts we undertake involving other countries. There are alternate theories about what happened in Afghanistan, that it needed to be under American influence so we could exploit the Heroin output. Iraq and the war there, is more about controlling oil than hunting terrorists. There are so many layers of intent and motivations for our actions, that we have virtually no way of ever knowing what really is taking place, unless we are part of a very small inside group of intelligence operatives, and even they are divided into sections, where no one group has all the knowledge.

Corruption in government, and the abuse of the common man at the hand of the fat-cat power machine that is the American political system, will continue to breed hostility against it, and eventually the continued terrorist attacks and our retaliations will snowball into a world war that will most likely change life as we know it, and hopefully, out of the ashes will rise a new society, one where the common good of all humanity will take precedent over one county's capitalistic agenda.

Learn more about this author, Todd Meikle.
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