When Did My Country Become so Chicken S**t?

Today is Thanksgiving so this will be a short rant. There are a lot of things I am NOT thankful for.

After seeing my country come together as a people for most of my life I am now watching us grow more and more divided. This is not an accident. Apparently it is much easier to make disgusting amounts of money through fear and very hard to do it through love.

I do not think racism and xenophobia have anything to do with hatred and everything to do with fear. White racists don't hate blacks...White racists are bone deep scared of blacks. Americans don't hate Syrians...It's just a very vocal group of Americans are deeply afraid of Syrians. It's because of a terrorist rampage in France perpetrated by...Belgians?

America destroyed two sovereign nations, Afghanistan and Iraq, because of the 9-11 attacks...Terrorist rampages committed by...Saudis? 15 out of 19 9-11 attackers were Saudi Arabians. More particularly, they were led by a member of the Bin Laden family who had been close friends and patrons of George W. Bush. So we let Bush make us so very afraid we let him send thousands of good decent Americans to war in two countries that had nothing to do with the attacks.

So now we are too freakin' frightened to give aid and comfort to refugees from Syria. Last year this country issued passports to a lot of people. Here is a list of a few countries and the number of visas for each:

Libya - 4,766
Egypt - 56,456
Nigeria - 141,527
Saudi Arabia - 142,180
Pakistan - 63,948
Afghanistan - 4,421
Bangladesh - 35,025
Syria - 12,671
Lebanon - 28,983
Algeria - 11,676
Iraq - 33,961

That's right! We issued 142,180 visas to the Muslim nation of Saudi Arabia, where the overwhelming majority of 9-11 attackers came from. Why don't you know this already? Did you know that a Saudi investment group owns about 7% of Fox? And Twitter and Citigroup?

So why are you afraid of Syrians again? Why are you, a citizen of the nation with more military weapons than the rest of the world's nations combined, afraid of a few fully vetted refugees from a war torn region which we had the major hand in?

Why are Americans afraid of anything? But mostly, why are Americans so damnably afraid of the WRONG things?


This, by Josh Marshall, should be read and thought about.