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| Mr. Rigby of the Royal Fusiliers and his wife Rebecca |
My two cents on the whole incident below.
Warning: It is a bit of a downer.
I am enraged.
I cannot bring myself to form the words to express the fury I feel.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22644857
A British Fusilier, brutally murdered and beheaded by a terrorist in his own country, while his countrymen stood in horror.
This is the power of terrorism. Two small men with delusions of grandeur committed an act of the utmost barbarity and viciousness that made hundreds of people stop in there tracks and freeze like deer in headlights. These two creatures, as I am unwilling to call them animals with respect to the latter, enjoyed the power they felt as they took the life of an innocent man. They paraded in front of the terrified witnesses, demanding to have their pictures taken, demanding to be interviewed, demanding to make the whole world know what they had done and why; to justify, to rationalize, to wallow in their deluded grandeur.
Good men, and good women, were in the crowd that watched the soldier die. But by using terrorism, through viciousness and cruelty, those creatures paralyzed the good people. The crowd could do little but watch as an innocent man, one of their soldiers, one of their boys, was hacked apart. Some pleaded, some yelled, but none acted. So the terrorism served it's purpose: to make good men do nothing, so that evil could triumph. This is the power of terrorism.
So on come the secondary effects. The United Kingdom and the world recoils in horror. The members of the crowd who bore witness to this evil are scared, sad, and broken. The family who has lost their loved one, is left with their emotions wobbling like a deck of cards in the breeze. The ideologues are radicalized, and politicians will demand action. Perhaps, even the policy of nations may change. Terrorism, like worm burrowing into the skull, occupies the mind of it's host and creates doubt, fear, angst, and sorrow. Immobilizing and poisoning it's victims. This is the power of terrorism.
I believe I am a good man.
Yesterday, I lost an ally, a brother, in Woolwich. This has not made me sad; it has not made me scared; it has made me furious. My anger comes from the fact that I am at war with terrorism in every sense of the word. The war on terrorism isn't about American interests, or resources, or cultures or people. It is a war against all those who seek to paralyze and poison good people through the violence of fear. Terrorists are my enemy, and so I shall fight them. I will not cease until the war is won. If it does not end, then I will never stop. I will die one day knowing I never accommodated to fear, because I lived the life of a good man.
If I am to be a good man, I will not be silenced when evil seeks to do it's dirty work. I will not be paralyzed by fear because there is nothing to fear. The terrorist uses fear as a weapon that gives him great power. He needs this power because he has none, and therein lies the weakness that I must exploit.The terrorist is cruel because he is heartless, he is crazed because he is mindless, he demands power, because he is powerless. He is nothing, the empty shell of a broken man who has decided to steal from the world to fill his own emptiness. I am a good man, and I will not fear nothing.
He has no name, no race, no religion, no creed, and no power. He has nothing that I do not give him. I will not hear his explanations. I will not listen to his bombastic gloating via video posts. I will not fear his veiled threats. I will not immortalize his name above the names of his victims. I will give him no quarter. I will, instead, do the right thing. I will stand by my brothers and sisters. I will support the strong, protect the weak, and heal the wounded. I will be an example to emulate to my peers.
But most importantly, I will fight him. I must not be silent. I must not be paralyzed. Should they or others like them draw their blade against the innocent, I must greet them with force. Terrorism demands inaction from good men, and they will have no inaction from me.
We must all fight them. We must all stand together. We are all good people.
And they are nothing.
Semper Fidelis my friends.
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| Mr. Rigby and his son Jack |
Semper Filly
