Rock, Paper, Scissors

8-1-03

From time to time I have to remind myself that emotion over rules logic…it’s wired deep down in our limbic brain…our inner caveman. Witness what has occurred in our country since 9-11. Over three thousand souls perished on that dark day, and it would not be overstating the obvious to say that the nation as a whole suffered a shock to its collective limbic system. When bad things happen we often turn to blame and scapegoating. In the first incidence we blamed Afghanistan and the Taliban for harboring Bin Laden. We basically bombed Afghanistan back into the middle ages. But that was not enough, with no Bin Laden to put on trail or body to display something did not feel right, we did not have “closure” as the psychologist would say. So we went looking for Sadam, as bad a character as you are likely to find, but with no apparent connection to 9-11, and this time we bombed Iraq back into the Middle Ages. But again there was no body and no closure. The world’s only superpower with the most lethal WMD ever known and we can not bomb our way out of our national depression. The problem with all this blame is that you can not undo what’s been done and the blame game becomes mass psychosis. Interestingly enough while our limbic brains are in overdrive the rest of the world does not understand us. The French arbiters of all that is je ne sais quoi think we are off our rockers. Perhaps we are. But here’s the deal, you can’t put the genie back into the bottle and sometimes when bad things happen people and nations act irrationally.
So maybe we will start acting rationally when the French do…but I hope sooner!