Last night, a local Network news affiliate had one of their newscasters saying: the “captain’s was a botched escape.”
Botched? Hardly. Unable to make it to safe ship, yes. But, “Botched?” … you sometimes wonder who is writing the teleprompter copy…
Not that long ago, the same news affiliate said of a child who was sexually intruded upon by an adult, that the “affair had gone on for over a year.” Affair? Have people truly somehow replaced their brains with flying canaries?
Re media takes on terrorists from Somalia. Same. Ditch the word ‘pirates’ which is another word not fitting this armed kidnapping and ransoming. “Murderers” is not too strong a word.
They attempted to murder the captain as he was trying to swim to safety, til one of the thugs jumped into the sea to try to keep the captain from fleeing. Pirates of Penzance in silk breech clouts and all. Right. Maybe they’ll all begin singing and dancing a production number on deck soon too.
Lastly and seriously, the terrorists main weapon is knowing how highly many countries value the lives of their soldiers and citizens. That’s the only thing I know that keeps the US Navy and Brits and French from blowing the terrorists sky high.
Between the three nations they have enough firepower to make the ocean and the land trade places.
I think of those who would not hesitate to kill all the thugs and all the innocent hostages with one fell swoop. I think of Than Shwe, the butcher of Burma, who massacred peaceful monks and nuns, young people, grandfathers, grandmothers, parents, children… who were marching peacefully to protest the billionaire dictator’s causing another rise in the price of oil the poor people relied on for cooking and for heat.
I think of Idi Amin Dada Oumee, unspeakably cruel dictator of Uganda. I think of Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, murderer and plunderer of Haiti. I think of Robert Mugabe who has single-handedly destroyed nearly an entire generation of hope for the poor and landless by taking the nearly 100M dollars meant to redistribute ‘fair sale-fair buying’ of land to the landless, and instead putting it in his wealthy friends’ pockets.
I think of the African kings who sold those they’d already enslaved for years in their tribal wars, to slave traders from the Netherlands and Europe and the Caribbean. That black on black egregious crime is no new phenomenon.
Then, I think of the Slaughter of Innocents of all boy babies under one year of age, and I think of Rachel, on the hills of Ramah, calling it like it was… she didnt call Herod’s thugs “pirates.” They were murderer, murderers, murdering… and she cried out the truth and cried out, and would not be comforted nor silenced.
We need a Rachel in news media and in Government, no more ‘pirates’ but calling a spade a spade…
while we are here with our hearts in our hands, wringing all three, hoping for the safety of the brave captain no matter what. Hoping for an outcome that will find a way through such travails without becoming, ourselves, what we say we are not.
Yet, here on earth, though some are absolutely certain about what ought be done in stand-offs far away, many in the thousand tribes here on earth continue to try to see how not to rule by force alone, but by justice first… and how to crack the paradox of civilized survival: preserving life and holding life dear… yet striking if utterly necessary.