Maybe There's No Such Thing as Terrorism

The terrorist believes the dead bodies, the smashed limbs, the lifeless children are of no importance.

The idea is important, the cause, the banner, the god, the book.

Dead words on a page are worth more than live bodies, and everything needs to be squashed into one dimension, so it fits into the book, deformed until it fits the idea, reduced in size until it can be put onto a banner suitable for carrying in parades, beaten until it kneels before God.

That may be the kind of thinking that bombed the Boston Marathon, an event that, by virtue of a couple bombs, has now escaped the triviality that hovers over all sporting events.

If, in Boston, in an argument between two factions of youth in a poor neighborhood, Darnell takes an illegally obtained pistol and shoots a kid named Li'l Breezy, is that terrorism?

Nope. That's crime or, at the most, "gang-related violence."

If an American plane, maybe a drone, sends down its finger of destruction on some village where a "terrorist leader" is strongly suspected of hiding out, is that terrorism?

Or is the drone just "putting a boot in your ass," as the song suggests?

Is a man who beats his wife to death a terrorist? If you lock a child in a dark closet for 16 hours to "teach her a lesson," are you a terrorist? What if you burn the kid's soft underarm with a lit cigarette. Terrorist activity?

At least in American culture, we have much more understanding of the man who shoots a convenience store clerk for $236 than we do the terrorist who kills three people for an idea.

Some kind of killing is sanctioned by nearly every society in the world. It's why cops and soldiers have guns. It's why abortion is legal in some places, as is capital punishment.

So there are some sorts of killing we like, or at least can tolerate.

It is perfectly legal for one man to kill another inside a boxing ring or on a football field. One kid can tackle another kid in a high school football game and, if death ensues, we are sad, and we may wear some kind of memorial T-shirt to the next home game.

Maybe there is no such thing as "terrorism." Maybe it's all just killing, and all killing is murder. Maybe it's murder if you kill to defend yourself. Maybe it's murder if you kill someone who is about to kill your children. Maybe there is no nobility or heroism in killing anyone, not ever, not when you're wearing a uniform, not ever.

A few decades ago, in America, a white man like me could have killed a black man who looked too long at my wife. In doing so, I would have been "protecting" my wife. I would have been "protecting the honor of white women everywhere."

Those uniformed Germans who shoved Jews into the ovens were protecting the Aryan race from the Jewish plague. In fact, they were protecting the whole world from the terrible bacillus represented by Jewish men, women and children.

We hope (or we say we hope) that we will someday eliminate violence, that we'll all evolve until we live in some real version of a children's book, all new friends and bright colors and happy bunnies to be our pets.

But down through the centuries, humanity has probably spent more time agreeing on which forms of killing are acceptable than it has spent rooting out the thing itself.

Sometimes we get God's help in deciding whom to kill. For a while, killing witches was acceptable, even encouraged.

Some people are still killing for God, the ones who aren't killing for a flag or a political system or a country someone drew on a map several hundred years ago.

Maybe there is no terrorism. Maybe all killing is murder.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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