Abstract

All Creatures Great and Small

Editorial. The article looks at political violence and other events around the world as of October 2004, and presents the author's anxiety over politics in the United States. The attack on the children in Beslan, Russia, embodied the extreme ideological intransigence that governs so much of the world. Within the same few weeks, Mark Thatcher (former British Prime Minister Margaret's son), and Simon Mann, founder of the band of corporate mercenary soldiers called Executive Outcomes, were indicted for trying to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. If true, it worries me, because so many of the world's wars seem to be most heated along the path of hoped-for oil pipelines, and months ago, long before U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared the war in Sudan to be genocide, there were news reports that Chad and Sudan would be the site of new pipelines designed to skirt the better-known hot spots in the Middle East. More prominent were the crazy-making contradictions flowing from the White House: A vote for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry means that the terrorists will strike again. Vote for President George W. Bush because the terrorists are going to strike again anyway. Our dependence on oil ought not to remain a driving force behind our social policy, our morality, our wars. Releasing ourselves from this dependence is worth the effort.