Sorta, but not quite.

So.  Ran across something last week that I've been ruminating on: "Skull-Stomping Sacred Cows: People are Dying Because We're Weak." 

We aren't weak.  Well, the American people (the real ones, the ones that remember what it is to BE an American, rather than European, or a "citizen of the world") aren't.  Neither are our military branches. 

Our politicians--the ones in control, and the ones our enemies look to when they assess the rest of us--are.  They desperately want to be "liked." 

We are not up against a similar culture, like we were in WWI or WWII, where we fought (mostly) in Europe against others who come from the same racial and cultural heritage that our nation was built on.  No, this is more like fighting on the Pacific front: we have facing us an enemy that sees nothing wrong in acts that seem, to us, to be cowardly, or barbaric. 

The thing is, they seem that way because they come from different cultural roots.  Ones that we only sort of shared.  These roots are in the Old Testament of the Bible.  Ours are almost completely founded in Europe alone, or in the New Testament.  Theirs are formed by tribalism,* ours by feudalism.**

We have it within our culture to overcome and wipe out theirs.  We've done it before, when we had to (see the early colonial period when we were forced to defend ourselves from the aggressive aboriginal tribes).  We are capable of doing it again.

Should a massive attack happen that hits us in the nerve center of the nation (i.e., Washington, D.C.), I do believe that our declared enemies, those who've declared war on us time and time again, will find that we are capable of doing it again, and that what they perceive as weakness--an unwillingness to cause unnecessary harm, or to torture instead of a swift death, or the discipline to not charge screaming into the fight but to wait and aim until there's no way to avoid our shots--are not weaknesses at all, but a massive well of strength that they, in their fractured, tribal based culture cannot hope to match.   

*Tribalism is focused on family, then extended family, then tribe, and to hell with anyone else.  And if stabbing a relative in the back is necessary for your own advancement, it's for the good of the tribe.

**Feudalism, done right, is a ruling class that cares for and protects its everyday people, right down to the individual families.  Advancement is not handled at the point of a knife, but by proving merit and working hard.