"Asked about the biggest threat to their groups' survival, a militant says that 'free secular education for all' leading to an 'increase in the literacy rate' is the gravest threat to the survival of the jihadi groups in Pakistan."
page 230, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill by Jessica Stern (NY: HarperCollins, 2003)
Free secular literacy for all.
That's what I'd like to see for "fighting terrorism" or just on general principles, free secular literacy in local languages available on all media, from cellphone and computer to hard copy and word of mouth, open source and user hackable, coupled with solar rechargeable reading lights as affordable and available as "disposable" cigarette lighters so that every child who wants to can read in bed.
The One Laptop Per Child project (
http://laptop.org/ ), undertaken by the brother of chief spook John Negroponte, Nicholas Negroponte, of MIT's Media Lab, will be one beginning of that process. Other, more vernacular efforts are certainly possible with the technology available. Such efforts could be launched by a small group of determined people for minimum costs [hint, hint].
"the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it" wrote Diane Di Prima in the poem "Rant."
I choose to imagine a world where free secular literacy (and numeracy) for all are available, a world where clean water and adequate nutrition for all pregnant and lactating women and children under the age of five (the standard enacted under Nixon for the Women, Infants, Children program, no means test necessary, back in the early 1970s) and housing and full employment within a healthy and growing ecological system. I choose to indulge in that thought experiment, at least for a moment. How would it work? Can we get there from here or vice versa?
I imagine a zero emissions industrial system where zero emissions is a goal for continuous improvement as in W Edwards Deming's zero defects on a production line through statistical quality control. My thought experiment includes a society which follows something like Bill McDonough's ecological design principles: waste equals food, use only available solar income, respect diversity, and love all the children. My imagined world is self-organized in affinity groups around different interests and projects in collections of businesses, partnerships, collectives, cooperatives, unions, guilds, and associations, barn-raising and community celebration Tom Sawyer fence painting as I've seen work in various capacities over the last thirty years, magnified now by eBay and Craig's List economies with worldwide collaboration possible and probably live video blogged.
I imagine my country recommitting itself to the Four Freedoms in all their FDR and Norman Rockwell glory:
"freedom of speech and expression --everywhere in the world.
"freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in the world.
"freedom from want which, translated into world terms, means... a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants --everywhere in the world.
"freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means... that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor --anywhere in the world."
And then I remember we are governed by a pack of psychopathic personalities who torture mentally ill criminals to generate the fear fantasies that are the false justifications for the war those psychopathic personalities want all along. Self-fulfilling paranoid prophecies built in an echo chamber.
I have another set of thought experiments for those psychopathic personalities who now govern but that's for midnight or the hour of the wolf.