Hi I'm drunk.

Let's get this out of the way first: I love Arabs. I love Persians. I love Syrians, I love Moroccans, I love the Lebanese, I think all of "South Asia" is a fuckin' dope-ass place full of dope-ass people and it breaks my fucking heart that we, as a culture, have run roughshod over it and strived to define it as this "other" that we can buttonhole and feel superior to. "Those poor Syrians." "Those poor Jordanians." Yes, I did just finish Said and yes, he's pedantic but goddamn it he's right.

But philosophy doesn't fill ships.

"Should we help?" Well, what does "help" mean? A refugee airlift of Syrians? Be realistic. We'll be lucky if we can keep Southern governors from grandstanding against problems that don't exist. When the fucking Cato Institute thinks you should let in any Syrian who can jump through the hoops, we can call it a dead issue. But those are a lot of hoops and a lot of jumping and the rest of them are fucked. They'll schlep their way into eastern Europe and hope for the best.

The fundamental problem with all these discussions is they fail to recognize that those guys with the guns? Who insist on killing us? They aren't from Syria. Them bitchez be indigenous, yo. They grew up in Paris, didn't make friends, recognized that the culture they were raised in considers them auslanders and struck a blow for the only fucking identity they could assimilate. There's this idea that "terrorists" are these dirty brown people from dirty brown places that don't know any-fucking-thing about you and hate your freedoms and it's purest bullshit. It is genuine, bona fide 100% steer-derived bullshit. Anwar Al Awlaki was born in fuckin' Las Cruces, NM. He preached in London. He was on the BBC like all the time and he didn't go radical until like the eighteenth time that the FBI tried to entrap him. We have met the enemy and he is us.

Worked with a guy. His name was Mohammed. He was from Pakistan. Spoke with no accent, raised in the US, mechanical engineer, four kids, went to the mosque every week. He used to go running at lunch. Stopped about October 2001 because while he could take the longshoremen trying to spit on him as he ran by, he couldn't handle them threatening to kill "his iraqi ass."

We'll never understand what the fuck is going on until we understand that there's more to it than "America, Europe, Japan and everything else." And if we can push through and treat humans as human we'll win in the end.

Fuckin' Aleppo is in ruins. The Bamyan buddhas are gone. Persepolis is under constant threat. All this is because Westerners think of anybody not Protestant as "other." All the rest of it is nuance.