Happy joyful life, blessed by... whatsoever

Listen, we in the western world should be happy with the fact that we are born overhere instead of somewhere else where child mortality is more common than survival after five years of lifetime. We are the lucky ones. Only we don't know that until we get educated, and start to be interested in global problematics. Then we can decide to trod the exploiting path or the administering path, albeit that there are other more locally addressed paths as well, while we cannot be all that involved in international matters.

The White House has an interesting website which contains lots of information about your presidency, and it keeps records of the past. This is very nice, because one can return to different eras that might shed some more light on the choices that were made then, which can be compared to our present hindsight knowledge.
I retrieved a radio addressing to the nation which was produced (? text writers andthelike) by Laura Bush instead of her husband. Why she replaced him I did not find out right away, but it was for the first time the president left his weekly address to the nation to his spouse.
Now, she is a wholehearted woman. She addressed all the school children after 9/11 reassuring them that their teachers are there to protect them against evildoers and so on. But now (November 17th 2001) she visited Afghanistan, where she met Hamid Karzai (bytheway former associate of the Halliburton company), and went horrified by the evil conduct of "the terrorists and the Taliban" imposed over this country. Reading her resume I found she gained "a bachelor of science degree in education from Southern Methodist University in 1968", and after that "a master of library science degree from the University of Texas" in 1973, so she must have some knowledge about what is going on in the world, I presume.
So she was abhorred about what she encountered in Afghanistan, while she started her addressing to the nation with "I'm delivering this week's radio address to kick off a world-wide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaida terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban."
Now for sure that is a serious issue. She continues "Long before the current war began, the Taliban and its terrorist allies were making the lives of children and women in Afghanistan miserable. Seventy percent of the Afghan people are malnourished. One in every four children won't live past the age of five because health care is not available. Women have been denied access to doctors when they're sick. Life under the Taliban is so hard and repressive, even small displays of joy are outlawed -- children aren't allowed to fly kites; their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud. Women cannot work outside the home, or even leave their homes by themselves." You cannot imagine how bad these guys must be to deny basic human rights to their kin.
"The severe repression and brutality against women in Afghanistan is not a matter of legitimate religious practice. Muslims around the world have condemned the brutal degradation of women and children by the Taliban regime. The poverty, poor health, and illiteracy that the terrorists and the Taliban have imposed on women in Afghanistan do not conform with the treatment of women in most of the Islamic world, where women make important contributions in their societies. Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish. The plight of women and children in Afghanistan is a matter of deliberate human cruelty, carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control."
Hey, wait a minute, she is comparing the situation in Afghanistan to other islamic traditions elsewhere, thereby stating that what happens overhere is an exception. She is right, although for the wrong reasons. And she keeps on repeating the words 'terrorists' and 'Taliban' in one breathe. But she forgot to look in history books, "as a public school librarian". She could have known this country was not only one of the poorest on earth, but also that there was a civil war going on for at least 35 years (almost an average lifetime overthere). And that the Taliban were restoring order after this incredible long time of turmoil.
The Taliban had some cultural ideas about what a society should look like. One must start somewhere rebuilding a society. It never happened in history that one entity could control the entirety of Afghanistan, but the Taliban almost managed to do such a thing.
What is more, the Taliban were backed up by the United States, in cooperation with the Pakistan secret service ISI. That was when the Soviets so called invaded Afghanistan which was not serving the interests of the United States. The Taliban were happy in showing their 'made in the USA' weaponry. But they were betrayed by your glorious country as soon as the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. The Soviets could not master the entire country either, if that ever was their commitment.
Laura Bush continues in her radioed address to the nation: "Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror -- not only because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us."
Yes, the Taliban are exerting a lot of power on the rest of humanity. They are capable of doing that. We should stand up and protest against such inhumane policies.
"Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. [...] Yet the terrorists who helped rule that country now plot and plan in many countries. And they must be stopped. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."
This is sheer propagandic talk that Laura Bush cannot have made up by herself. But, hey, time is up (because of the 'messages'*): "In America, next week brings Thanksgiving. After the events of the last few months, we'll be holding our families even closer. And we will be especially thankful for all the blessings of American life. I hope Americans will join our family in working to insure that dignity and opportunity will be secured for all the women and children of Afghanistan.
Have a wonderful holiday, and thank you for listening. " concludes her address to the nation.
Now, she is a wholehearted woman. But what was the exact contribution of the rest of your nation to Afghan welfare? And on what basis was this administered? There were indeed individuals that tried to contribute on humane grounds. But generally speaking your enterprises stood in queue to get contracts. The more is destroyed the more can be build up again. The issue of the oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea is still on some agendas. But the women are still marginalized overthere. With your consent.

* the 'messages' refers to the commercial advertisements that continue to terrorize the television watcher when one tries to attend the programmed broadcasting inbetween. It might be the case that the broadcasting company has to earn money to continue doing their job, but for instance in the United States one is literally confronted with advertorial bullshit, surrounded by advertisement messages which together are very indicative of USA's current economic welfare state of being.