One man, two shoes, and a very, very small measure of justice

My first reaction to the shoe thrower was: "I get his anger, but that's really not too cool". I also worried about the secret service not getting the jump on a violently angry man not 4 yards from the president of the United States.

In the last two days, I have done a 180 on all these thoughts.

1- The Secret Service can only stop shoe throwers if they keep all human beings away from the president. If the guy had anything more dangerous on him, he doubtlessly would have never got past security. His attack was not life threatening or even injury threatening. The NRA tells us that a well armed society is a polite society. I guess now I'd make the same argument about a well-heeled society.

2- It really was a cool thing to do. Again, Mr Bush was in no real danger of anything more than a scratch on his noggin. Compared to the violence visited upon the innocent people of Iraq, compared to the dead and the displaced and the kids with their arms and legs blown off and the women scared to leave their homes and the families torn apart and the communities irreparably divided along sectarian lines by death squads and kidnap squads and the weight of destruction and humiliation brought down on that nation, trying to bean the architect of that chaos with a pair of docksiders is a fitting (and culturally significant) symbol of the scorn of the world.

but my most important reversal of all is...

3- Actually, no, I do not "get" his anger. I live a good life. I drive to work without fear. I pay my bills without fear. I go shopping without worrying about a bomb blowing up the marketplace. If I lose my job, I can be sure I'll soon enough find another job. I spent two weeks without electricity because of a hurricane, but I never doubted I'd get it back; I never worried that terrorists would blow up the generator after that. I send my kid to college halfway across the continent and can worry only that she'll miss her flight back next week. I have not been kidnapped, as Muntadhar al-Zeidi was. I have not been beaten. My sister hasn't been raped; my father has not been murdered; my cousins have not been seduced into joining a ethnic cleansing militia; my mother's door hasn't been kicked down in the middle of the night by foreign troops. I have not seen hell unleashed on my community because some ideological thinktank in another hemisphere thinks it has an intriguing theory for global domination.

So I cannot in any sense get Muntadhar al-Zeidi and what made this man in the truth business flip out on President Bush. More importantly, I cannot judge him. I do not have that right. He has every right to judge us, however. When you look at what has happened in our name, I can only stand amazed that, having judged us, he sentenced us to so light a punishment.