Senator Ben Cardin's Response to My Letter

So about 10 days ago I started a letter writing campaign to ask Senator Cardin to condemn the civilian massacre that's going on in Gaza. I received a response and well...let's just say it wasn't the one I was hoping for.

Dear Mr. Ahsan:

     Thank you for contacting me regarding the conflict between the State of Israel and Hamas. I am deeply concerned by the escalating violence.

     I strongly support Israel's right to defend its citizens against threats to its security and existence. The recent military action taken by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza is a direct response to Hamas' ongoing barrage of rocket and mortar attacks against civilians in Israel. 

     Hamas poses a critical challenge to the regional peace process. Labeled as a terrorist organization, Hamas' leaders encourage violence and cling to the belief that Israel should be destroyed. Hamas' actions to extend its reach deeper into Israel and its failure to end continuing attacks exacerbate the already fragile humanitarian situation for the residents of Gaza and undermine efforts to attain peace and security in the region. 

     On July 10, 2014, I joined 41 of my Senate colleagues in introducing Senate Resolution 498. This resolution reaffirms the United States' support for Israel's right to defend its citizens and ensure the survival of the State of Israel, condemns the unprovoked rocket fire at Israel, calls on Hamas to immediately cease all rocket and other attacks against Israel, and calls on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the unity governing arrangement with Hamas and condemn the attacks on Israel.

     We must find a way to advance a stable and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. Hamas must end its rocket and mortar attacks, recognize Israel's right to exist, renounce violence, and honor all past agreements to peacefully move toward a two-state solution. I want to assure you that the United States will continue to do all that is within our power to promote peace and stability in the region.

            Thank you again for contacting me on this important issue. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future on this or any other matter of concern to you.

Now here's my letter with the points Cardin chose to ignore highlighted:

Senator Cardin refused to acknowledge the civillian aspect of my letter and only mentioned in passing! "Fragile humanitarian situation" and "escalating violence"? No, that makes it sound two-sided when really the best word to describe it is genocide. He ignored the fact that Israel has an Iron Dome protecting it from Hamas's crap rockets. He ignored the fact that innocent people are being blown to bits by Israeli rockets, not Hamas militants but ordinary civilians who have never held a weapon before in their lives. He ignored the fact that Israel is receiving massive amounts of foreign aid in spite of the violence. And in his concluding paragraph he says Hamas must do A, B, C, D & E and not a word about Israel stopping it's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Senator Cardin is a coward as is President Barack Obama and everyone in the Senate who voted for SR498. Russia shot one rocket at a civilian aircraft and the U.N. is crippling Russia with sanctions. Israel has killed 3 times the amount of people on the plane and has injured and maimed thousands more and the U.S. has stayed silent. The only time any media outlet dared to criticize Israel was when Israel blamed Secretary of State John Kerry for faltering peace-talks, only then did anyone get the balls to say anything negative about Israel.

Politics is not a game, it's an auction and the highest bidder holds power. If you had any doubt as to how corrupt our political system is your eyes have been opened. The hypocrisy of the United States is appalling, they spent the past decade holding a war on terrorism and when they have an open opportunity to stop international terrorism they sit back and do nothing. Why? Because they need the money for their next campaign, where voters will still vote for them because the media has brainwashed most people into thinking Hamas is terrorizing the innocent Israelis and that any Palestinian person is an automatic ally of Hamas.

It sickens me how helpless the people are but I encourage anyone who hasn't already to CONTINUE WRITING TO SENATOR CARDIN. Let him know that his constituents won't stand for open terrorism.

Here's Your Chance to DO Something about Israel

Social media is great for creating awareness, however there has be a catalyst between awareness and actual change. I'm sure you are all aware of the near genocide that is currently going in Palestine. Here's what you can do about it in five minutes. I drafted a letter to Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, he's on the foreign relations committee in the Senate. All you have to do is put your name on it and mail it. One letter won't mean much but a barrage of them should at the very least elicit a response and it's better than just sitting behind a computer screen sharing pictures of the carnage. 

A few things to keep in mind:

1. Feel free to look the letter over and edit it as you like

2. Depending on the date you send the letter make sure to update the relevant death count and any other information that may change.

3. If you are not living in the State of Maryland then custom fit the letter to your local senator. The meat of the letter can remain the same but references to Cardin and his legislative role must be changed.

4. It's very important to send it both online AND as a hard copy.

What to do:

1. Download the letter here. (It's a mediafire download, quick and simple)

2. Read it through and put in your information.

3. Go to Ben Cardin's website here.

4. Make sure "Leave opinion on legislative issue" is check and then enter in your information, using "Foreign Affairs" as the category.

5. Copy and paste the letter, excluding the subject line. (So copy and paste from where it says "Dear Senator..."

6. Print a copy, sign it and mail it in to the address indicated on the letter.

7. Share this with anyone who wants to try and make a difference. 

If anyone see's a glaring error in the template that should be changed send me an email or leave a comment below. Avoid leaving comments on facebook as people who aren't friends with me on facebook can't see those.

The Fallacy of The Human Mind

There are many insurmountable hurdles in achieving a perfectly rational mind. Human beings are a mish-mosh of emotions and rationality. Raymond Tusk from House of Cards put it best when he said: "the rational and irrational complement each other. Individually, they're far less powerful." And the guy's a fictitious billionaire energy mogul so I'd take his word on this one.

 Now I'm the type that seriously favors my left brain; logic and rationality are useful, emotions aren't and I have no patience for useless things. But the irrational side is what makes us human. Engineers can program computers and robots to follow a logical set of code. Logic can be replicated, but human emotion can't and it has it's own value. Irrational thinking is what saved a ton of peoples' lives in The Dark Knight. In case you don't remember the Joker had two ferries rigged with bombs. One ferry was filled to the brim with innocent civilians, the other with Gotham's worst thieves and murders. Both were rigged with explosives and each ferry was given the detonator to the OTHER ferry. If one ferry blew the other up then that ferry would be saved, if neither did it by midnight then the Joker would blow them both up. 

Think about your two options in this scenario:

1. You blow up the other boat and live. 

2. You don't and get blown up, either by the other boat or by the joker. 

So your two options are literally live or die. It's a simple choice, a rational mind would have blown up the other boat in a heartbeat. One such "rational" mind on the civilian boat points this out and notes that the criminals deserved to die more than the civilians did. Eventually he takes the detonator but doesn't pull the trigger. Faced with the choice of life and death both boats chose death rather than kill the other boat. An amazingly irrational decision that bought just enough time for Batman to swoop in and save them both. 

Emotions and the irrational have their value, but are also the source of the biggest flaw in human thinking. Most people let their desires cloud rationality, causing them to ignore consequences that aren't immediate. Think about all the people who believe in a religion that holds that you will be punished for sins. Not a single one of those people, myself included, has completely avoided those sins. Often times we knowingly do these things for no other reason than the pleasure from said sin is immediate and the consequences are far off. But this is expected, believing in an afterlife is one thing, visualizing it happening is another. Plus there's the rather moronic expectation that you'll live a long enough life to be "good later" so we tend to ignore the consequences right now. 

Now let's look at the shorter term; it doesn't take a lifetime for us to ignore non-immediate consequences. A kid enters the workplace at 23 years old and gets a decent job. He saves up $10000 in two years and is wondering what to do with the money. He could lock that money up in a Roth IRA, earn 11% a year and turn that ten grand into more than half a million by the time he can collect on the IRA, that's $580,000 tax-free. But no one does that at 25, instead they buy a motorcycle, a new car, or a 65' T.V. Choosing the sexy option that provides enjoyment now is usually more preferable than waiting for the better prize. 

Even shorter term now: grades in school. There's two ways to look at this one. For some white folk the need to graduate high school in four years is overshadowed by the current need to party, have fun, and not focus on schoolwork when your future depends on it. For some people of any other race the need to avoid the can of whoop-ass for getting bad grades at the end of the semester is overshadowed by those same reasons. Think about the bums you remember from high school, the ones who wouldn't even try or show up to class. It's so stupid looking back, to not graduate or not get into college because you were skipping school to get high or even just sleep and play video games instead of going to class. 

Moving on to my favorite example, this one takes place in a matter of minutes. The last few examples have been over the course of months, years and decades. Keep in mind this doesn't apply if your parents wake you up or if your parents are home when you're supposed to be at school. During my last semester I had to wake up at 7:30 every morning to get to my 8:30 classes on time. These classes were ones where I needed to be in class to understand the material properly. Every so often I'd wake up to the sound of my alarm and just feel so tired that I'd go back to sleep, knowing full well that after I wake up I'll spend an extra 5 hours trying to understand material and copy notes for a 50 minute class. 

After the consequences eventually come into the picture all those immediate but fleeting pleasures that we enjoyed at some cost in the future seem so horribly trivial that we marvel at our stupidity back then. Think about the few kids who took those 15 A.P.s in high school and put in work while everyone else was living it up. They were the ones that got those ivy-league acceptances in April. I'm not saying that these kids were all work and no play but that they had the foresight to budget their time and energy responsibly. The retirees who invested when they were young are counting their millions now. The kid who woke up for his 8:30 class is able to enjoy a stress free nap later in the day instead of copying notes. The religious person is able to enjoy a clean and healthy conscious. This trait is naturally ingrained in our psyche and it takes serious strength to overcome. Most people realize this over a grueling period of mistake after mistake and only fix it after an extraordinary period of time. The people who realize this earlier on and overcome it in their everyday decision making are the ones who end up being successful in life, especially those who start from a young age.