Positing the absurd ...

In the days and weeks to come many a commentator, politician and average citizen will posit their own interpretation as to what happened at Fort Hood.

Yesterday afternoon as I said a few prayers I became very cognizant that my little brother was stationed at Fort Hood, as a proud member of the US Army. And as the flurry of text messages poured in from my other siblings, asking if anyone had gotten ahold of him, the obvious phone call to the folks was one none of us wanted to make. We simply kept trying to find out if anyone of us, the kids, had gotten ahold of him. Thankfully one of my brothers called to say that his wife had spoken to the family and she confirmed he was fine, and was simply still on lock down, on base.

Now once that subsided I started to notice a disturbing pattern, which I discovered only increased overnight into this morning's news coverage. A quick surf around the Internet or your television dial (although we scarcely have dials anymore do we) and you'll see a cohesive message emerging. "A military stretched to the brink"; "the stress of combat"; "fear of deployment", etc, etc. Now while I'm certainly ready to accept via a thorough investigation that Hasan had no official affiliation with a terrorist organization, I think it is ridiculous for the media to claim to have found the FIRST identifiable case of PRE-post traumatic stress syndrome. Let me posit another, more plausible theory ...

... not even the military is immune to political correctness. After decades of such an onslaught, what Western organization could be? From what I gather Hasan made Major in 6 years, a rank typically earned in today's military in 9 to 10. Also, an officer (let alone a Major) must go out of his way to get a poor performance review, as was the case with Hasan's last CO's official assessment. Yet he was afforded a prestigious posting at Fort Hood, and it is exactly that - the larger, nice bases are considered desirable by physicians within the military (he is a psychiatrist). He had been handing out Korans the morning of the shooting. Months back he expressed pleasure in the Little Rock, Arkansas assassination (two soldiers were gunned down outside of a recruitment center) to fellow soldiers to the point of his comments becoming a matter of record; and during the slaughter of our brave men & women he was screaming, "Allah Ak-bar", God is great. So my question is was this man promoted, unsettling behavior ignored, and perhaps transferred around in order to not seem "racist" given the chief enemy of America and her armed forces in 2009? Were kid gloves employed in order to dress up politically sensitive appearances? Was his ever growing dedication to radicalism, combined with poor, disturbing behavior not properly addressed due to his race? I can not assert this as fact, but it is at least AS (in my mind more) plausible then the stress of an impending deployment causing one to "snap." Especially when he had never faced combat before, there was no "post" stress about it, and because as a psychiatrist the likely hood of his going on combat missions would be near zero.

In addition the media seems bent on divorcing his religion from his behavior. A perversion of his religion to be sure, but clearly a plausible (if not OBVIOUS) influence nonetheless.

I just think these are questions that we owe the fallen to ask, and have answered. In terms of an investigation once the bodies of US Soldiers hit the ground, political correctness be damned, real questions must be asked because real people are dead.