"Rafts", by Bill Whittle

For those of you who may not know, Bill Whittle is one of the top essayists around regarding the issues that define who America is as a country. His first book, "Silent America: Essays from a Democracy at War", is a fantastic collection of essays about those very issues. The writings in that book had a huge impact on me during my formative years as I learned at an exponential rate about our nation and its history, the world around us, and where we go from here in the aftermath of 9/11. A second book will be out later this year, and I can't wait. But in the meantime, in honor of the 4th of July, here is his most recent essay, entitled "Rafts", along with key excerpts. As Mr. Whittle says, on this holiday, "Which way are the rafts headed?"

"The forces of ignorance and barbarism bearers of ruin and despair wherever they make camp are growing in confidence. But besides their will to destroy and die they have nothing. These Death Cult barbarians think this is all they will need that, and an initial alliance with the forces they most despise. I still hold out hope that they will crack open a second book a history book, say that might at the eleventh hour give them some insight into the avocado nature of the Civilization they seem determined now to assault: soft and pulpy on the outside, impenetrably tough and hard within. They are going to do more than chip a tooth on us, these raving, bloodthirsty lunatics: they are about to make, I think, the same mistake that others have made before them to see the Cindy Sheehans and Michael Moores as representative of a corrupt and dying culture, rather than what they really are: somewhat entertaining animal acts we Westerners use to pass the time while waiting for the next opportunity to pull the gloves off, and kick some new inhuman, barbaric horde onto the ash heap of history, where reside Aristocracy, Slavery, Fascism and Communism, holding in common only the mark of our boots on their asses." ...

"We can, indeed, lay out competing philosophies on the table, and see where each conforms to reality and where it does not. No maps are without distortions; none of these are likely to be, either. And one map may conform perfectly to the coastline in one area, and be dreadfully amiss in another. We can cut and paste them as we wish. This is too important for us to be arguing about who is right all our energies must go to getting it right.

And before we start, we must agree to one thing: we will never be so full of arrogance and blinded by pride that we dare confront a place where our map does not match the coastline, and proclaim that the coastline must be wrong." ...

"How much pain and torture, how many human lives -- each as unique and wonderful as your own -- have been snuffed out of existence because self-righteous, power-mad bastards have waved maps written decades, or centuries, or millenia before, without so much as a peek out the window at how the world really works? How many of the criticisms leveled at this civilization are genuine, and how many are nothing more than sketches on parchment in the minds of bitter and vindictive people who dare not face the light of day? How many people have died because a person would rather see a thousand people taken out in the night and shot in the head -- or a million people, or a hundred million -- seen them shot in the head, rather than facing the coastline and changing their mind?" ...

(On the question of whether Cuba is a worker's paradise or Communist hellhole...--Ed.)

"Well, ask yourself what it would take to give up your home, your country, your family and all your friends. Ask yourself how desperate you would have to be to sneak out in the night, and strap your family your grandmother and infant son to a collection of inner tubes lashed together and set out in the dark surf across 90 miles of shark-infested water in the dead of night, hoping against hope to make landfall. We can all agree, I think, that that kind of desperation could only be driven by a fairly passionate first-person opinion of such things. Surely this goes beyond what you or I would do to win a map argument at Starbucks.

So. Go up on deck, get out the telescope, and answer one simple question for me and for yourself: Which way are the rafts headed?

We need to know how to cut to core truths. We need to practice testing our maps against the shoreline. We need to do this, and more right now because as we sit here together, you and I, something delicate and precious is dying before our eyes for the simple lack of belief in what it represents."