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I used to get a lot of hate mail when I first started posting stuff on the Internet. Especially after I stopped using pseudonymous handles and started posting under my own name.  

As you might suspect a lot of it, at first anyway, was from right-wing warmongers who were driven mad by the sting of the 911 attacks against the WTC and the Pentagon. But nasty and hateful though they were, I could manage. I’ve heard this kinda shit my whole life and so I have evolved a very thick emotional and psychological armor. Because my choices were either to adapt or go mad, I chose adaptation.  

It doesn’t seem to matter much to the blood-maddened revenge seekers that I am a native-born, third-generation American or that I served in the US Army and fought as an infantry officer in Desert Storm. Or that the only bullets I’ve ever launched in anger and with intent to kill were against Arab Muslims. In other words, people just like myself. That sure doesn’t matter to the racist Arab haters, though. To them I’m a wog, a towel head, a sand nigger and all the other racist epithets their dim little minds can concoct and I always will be. I dismiss them as hateful idiots and clods whose views are without merit entirely. I don’t especially care what people that hateful, deluded, brainwashed and racist think of me or anything else for that matter. See, I know full well that they can never be appeased, argued with, satisfied or otherwise convinced of my humanity. And if they didn’t hate me for this, it’d be somebody else for something else equally foolish, wrong, and stupid. It’s their nature to hate “the Other.” And as Ayn Rand noted, a thing “is what it is” and so the haters are what they are.  

I had a private in my platoon who called me “Lieutenant Spic” behind my back, although I knew of it. Why would he do this, given that I’m not a Hispanic in ethnicity, physical appearance or surname? Because he was from a small town in Oklahoma and “spics” and “niggers” were the only racial groups he’d ever encountered in his entire life before enlisting and so they framed his only way of thinking about the Other. People like him don’t especially scare me. Private Okie was a dumbass who couldn’t think his way out of a paper sack. No, what scares me is what he’s capable of if he’s ever in a position of authority over other people. That is very scary to contemplate.  

The real hate mail that I get that does scare me is from other Arabs or Muslims who berate, denounce and threaten me for having served in the US Army and Desert Storm. "How could you do this, Ali?” they thunder. And so I am hated not only by the lowlife racists and the right-wing neo-con war statists here in America and by the Muslims and Arabs around the world that are infuriated that I fought against the Ummah.  

I have no safe place in this world. Sooner or later I believe, and despite the ramped up efforts of the Feds to protect America from the aggrieved of this world who have been bombed, enslaved, exploited, humiliated and terrorized by America and its surrogates for the past half century, revenge attacks will come. I guess the globalizationists forgot to mention that nasty little side effect, eh? In a global village everyone and anyone can reach you. America warred upon North Korea and North Viet Nam back in the 1950s and 1960s much to their dismay, but what the hell could they do about it? Not very damn much other than continue their struggle until the US lost interest and left their countries. They had no means to attack America to the degree that they were being attacked. But that situation has changed.  

Nuclear and biological weapons are great equalizers, no? And we all know about lesser means of attack such as random snipers, suicide and car bombs, IEDs, etc. All of which the aggrieved ones are fully capable of using in American cities at any time. I believe without a doubt that they will, too, and who but the most Pollyannaish and naïve sorts can honestly think otherwise?  

And this is what really scares me. Some time soon a mushroom cloud is going to appear over an American city. Or perhaps instead a mysterious epidemic caused by biological or chemical agents will break out. And then me and mine are going to be rounded up and imprisoned in Halliburton-built detention centers that will make Gitmo look like Club Med. And no doubt they’ll be staffed by good patriotic American private contractors. Prolly there will be many veterans amongst their hires, too. Probably many good, loyal ex-Army men like, oh say, Private Okie.  

And just like with the Nisei in 1942, the fact that we’re native-born Americans, military veterans, and completely harmless won’t matter one fookin’ bit to them.  

I just hope I have the wherewithal to escape this nascent but growing police state before such days come. I feel much as some of the Jews in Germany must have felt in the 1930s watching the Nazis gain more and more power. Why didn’t they leave if they could see what was coming? Why indeed? That’s a mistake I plan to avoid making.