We Need To Start Imagining The Future

You Know, Very Often, If You Look At The Kinds Of Communications That They're Getting In An Isis Recruiting Video, The Videos That, You Know, That One Hears Of As Radicalizing Them, These Are Like Action Movies. And So In The Sense, It's That By Closing Off The Idea That Young Muslims And Particularly Young Muslim Men Can Be American Heroes, It Increases The Chance That They'll Try To Be Some Other Kind Of Hero. And That, I Think, Is Entirely Counterproductive.

With Movement, Families Get Split. With The Politicization Of Religion, Spirituality Gets Diluted. With People Intermarrying And Falling In Love Outside Of Pre-existing Defined Groups, The Tribe Is Disappearing. I'm Not In Favor Of Going Back To Those Things, But You Can't Take Those Things Away Without Putting Something New In Its Place. So Finding A Way To Make Transience More Acceptable, Even Beautiful Is Key.

And Also I Think The Rise Of Other, You Could Say, Destinations For International Jihadis Mean That Pakistan Isn't Necessarily The Place Where People From All Over The World Who Want To Engage In These Activities Gravitate To. They're Going Now To Places Like Syria Or Yemen Libya, Elsewhere.

For If There Were A List Of Cosmic Things That Unite Us, Reader And Writer, Visible As It Scrolled Up Into The Distance, Like The Introduction To Some Epic Science-fiction Film, Then Shining Brightly On That List Would Be The Fact That We Exist In A Financial Universe That Is Subject To Massive Gravitational Pulls From States. States Tug At Us. States Bend Us. And, Tirelessly, States Seek To Determine Our Orbits.

Pakistan Hasn't Been Cast In The Role Of... Interesting Cultural Place Or, You Know, Land Of Great Comedians.