Who's the enemy?

We're at war once again without boots on the ground or without an affirmation by Congress. Obama didn't send it to Congress because they didn't want it. That way if it fails, they can blame the President, if it succeeds they can say they were behind him. That's the state of politics in our country today.

But that's not the point of this column. We invaded Syria last week primarily because of the public and videotaped decapitation of two Americans. It incensed the American people and it incensed the Administration so they took that as a green light to broaden the bombings against ISIL/ISIS in a country we've never been involved with militarily before. Members of the Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS) will die because of it but so will many innocents as they always do and America will be blamed for their deaths like we always are. So in the long run, it's this columnist's belief that more people will be turned against us than influenced towards us. It has happened everywhere we've been for the past 13 years and there's no reason to think it won't happen again.

Two Americans being decapitated and the video of those decapitations being shown on social media is what fueled our fire. That was a gut reaction and a knee-jerk reaction. Reporters, soldiers and mercenaries know the risks they run when they go to countries where their protection can't be guaranteed but they go anyway. I admire them for that and they're great patriots for doing it but, in the end, they chose to be there; either by signing up for the military which has the right to send them anywhere the brass wants them to go or writing for a newspaper or reporting for a television network and volunteering to go to war-torn areas. They knew this and their families knew this but we hail them as heroes when they were just doing their jobs.

We overuse the word 'hero' today. People who simply work at jobs that are potentially dangerous are now hailed as heroes when formerly one had to do something above and beyond the call of duty to gain that honor. Serving your country doesn't make you a hero. Doing something that no one else would do to protect the homeland or the lives of your comrades does. The overwhelming majority of people do nothing extraordinary at all, yet they're celebrated as heroes, therefore degrading the real heroes that went before them.

When we're trying to determine who our enemy is, we have to look no further than the borders of our own country. About two murders happen every hour, every day in the U.S. That amounts to 1,440 murders a month, and over 17,000 murders a year. Twenty percent of those are committed by family members and half of that 20 percent are committed by spouses. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, 4,000 Americans have been killed by terrorists since 1970 and less than 20 since 9/11.

We're in the middle of an undeclared war against a sometimes unidentifiable enemy, spending billions of dollars to hopefully bomb this enemy into submission when Americans kill more Americans every single day than terrorists have killed in the last 13 years. It makes no sense to me and it shouldn't make sense to you either.

We have identified the enemy and he is us.