I just finished reading the book "Three Cups of Tea", by Greg Mortenson, and it may have changed my life. If nothing else, it's changed my mind, which is good enough for me.

The story details the events of how a failed climb of the mountain K2 ended up leading Greg Mortenson to his destiny: to promote peace in the countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan through building schools, women's vocational centers, clean water projects, and hostels for students on scholarship.

Greg was a fairly normal guy, if you discount the fact that he lived in his car to save money from his nursing job to support his climbing addiction, but as the son of two missionaries in Tanzania, he was raised to spot a need and to fill it himself. When he wandered into the Pakistani village of Korphe, after getting lost from his porter for the second time, the villagers took him in and showed him around. When he asked to see their school, they solemnly took him to a frostcovered mountain ledge where little boys and 4 girls drew their multiplication tables in the mud with sticks. They were avidly studying despite the fact that they didn't have a teacher. Shocked, Greg promised them that he would one day return to the village and build them a school. One year later, after scrimping and saving and finding a donor, he was able to do just that-- and it changed his life forever.

The experiences detailed in the book are amazing and mind-blowing, and the people he meets during his travels and work are both heart-warming and scary. He was in Pakistan during 9/11, had tea with the Taliban, and ended up building schools in Afghanistan with a general who is known for loving his people, but tearing apart his enemies with the help of two jeeps.

When I finally got to the parts of the book that mirrored time I could recognize and events I knew about, I became upset. It's one thing to hear the promises of our government, see our rationality, and another thing to see the US and our actions from the other side.

I doubt I could ever be mistaken for a supporter of Bush, but I did happen to agree with the Afghanistan war. After all, we knew Osama bin Laden was in that country and there was a massive amount of Taliban fighters there. Even the people of Afghanistan wanted us there. However, I also thought we took care of them, but for the second time (the first time occurring after the war when we helped the Afghanis expel the Soviets), we completely forgot all of our promises. We promised them an amazing amount of money to help them get back on their feet, but only a quarter of that promise actually made it over there. The excuse? "They don't have a central banking program. We can't wire the money over there," said one of the members of Congress responsible for sending the money to them. Nevermind the fact that we flew bags of money into Afghanistan to bribe warlords into helping us during the fight. We also took around $634 million of the little bit of money that got sent to the country and moved it over to Iraq in preparation for the war over there.

Not to mention the actual war in Iraq.... can anyone PLEASE tell me why we're over there? Because I'd really like to know. I was a huge supporter of Bush  back at the beginning of the Iraqi war, but even then, our sudden switch to Iraq didn't really seem right. I never saw the correlation between Iraq and Osama bin Laden. I heard about WMD's, but we never found any. I know he was a dictator and needed to be held accountable for his actions, but so do a lot of other world dictators, some worse than Saddam, as well as countries where combatants are causing mass genocide even as we speak. But we decided to bomb Iraq, where it wasn't abnormal at all for someone to live a long and fruitful life, and we killed women and children, thus uniting 200 million Muslims against the US, when we would have had a large majority of supporters. I started to turn against Bush when I read the book "Bush at War", by Bob Woodward, in search of what happened to turn our attention to them, and found the part in the aftermath of 9/11 when Bush repeatedly asks his staff if there could be a connection between Saddam and 9/11. Even though no one has anything to offer up in answer to his question, Bush continues to ask about the connection and even tells them to find one. Despite the fact that we knew Osama was in Afghanistan, along with a large majority of the people responsible for the attacks, before the war in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld complained about the bad targets in that country and suggested striking Iraq instead. It turns out that most of our intelligence came from a man that the CIA had long since stopped believing because of his strong ties to Iran, the country profiting the most from the Iraqi War.

And on top of all of this, we've avenged the deaths of over 3,000 people from 9/11 with the deaths of over 4,000 soldiers in the war in Iraq alone. Despite the fact that 70% of Americans believe things aren't going well, and strong calls from the public to pull out of Iraq, VP Cheney sits there and answers the reporter who repeats this information to him and says, "So?", shrugs his shoulders, and snickers a little. Really?

Rumsfeld and friends have taken the liberty to declare the Geneva Convention null and void when dealing with Guantanamo prisoners and we're TORTURING them. Except, it's not torture because they haven't died or dealt with permanent mental or physical damage. Who cares about the fact that we "respect the Rule of Law", not the "Rule of Force"? Oh wait, a Democrat president said that, so obviously it doesn't matter.

Our president has allowed for wiretapping, created a Patriot Act, and manipulated the Constitution into whatever works for him and his personal values. He has made a mockery of us around the world, and we've helped, by either buying into his call to the required warped sense of patriotism or by sitting around complaining with little to no action. Benjamin Franklin once said (and this is incredibly paraphrased, as I don't remember it word for word), that those who give up their freedom out of a desire for security, deserve neither freedom nor security. So the people who continue to cite the need to protect ourselves against potential future attacks by allowing the government to take away even more of our freedoms will wake up to realize that they've made a serious mistake. And that time is now.

For all of us who are outraged and shocked about where the previous 8 years have taken us, let us not simply complain and be full of talk. The way we're infighting even now falls in line with what happens almost every time we get a chance to change something and fail. We need to stop worrying about lapel pins or crazy pastors and ridiculous claims of radical Muslim ties and do what we can to keep the next 4-8 years from being a repeat of the ones we just limped out of.