Rovers
When I played softball I learned a valuable lesson about human behavior. No, not that failed high school athletes tend to take recreational league sports too seriously, or that the guy with the beer gut and two knee braces is always the pitcher. Those things are true, of course, but I'm talking about something else.
In recreational league softball, unlike actual baseball, each team fields ten players. While on defense that tenth player is called a 'rover,' because, well, they rove. You can put them anywhere on the diamond you'd like, and move them around at will. Most teams use their rover in one of two ways: playing deep as a fourth outfielder or playing shallow behind the infielders.
The lesson I learned was you could tell how a team performed offensively by how they positioned their rovers. Teams that boasted a lineup of big bashers tended to use their rover as a fourth outfielder, while teams that hit lots of ground balls and line drives placed their rovers directly behind their infielders. As a result, you knew to mimic their defensive alignment for maximum efficiency against them.
Big deal, right? So you knew where to put a softball player. How is that a 'valuable lesson about human behavior?'
It's valuable in that I learned something about how people think. People assume everyone thinks the way they do. The teams with big bashers assumed every team had big bashers, and played their rovers deep. The teams with scrap hitters assumed every team had scrap hitters, and played their rovers shallow.
I soon noticed this lesson was applicable off the softball field, as well. You can learn a lot about a person from their assumptions, and how they act on them. A racist will see everyone else as bigoted. A liar will view everyone else as dishonest. A thief will assume everyone else steals. It's a handy little tool when it comes to deciphering the true character of those around you.
And that's how you can tell terrorists are cowards.
Terrorists assume they can frighten people into behaving the way they want them to, whether that means outlawing abortion, subjugating women and minorities, or no longer drawing silly cartoons about their god. They believe they can achieve their goals through fear, assuming the majority of the population are weak. As weak as they are.
Using the 'Rover Rule,' terrorists believe fear works on others because fear works on them. It doesn't take courage to pull a mask over your face, arm yourself with high-powered weapons and shoot a bunch of unarmed people to death before running away. Those are the actions of cowards.
It doesn't take courage to bomb a clinic, or shoot up an office, or fly airplanes into buildings. Willingness to sacrifice your own life isn't an act of bravery, it's an act of stupidity. And how many terrorist 'masterminds' actually take part in these attacks themselves? Instead they find angry, disenfranchised, easily-manipulated surrogates they can brainwash into sacrificing their lives for whatever the glorious cause of the moment happens to be. Is there any greater act of cowardice than sending others to kill and die for your cause in your name?
Especially when your cause is being mad about jokes. When you feel your all-powerful, all-knowing, infallable god can't withstand the petty indignity of a bad caricature. When you think your all-everything god takes a ribbing with the grace and self-awareness of a junior high schooler suffering through their first zit. When it's you who have reduced your god to the level of the asshole villain in an 80's teen movie. When you think that's worth murdering people over. Religious extremists hide behind god as surely as they hide behind ski masks - to escape responsibility for their own actions, to cower behind misinterpreted scripture.
There was a high-profile terrorist attack in France today - and probably many more in places the western media doesn't cover, against people the western media doesn't find 'newsworthy.' They were all the work of cowards. Cowards who are so fearful they assume fear is humanity's prime motivator. Cowards who will never possess a fraction of the courage of those they've killed, or the courage of those who will rise up tenfold to take the place of the fallen.
A picture is worth a thousand words...
