Every day it is clearer that the global cancer of capital and technology devours more of life in every sphere. More species, cultures, and ecosystems are under attack, at every level. The cancer of the megamachine is always at work, consuming its host. And if it ever stops expanding, economic alarm bells go off worldwide.
This relentless colonization/globalization has ignited resistance everywhere. In this painful twilight struggle, as the crisis deepens, some of this opposition has taken the desperate form of religious fundamentalism. From this desperation arises the ultimate gesture of suicidal violence, hopeless and indefensible on any level.
Novelist V.S. Naipal reminds us that "The world is getting more and more out of reach of simple people who have only religion. And the more they depend on religion, which of course solves nothing, the more the world gets out of reach."
But as New York Times Magazine writer Joseph Lelyveld (10/28/01) discovered through interviews with families and supporters, suicide bombers are recruited by a promise with widespread appeal among disaffected youth: "better a meaningful death than a pointless life."