Evidenced by the front page of the last edition of the Maroon-News, the Colgate community seems to be hooked on a drug; is there someone not caught up in the ecstasy of the tsunami relief effort? I, for one, cannot wait for the exciting and enjoyable fundraising events that have no doubt been concocted. Drugs, even the best ones (the transparent effectors), are merely temporary distractions; in all of our fun over the latest catastrophe, we are failing to see that under the inspired leadership of George W. Bush, our great epic is ending. Are Bush and his disciples the only ones who see the liberation in scaling back aid, who are working toward our eternal salvation?Even the Colgate Republicans aren’t keeping the faith. Not a word of support from them in favor of their Commander’s Holy vision. The crackpots and scientists who point to the events of the tsunami as evidence of our end times are, in a reverse sense, correct. The tsunami and the relief effort are obstructing, not heralding, the coming of the end. Rather, the Western dream of an end, an end President Bush feels compelled to bring about. In order to understand the Bush Administration’s decision to cut aid to the tsunami victims, we must first look at the rallying cry for his War, engage in the necrophilic orgy of history before returning to the sadistic one at hand.Suppose, for a moment, 9/11 was the means to our end. The modern age saw rise to notions of an international community and, subsequently, international aid. The West created for itself the role of a proud, big brother cradling his baby brother. A whimsical, if not absurd scene. However, like with siblings, the bigger comes to envy the vulnerable, careless position of the smaller. The illusion of power and nurture becomes exhausted (and exhausting) after a while. In this sense, the west led by the United States, has trapped itself in a position of empty strength and hellish progressivism. To upset this balance and to completely absolve the positions of the strong and the tragic set in our history, a tragedy of tragedies needs to occur: the destruction of the West. Yet, even with all of the personality and familiarity of a great tragedy on its own turf, the West’s conflated sense of worth and its orientalistic perspective continued to dominate our interpretive faculties; what should have been the great catastrophe of the United States and the Western world crumbled into a nonevent. The waning number of fatalities as the media coverage entered into its twenty-fifth hour demonstrates the failure. The media’s speculation on the damage speaks to a collective zeal to have a cataclysmic event to call our own. As it turned out, the imagined void left in place of the two towers failed to suck, even symbolically, the Western sense of responsibility, the self-imposed guilt into the oblivion. The footage of a reticent Bush sitting in the elementary school classroom does not depict the quiet panic of the curtain falling, as some liberals would have you believe, but rather the contentment of a man thinking that the end is finally near. So, 9/11 was not the doomsday that dissolved the West and, therefore, the entire world. However, 9/11 became the means to another end. The War on Terror replaced the Apocalypse. What we have now is the systematic destruction of the West through its deconstruction. This war fragments the West at the same time the West expands a caricature of itself, erasing the East through the process of “regime change.” A staged battle of Good vs. Evil comes to replace Western responsibility for the world it has created. The recent tsunami feeds into our narcissism, the superiority of the West and the West’s superior guilt that the War on Terror is trying desperately to dismantle. To give into the calls of the relief effort is to enter into a certain hell. The tsunami becomes a last ditch effort by the East to lobotomize the Western mind, to make permanent the hallucination of responsibility, before the takeover of Iraq is permanently botched and Osama bin Laden alludes capture for eternity.There’s only guilt in giving. It is not too late to have the courage. It’s not too late to turn our backs on false prophets, to turn our backs on our petty Modern times and to follow Bush and transcend this world. The rooster has yet to crow.