To my readers: Regarding my last column, “Ghosts of Liberation,” some new evidence has come to light showing how “better off” Iraqis are. See for yourself at http://www.albasrah.net/images/iraqi-pow/iraqi-pow. Viewer discretion is strongly advised.

Last week, a national controversy began at the University of Massachusetts when the majority of people who read the column by Rene Gonzalez were outraged at what he had to say.

A shockwave spread from this campus all the way to California, resulting in threats and ethnic attacks. I’d like to touch on it before this story loses its marketability in the media and people jump to the wrong conclusions about Gonzalez, Pat Tillman and even the war Tillman gave his life fighting in.

Gonzalez’s column was, no doubt, heavy-handed and reactionary. But people have to understand that Gonzalez, like many people, has a different paradigm when it comes to the War on Terror. And, like every American, he is entitled to it.

But Gonzalez doesn’t know Pat Tillman, and what he has to understand is that when people are staring in the face of tragedy, it’s not a good time to try to give someone a “wake up call.”

I’ll have to get a little personal now, but here’s what I mean:

I have a cousin my age who passed away earlier this year. He reenlisted in the military to join Operation Iraqi Freedom. At about 4 a.m. on the morning he was to ship out, he was found dead in his bed from what the coroner found to be a mixture of alcohol and heroin. On what was supposed to be a weekend of family, friends, beer and football, I found myself sitting in a funeral parlor, picking a casket to bury my cousin in.

His mother couldn’t accept the fact that her son was gone, especially from something as foolish as drugs. In a panic, she tried to do whatever she could to “cover up” the nature of his death and refused to show anyone the coroner reports. She even requested that my cousin receive a military funeral.

Now obviously, how he died was a completely ludicrous contradiction to what a military funeral is for, but still, I kept my mouth shut. I went along with it and asked the funeral director to see what he could do about an honor guard at my cousin’s funeral. I even made sure he was buried in a “military-standard” casket.

The moral of this story is that sometimes people are not ready for that “reality check.” Can you imagine the unnecessary pain I would have caused if I tried to give my family a “wake up call” and threw it in their face that on mere technicality, my cousin was not worthy of a military funeral? So, I did the noble thing: I kept quiet.

When we talk about a man like Pat Tillman, the same idea applies, only on a far more massive scale. Even if we see that our involvement in Afghanistan was illegitimate, the last thing that a man’s parents – or even his thousands of fans – want to hear is that his death was “prophetic idiocy.”

I also doubt the reason why Tillman went to Afghanistan was because of some macho concept of American military supremacy. Couldn’t it simply be his sense of disgust for those who would kill 3,000 innocent civilians on a quiet morning in September?

Tillman probably didn’t know the history of American foreign policy, but it doesn’t make him a macho wannabe-Rambo. That’s like saying firefighters ran into the crumbling World Trade Center because they watched “Backdraft” too many times. It would take much more than some “America is #1” arrogance for anyone to drop a $3.25 million contract and pick up a gun. I really find it impossible to smear the selfless nature of Pat Tillman.

However, there is some truth to the paradigm that many people do not know, nor are they ready to know, about the historical causes of Sept. 11, 2001. It’s not as simple as a bunch of random Islamic fundamentalists that woke up one morning and decided they hated America. It may give us a sense of moral superiority in a time when we need it most, but it’s far from the truth.

The media and our government have a part in this mass ignorance of “why they hate us” and they will continue to profit from this to no end. They don’t want America to know about the deals the oil executives made with the Taliban within months of Sept. 11, or perhaps, how many pounds of Afghani and Turkish heroin was shipped to the United States via the CIA to support the Taliban.

They only want you to know heroic icons, flying flags and “enemies within.” What Gonzalez should have known is that these “peddlers of crisis” just love to use statements like those in last week’s column to build animosity toward the skeptics – those nameless, faceless “liberals” that hacks like Joe McCarthy, Michael Savage and Bill O’Reilly build careers off of by yelling about.

In the end, make your own decision about the War on Terror. Don’t let the government or the media make it for you. Nothing good has ever come out of it.

As for Pat Tillman, rest in peace, Ranger.

Mark Ostroff is a Collegian columnist.