I've given a lot of thought to what I'm going to talk to you about right now given the gravity of the most recent prediction I have been preparing to reveal.
Since 9/11, we've been at war. And let's face it, 9/11 has been our Pearl Harbor, and this has gone on now for thirteen years. I've held back for a lot of reasons, you can read between the lines why. So these are my comments and predictions on how I think the world is going to be changing in the months and years to come. These are not logical things I'm going to say, but things that I feel very, very strongly about.
The Draft
I think that after thirteen years of war and with the events that recently took place in Boston, the government and the people will reconsider the return of the DRAFT. With our government leaders mostly concerned about being reelected, the consideration of a draft would be a death wish because you just don't play around with something like that. But I believe that there will be a series of events that will take place in the not so distant future that will cause the American public to feel very strongly that we need greater protection and safety that they, themselves, will have to be involved in. I think there is going to be a return of increased patriotism so strong that most of the population will feel the need to contribute in some way to the safety of our nation--and that includes young people, almost paralleling Israel, which, of course, has their young people giving two years of their time to service. I think this is inevitable because we now have something that we never have practiced for, and I don't mean that in a trivial way. We are not used to a war that is taking place within our own terrain. We've been used to an enemy outside that has attacked from outside. Our scenario is changing today.
Length of Homeland War
We are in a full-fledged war today--no one's going to argue with that. It's going to be a lengthy war. This is going to sound sarcastic, but I think just about the only incident that is going to shorten the length of the war and create a coming together of cultures throughout the Earth...would be an attack or an entrance on Earth of UFO aliens... Of course while, I am SURE that that's not going to happen. I can't think of anything else that would cause all the differences--the weaponry and power struggles--to go away. Considering the fact that that is not going to happen, I believe that this war, which has already gone for thirteen years, is going to last some twenty more years. If we'd only learn from history, it would become clear that the longest wars in history have been religious wars. It is a more basic fundamentalism of thinking that is against the more modern thinking that we have of various faiths advocating peace. It's a very basic substance--not just the way women are treated, but the way the culture has been created. You can't go into a place, and by some mysticism, say, "We're going to make it a democracy."
Children Future
Having predicted that the war is going to last twenty years, I predict that if you ask a child twenty years from now, "How were you able to handle the scenario of this eternal war, how were you able to grow up under such pressures," they would answer very simply and say, "This is the way that we assumed life is." The children of London and other cities proved this in World War II--it was a case of their scenario. Our children, in the present and the future, will adjust better than most adults. I've thought for a long time about saying this publicly, but I believe very much in the American spirit, and I know I had to say this.
Global Mindset
I've been around the world for a long time, and I've spent several years now performing in the Middle East, and what has become clear to me is that a mindset can last a damn long time. I live here in New Jersey, and I saw what happened here as the events in Boston took place. Not many miles from where I live, there were hundreds of children playing on the street and cheering what had happened. Now, they were of a Middle Eastern origin. How do I know this? I've worked with the police for years--I've worked on eighty-four cases. I'm not condemning these kids, they had to learn this from somewhere--there certainly is no television show that they're learning this from. The message of what I'm saying is that this is far more deeply entrenched than our political leaders feel.
These are my intuitions, they'll come to me often when I'm running; they don't come every day, and this one has been building up. People often ask me a question about something they hadn't told me about ahead of time, and they finally explained to me that they thought I was able to kind of put myself in the shoes of somebody's situation, and not give it a definitive answer, but an outlook and a feeling about it that maybe was important to the public.