I do not know whether to post this on facebook or not. People who know me know that I am not an isolationist. I think I am a fairly moral person and have a good idea of what is right and wrong, and I am pretty aware of what I am doing when I am manipulating any number of things to get my way. I also know that most Americans right now are opposed to any warlike action that the president might take - whether or not backed up by Congress or not. An informal internet poll yesterday showed a 72-28 split. There was a demonstration against any war yesterday in Eugene, but it hardly received notice. I think by presenting a strike against Syria as a given, that Obama shocked many of us into thinking that the choice was much more simple and that we had to do this if we were human. I think the simplicity of punishing the bad man seems so much easier than if he had said: ‘ we are going to spend maybe twenty or thirty million to begin with, and maybe kill a thousand people or so and destroy a lot of property to teach this bully a lesson, and I know this will mean less money for education, and there is no guarantee right now that we even have the money to pay our soldiers after October 15, but hey Americans, let’s go bomb another country, You know we are the best there is at it.’ I do not know if my sanity has left - if I am in an altered state - or what. I know it is serious, but the idea of sending missiles into a country to punish its leader seems possibly comical - as in a little kid saying he is going to send his dad over as soon as he gets home from work to beat up another kid for what he did to him. (I know the leader is a despot, but please do go back to the Monroe Doctrine among our great early political policies, which was invoked as recently as Truman and Kennedy - even if Reagan did ignore it). Then I have to go to the cause or reason behind this: supposedly 1400 plus people killed by poison gas, 400 most likely children. Let’s suppose that this bit of information is really accurate - you know, actually perpetrated by Assad and not (fill in the blanks). The missiles we send are going to punish him. How, I would like to know. If correct, he is already killing his own people in internationally illegal ways even in a war. Can we guarantee that we will not kill any children with all these missiles? We will certainly create a bunch of orphans. We most likely will not harm Assad physically. I suppose if we did kill him, then he would never get to appreciate the full nature of our punishment of him. OK. I will stop short of comparing this solution to Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal. I will just raise a few of the questions that come to my mind. How many migrant workers have we killed (as a nation that allows them to be brutalized legally) through pesticides, etc. In any given year, and if you want the numbers to really add up, the last ten years. Why do we support corporations paying less than it takes for one person to live on adequately - and keep eroding the educational system to further diminish the lives of what used to be a middle class? How is our so called punishment of a sovereign leader going to increase the pride in being an American? I read that there is no way that Russia will give up supporting Syria and Iran - nothing that we could possibly do or offer - I know it is sacrilegious, but what about if we quit supporting Israel. Could that be seen as a fair trade off? I know that we cannot even suggest this solution because of the charges that would be flung at us - but I think we might examine the basis of these charges and who is getting what as a trade off. If we want to learn a lesson (instead of constantly trying to teach someone who doesn’t want to learn something he doesn’t want to know), why don’t we examine the history of the Roman Empire and why it fell. Also, the great world powers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who lost it all except for the wealth of some individual dynasties (corporations). I know I am naive, but I cannot get over the idea that we are so grandiose as to think we have the right to punish someone by bombing his country. This seems to be medieval scheming at best.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Sep 2013 06:03:02 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015