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 |  Opinions are like Blogs, everybody's got one |
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Every so often I have a thought or two, I might as well write them here...they may be political thoughts (I hate war, polluters and thieves), or thoughts about American culture (which I wished we really had) or even religious thoughts (I don't play favorites)...but you're invited to see these thoughts of mine right here. Comments are welcome... |
| Last night I watched the movie Syriana for the first time. I found it kind of hard to follow, I suppose the more times I watched it the more of it I’d understand. But I did get the main gist of the movie, I think, which is to underscore the complexity of the Middle East and our national involvement in both the politics and economies of the region. Since we’ve begun to be attacked by Muslim extremists we’ve had a hard time understanding why. The Bush administration has tried to boil it down to simple terms, the extremists hate freedom, therefore they hate us. But it is way more complicated than a hatred of freedom. The truth is we wouldn’t even care what happened in those desert fiefdoms at all if they didn’t have oil. We’d not be concerned if they kept muddling along as they’ve done since the eighth century, believing in the Koran and Allah, riding their camels or whatever they wanted to do. We’d not care at all. Everything changed, though, when oil was discovered there in great quantities. At first the Middle Eastern folks were pretty agreeable to our business investments and we got a kick out of those white-robed Arabs driving Cadillacs around in the desert. They suddenly had more money than Croesus and it was quaint and laughable as long as they remained so agreeable. But with an increased American presence the followers of Islam started to get worried about the threat Western influence posed to their culture. The newly rich Arabs started sending their sons to Europe and America to get educated. The kids returned with a taste for boozing and gambling, it was tough to keep them down on the dunes after they’d seen Paree, so to speak. There was a growing influence in the Middle Eastern countries to modernize as if the traditions that had suited the region just fine for centuries were in danger of being overwhelmed by a God-less Western tidal wave. The response by religious leaders, Imams, was a great deal like the fundamentalist Baptist response to movies and dancing, give me that old time religion, it was good enough for Muhammed and it’s good enough for me. Consequently our business concerns began to have trouble, the Arabs were less tractable, not so agreeable. To keep the upper hand Americans began to fiddle with politics, assassinating those we didn’t like, supporting those we did, just like we’ve done all over South America. No big deal, it was just business as usual, American-style. But we underestimated the groundswell of unhappiness, the clout of the Imams and the power of Islamic traditions to resist Western, modern changes. They didn’t want their women to find out how liberated Western women were, the Koran made it clear how women fit in society and the Koran is not a book to be revised in any way. As well, the Koran is also clear about keeping infidels away from holy sites and here America was, building bases in Saudi Arabia on holy ground, so to speak, spreading more Western poison in an attempt to bolster up the agreeable Saudi King’s family, while at the same time our military presence would protect American oil interests. Our very presence is profaning their holy land. Looked at from that perspective it isn’t surprising we’ve come under attack, and it ain’t about “freedom” at all, except for American businesses’ freedom to keep profiting like it was our God-given right. I think in the long run the Imams will lose their fight against modernity, against a secular society, the world continues to shrink as the World Wide Web grows, but right now they’ve got their heels dug in and they’re fighting a battle for survival against the Western crusaders, a battle remarkably similar in their minds to the original battle against the first crusaders back in the twelfth century. Like I said, modernity will ultimately win, but not in the way the Bush administration has chosen. You can’t drag people into the modern world, kicking and screaming and blowing themselves up every chance they get. Because of our Western addiction to the lifestyle cheap oil allows we are making a big mistake trying to control these people. The Bush administration continues to make the point we are in a battle for survival here, and they’re right, if we lose our stranglehold on Middle Eastern oilfields America will be forced to go through some real changes. Imagine our country not being able to drive anywhere we want, anytime we want to; imagine what would happen if goods and services were not delivered. Oil has allowed us to create an artificial society which would collapse without it, people in cities would starve. Yet in order to win this war we’re going to have to get out and let the chips fall where they may. Our day in the sun is over, we just can’t keep consuming 25% of the world’s resources with 5% of the world’s population. The American house of cards is too top-heavy to sustain and we are making enemies all over the place trying to hang on to our advantage. The makers of Syriana are right, the situation is too complex to get a handle on, there are no easy answers. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear, we cannot win the war we’re fighting right now, for one thing it’s the wrong war, the war we really need to fight is the one freeing us from the addiction on oil. The war which finally brings us down to the same level as people in the rest of the world will be fought, like Bush says, on our own soil, in our cities, towns and countryside. Without a doubt we will be in a fight for survival when our artificial society collapses, it is not a pretty picture to envision especially since for the most part we’ve lost the skills necessary to survive. When we’re forced to compete with the rest of the world on a level playing field we won’t have to worry about being conquered by some other country, we’ll be defeated by our own hubris and greed. We’re ranting and raving and screaming like a spoiled brat right now, fighting wars, killing people, making enemies just so we won’t lose our toys. The world will be a far better place when we’re finally forced to grow up and face the music. |
| Okay let’s look at the details, the salient facts and such. A year ago today Katrina hit the gulf coast and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Our president praised the lackluster achievement of his appointee, stood in Jackson square and promised help, and got Congress to put up money from the lower middle class to pay for it. Who has benefited? In New Orleans the rich neighborhoods are back up and running. Perhaps half of the population of New Orleans have returned and huge sections of the city are still in ruins. The bottom line is maybe half of 110 billion promised has been paid out and folks in New Orleans are asking, rightly, where is it? White people, talking heads mostly, are explaining where the money is. It is stuck in committee, they need to do some planning. Anyone who donates money should be smart enough to look at the price administration takes from the money they donate. Is our government smart enough to figure out how much of that 45 billion dollars is getting siphoned off by administration costs? Apparently not, since the money isn’t available to rebuild the lion’s share of homes destroyed, even one year later, the money’s going somewhere we just don’t know where it is. I guess lessons from Iraq’s rebuilding should give us all a clue. After years of war and billions paid, infrastructure in Iraq is in shambles. Where did the money go? Didn’t the middle class of our country pay the money? Yes. Did the rich pay their share even though they seem, in lockstep, to support the government? No, they were given a tax break. So again I ask where did the money go? The answer is to line the pockets of Halliburton and subsidiaries, the folks getting huge tax-breaks. The same is true in some part in New Orleans. Insurance companies, strong lobbyists all for our current administration, have worked overtime to avoid paying premiums to those lucky enough to have such a luxury, to those without insurance…sorry. One thing is very clear, hot air from the current White House doesn’t rebuild communities, either in our country or in Iraq. By the time the money trickles down there won’t be anything left. Charles Schieffert on Meet the Nation Sunday pointed out how Hezbollah is now handing out American dollars to rebuild Lebanon, less than two weeks since the war there ended. Yet in New Orleans the money is still stuck in some kind of plugged up trickle down sewer. Perhaps the American people need to employ Liquid Plumber on the White House, flush the plugged-up shit out and flush again. It would be nice to be an American and not have to apologize to the rest of the world for the stupid things our elected president and his administration does. It would be nice for promises to be kept. The only thing our President has to say to the folks displaced by Katrina and the folks stuck to the gunnels in the blood of Iraq is “stay the course.” Someone will garner a lot of money from both situations, but I promise it won’t be the folks who need it the most. Stay the course, indeed, and then flush again! |
| I got a phone call last night at midnight from a guy I hadn’t talked to for 25 years. Phone calls at midnight are problematic, as I’m sure anyone will tell you, in fact I hate getting them. You wake up wondering what the hell has happened, who’s died or been in a car crash, or arrested? A phone call at midnight usually isn’t good news. In this case I have mixed feelings about it, although I’m glad it wasn’t bad news per se, I’m not sure it was good news either. The last time I talked to this fellow he’d called me to tell me he’d fallen off the wagon and shot up heroin again, a bad habit he picked up in Vietnam and couldn’t seem to shake. It wasn’t the first time he’d called me in this condition but this time I told him not to call me again if it happened, I was sick of lending a shoulder for him to cry out his weakness on. I’m not keen on being an enabler, and even if I wasn’t one it still felt like it. I’d met this guy on Okinawa where we were both stationed in the Air Force, probably around 1970, in the middle of troubled times both in the military and back home in the “world” as we called America. Perhaps that’s where my feeling of enabling came in, with a dose of guilt, since I’d gotten him high on pot for his first time and also was present the first time he ate LSD. He was a funny kid from the East Coast, a good athlete, smart, but also kind of neurotic. As time went by I wasn’t sure I’d done him any favors turning him on to recreational drugs. After Okinawa he went to Vietnam and Thailand where he introduced himself to heroin, something I’ve steered clear of. I’m sure many people will believe it is inevitable, the “stepping stone” theory of drug use, pot being a “gateway drug”. In my own life the theory didn’t hold water, in his case perhaps it did. I can’t help but think his phone call at midnight was also drug-related. What the hell was he doing up at 3AM? And what would prompt him to look me up after 25 years to call me at such an ungodly hour? If it was drug induced I doubt it was heroin this time, but it doesn’t matter, it still showed me he isn’t using good judgment. He talked about coming out to the West Coast to see me, now that we’ve “reconnected”, another thing I’ve mixed feelings about. There’s only one guy I’ve kept in contact with from those days and I’d be glad to see him again, in fact I even went back to Ohio fairly recently to see him. But this guy from Pennsylvania is not really someone I feel a great affection for or even care to see again “for old times sake”. It’s obvious he feels differently about me than I do about him. For some reason every time he reappears in my life it’s like a rock in my shoe, or something. After Okinawa I went to New Mexico to finish serving my enlistment and one day I was called into the OSI offices on the base to talk about him. The OSI to the uninitiated is the Air Force’s version of the FBI, DEA, etc., they wanted to know if I was still in touch with “Purple Haze” as I guess his nickname had become. I was glad to tell them the truth, which was I hadn’t seen him since Okinawa, and didn’t know anything about him now. It was an unpleasant interview and I wasn’t happy to think we’d been lumped together in the cops’ mind, I preferred then and still do to stay under the radar, so to speak. It turned out not to be my former acquaintance’s fault I was called in, in fact it was someone else entirely who had fingered me. A guy, also from the East Coast (who used to brag about his Mafia heritage) who had “named names” in order to escape legal retribution while stationed in England. This connection I learned maybe five years ago, from an entirely different source who had known the junior Mafia fink in England. So the guy in Pennsylvania hadn’t had anything to do with my conversation in New Mexico, still his name had come up. And now here he is again, resurfacing like a fresh rock in my shoe in an unwelcome phone call at midnight, probably high on some kind of drug that keeps you up late. Am I wrong to have mixed feelings about it, no, my intuition tells me to tread carefully, there’s a rock in my shoe. |
| There are some positive aspects to the price of fuel going through the roof. With India and China using more gasoline, being the future superpowers of the world, we Americans are starting to feel the crunch of paying through the nose for gas and diesel. We’ve been insulated up to now, laughing up our sleeves at the high prices the stupid Europeans have been paying, but now we’re beginning to see we’re in the same boat, and surprise! It’s a rowboat. But as I was saying there are some positive aspects to all this. First we’re going to see less and less of Mom and Pop America driving gas-guzzling motor-homes all over the country, reveling in Mt. Rushmore, the Corn Palace and Hot Dog museums. I don’t know what makes people think that after a lifetime selling widgets they are then qualified to drive a vehicle the size of a semi to exotic locations like Arkansas and South Dakota when they ought to be happy sitting in the lazy-boy watching restful reruns of Ozzie and Harriet. These diesel-pushing behemoths have crowded our nation’s byways long enough and with the cost of fuel, coupled with the miserable mileage, we should be seeing less and less of them real soon. I wish the same were true of Wal-Mart trucks shuttling plastic crap to all their Super-eyesore Stores, but it’ll be a dead heat there. Plastic crap is also made from the same precious oil as the diesel it takes to shuttle it, I predict they’ll keep using it up until it’s gone. Thankfully the Walton clan will be able to afford alternative transportation even if the rest of us are riding bicycles. Wal-Mart going under would be a positive aspect in my opinion, but today I’m concentrating on other positive aspects, like the cheap housing all those motor-homes will soon make available. Where I live in Oregon is home to many factories producing motor-homes. Every day, for example, we are treated to a dealer in motor-homes, motor-homes, motor-homes who is becoming more and more frenzied trying to sell a bloated inventory. He acts like it’s a surprise to him we Americans aren’t buying the darn things like hotcakes anymore. He’s a little bit like Ford, Chevy and Chrysler, nobody saw the obvious oil-crunch coming, I guess. Soon the factories will start laying off droves of workers. Soon the only motor-homes being produced will be the million-dollar luxury coaches bought by country/western stars. I predict country/western music will be bigger than ever in the future, due to the fact Americans will commiserate with all that musical whining, we’ll all have plenty of reasons to whine. We won’t be able to afford to go exotic places like Flatfish, Montana to see the whiners so it’ll be a blessing the whiners will be coming to us. But back to the positive aspects, the increased affordable housing. I guess I could live in a discarded Winnebago, why not? Sure it has its downside, I’ll need an electrical hookup so I can pump out the shitter tank when it gets full (note to self: park on a hill, preferably above the other motor-homes pumping their shitters out). I guess I’d also need a water source, although clever management of resources, like using paper-plates and drinking beer would lessen the need for water. Americans are natural problem-solvers, I’ll work something out if need be. I can see the future and it’s not so bleak after all. Under that thin veneer of civilization Americans are basically trailer-trash. It’ll be a good thing for us to sink to our natural common denominator, finally, our delusions dispelled. A nation parked on a hill, our GNP flowing downhill toward Crawford, Texas. |
| Snake oil I am struck by Merck’s (the pharmaceutical giant) recent public relations blitz in the face of all the lawsuits filed over their Vioxx product. We are told by a very caring executive how Merck always puts the public and patient first, just like the founder of the company has required from the very first pill they made. Supposed lab workers of Merck are shown in commercials talking about the very important work they are doing to cure Alzheimer’s and other really tough diseases. But the real bottom line are the profits Merck made selling Vioxx on TV, and the true side effects of the drug will be to reduce those bloated profits. If you talk to doctors they will tell you as soon as some new drug shows up on TV many patients are sure it is something they need. The phrase “ask your doctor if such-and-such a drug is right for you” has replaced the doctor discovering and treating your symptoms and diseases. We now do all that legwork ourselves, from twitching legs to heartburn to weak urine stream we tell the doctor what to prescribe for us. It didn’t use to be this way before drug companies were allowed to hawk their products via the airwaves. Advertising on TV is hugely profitable for pharmaceutical companies and I think it has become detrimental to their purported purpose of curing “the really tough diseases”. Instead they now want to make money from a gullible public selling all manner of snake oils to alleviate discomfort, even if the drugs are not necessary and in some cases even dangerous. I don’t buy Merck’s public relation campaign and I am suspect of snake oil peddlers in general. If it weren’t for insurance companies subsidizing the drug industry very few of these drugs would be sold. I think it’s time the drug companies focused on curing disease instead of treating symptoms and I also think such drugs should not be advertised on TV. I’m also pretty clear on the fact that since so much money is to be made, lobbyists will make sure any law disallowing such advertising will die in committee. That’s the way our government works these days, money is the miracle drug, the snake oil that greases the making of laws. To bad there’s not a cure for the public’s foolishness. |
| The recent arrest in Thailand of a child-porn loving elementary teacher in connection with the ten-year old murder case of the Colorado child beauty queen probably won’t solve the case. I personally haven’t followed the ins and outs of the unsolved murder, it’s not my practice to buy and read tabloid newspapers (which have made a good deal of hash from the mystery). But I must say the whole thing troubled me right from the start but not because of the lurid details surrounding it. Rather I’ve been troubled by the pictures of the young girl dressed up as a woman, a case of lamb dressed as ewe (to turn the English phrase on its head). What would possess a mother to parade an innocent child in such a light? It wasn’t predictable the girl would be sexually assaulted and murdered, but I’d have to speculate none of it would have happened if she’d been allowed her childhood to progress normally instead of being marketed by her mother for her beauty. That the pervert was arrested in Thailand is no mystery, Thailand, the Philippines and Costa Rica are well known places for perverts to go to have sex with children. Of course it’s horrible such things happen and in the case of these countries are allowed to happen. Perversion like this is another example of human nature, much like boyfriends killing their girlfriends children born of another man’s seed (a common occurrence among the apes, by the way). While civilized human culture tries to limit this kind of behavior it’s pretty clear it will never be eradicated. My point is child beauty pageants should be eradicated too, perhaps all beauty pageants. The focus on beauty does not lead to healthy culture. Eating disorders are not infectious diseases with viral or bacterial causes, they are products of an unwholesome focus on perfection and beauty. I would speculate there has never been one case of someone getting smarter and furthering our species’ progress by focusing on bodily perfection. But as long as money is to be made selling beauty products, exercise machines, plastic surgery, etc., this unwholesome focus will continue. It appears to be human nature and as we’ve seen through history no amount of religion or the making of laws will stop the unwholesome aspects of our nature from emerging. Just like we can’t teach male chimpanzees not to kill the young produced by other males, we can’t teach our own human brothers and sisters to stop doing things which are apparently part of our innate natural behavior. We’ll probably never know who killed the child beauty, but it would be safe to say she won’t be the last one killed in like circumstances. Sad as it may be to face that fact, it is even sadder to know humans will likely keep killing each other for reasons we could do something about, like patriotism, racial differences, religious differences and economic differences. The history of our own enlightened country is full of such killings by supposedly enlightened people. I guess barbarism, like perversion, is part of our nature too. I’ve never killed anybody, or sought out children to have sex with. Does that make me a good person? I don’t know. All I know is if everyone on the planet could say they haven’t done these things either, it would definitely be a signal of some kind of human progress. |
| I was reading a sponsered blog yesterday. The gentleman writer made some good points about how women are devalued and so I read some of his earlier postings and got into where he championed conservatives while demeaning (devaluing?) liberals which got me to thinking... Conservatives have something to conserve. They have a pile which they hope to grow into larger piles. If you don't have jackshit you won't be a conservative. Oddly enough some very rich folks (Bill Gates comes to mind) are liberals and they give away more of their piles than any conservative could hope to corner. And that's the difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives hang onto their piles greedily while liberals give their piles away. I'll never be a conservative, though I don't have jackshit, all the jackshit I have I give away in terms of generosity of spirit, friendliness and helpfulness to those with even less jackshit than I have. Oddly enough a number of conservatives also claim Christianity, something I don't claim, and yet they really don't seem to get the teaching of the Christ they claim to believe in. I'm sure they'll be happy to attend heaven and hang out with other greedy folks while I'll be in Hell hanging out with truly generous folks. The heaven the conservatives occupy will undoubtedly be right close to the heaven promised to the suicide bombers of Islam, maybe they can share some virgins... I shouldn't have read the Bible, especially since I seem to have gotten all the teachings of the Christ I don't believe in so wrongly. But I'll be much happier in hell, I'm sure, I can't even imagine spending eternity with the likes of Ken Lay, George Bush, Jerry Falwell and John Chaney, I'd sooner commit suicide... |
| My departed Dad was always so proud how "at least I taught you boys how to work". Now that he's gone I can finally say "piss on the whole concept!" The last five years I've worked harder (as in hard work) than I'd ever done in the fifty-odd years preceding it. I can't believe a college-edicated man like me would ever stoop to such menial labor unless he was stupid or desperate (neither of which applies to me). Sure there are rewards, the accomplishment of impossible tasks, the just sleep following such work, the good paydays subsequent to prevailing wage-earning, etc., but my lasting impression is it sucks!!! My back hurts, my feets stink and I don't love Jesus, as the song-writer put it, and I'm ready for a change. Where is the job which is fulfilling, enjoyable and well-paid? What do I want to be when I grow up? I don't know. Five more years of foolishness and I can start to reap some small benefit from paying so much into Social Security. All I can hope for is the asshole President in Washington doesn't pull even that throw-rug out from under me. I am a man who has many skills and I'm proud of that. I don't really care fuck-all for the laurels but I'm ready to rest on them. That blessed time can't come soon enough for me, even if I'm still going to have to do something to make ends meet, at least part-time. I hate the Puritans who founded this country, why couldn't they have lived on a coast where the living was easy and a man could feed himself just drowning worms and sleeping in warm sand? Cocksuckers!!!!! |
| We're in a world of hurt thanks to the Pakistanis and packets of ketchup mixed with sunblock, vitamins, lattes and sportsbottles. Thank the Lord for our vigilant security forces purging the fragile airlines from these terror threats! People with the wherewithal to travel by air should take a bus instead, the al Qaeda don't seem to have targeted Greyhound yet!! Sigh!! It's probably only a matter of time before somebody blows up a bus destined for Walla Walla... I guess my real question is how those nutball suicide folks can believe virgins would look at any of them twice?? |
| As a teenager in the 60’s I read Leon Uris’ novel Exodus and saw the movie of the same name starring the blue-eyed Paul Newman as an Israeli freedom-fighter. I was caught up in the struggle of the fledgling country’s quest to regain their historic and ancestral homeland, seeing many parallels to America’s battle for independence. There was something romantic about the kibbutz lifestyle and the young Israelis being kind of like homesteaders or something. When the Israelis were attacked from all sides in 1967 by Arab countries bent on driving them into the sea, I took great pleasure in how the Israelis kicked butt and turned the tables on their attackers. It was a case of the cowboys and Indians all over again and even though I’m not Jewish I entertained the notion of going to Israel and joining a kibbutz. I didn’t know the history of the Palestine region beyond what I’d read in the Bible, this ignorance led me to conclude there was something right and proper about the Jews returning to their homeland, a place they’d be safe from pogroms and holocausts. I didn’t take into account how the displaced local Palestinians would feel, all I saw was how the Israelis were making the desert bloom, creating sustainable communities in an inhospitable land. It gladdened my ignorant Puritan American heart to see these plucky Jews finally reversing their sad history. It seemed to my teenage eyes pretty much a black and white issue, the Israelis in their white hats, the heroes, the sneaky ne’er-do-well Arabs obviously villains. Like I said, kind of like the cowboys and Indians all over again. My feelings about Israel and Palestine have changed after watching fifty years of conflict in the region. I don’t know who the cowboys are or who the Indians are anymore. Having finally educated myself about my own country’s displacing of native populations my feelings about that have changed as well, and now I feel more like the Indians were the noble race, the true heroes, while the whites were the sneaky ne’er-do-wells. Funny how a little perspective and education can change foolish youthful hero-worship. I think 9/11 changed a lot of my perspective about the Middle East. These were no longer funny guys with table-cloth hats anymore, suddenly I realized we had something to fear from these backward-seeming people. I also realized 9/11 wasn’t a one-off, it was the latest in a string of such attacks against Americans. It appeared finally to me that the Arab world hated us. President Bush told us it was because they hated freedom, but the reality of their hate is substantially different. A majority of the Middle Eastern world dislikes us for two reasons, number one is our continued support of Israel, number two would be our disregard of Islamic traditions, trodding roughshod over the backward Arabs so we can make piles of money from the oil they don’t have any use for, dabbling in underhanded political meddling for our own advantage and generally looking down our noses at these camel-jockeys. Screw them, we can do what we want and they are weak and unorganized. What the hell could these ragheads do to us? The concept was laughable to consider. Which is why we were caught with our pants down on 9/11, even though we’d been attacked before, in Kenya, in Yemen, a previous attempt at destroying the Twin Towers, Lebanon and Somalia. It seems pretty clear to me these previous attacks weren’t just random acts after all, this hatred has been going on for some time and we discounted it. Our support of Israel was a sign of enmity to the Arab world, our disdainful treatment of the Arabs proved it. We are hated by people who historically have carried grudges against their enemies for centuries, and we are giving future generations of those people more reasons to plot terrorism against us. Our incursion into Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with our support of Israel has, in the minds of the followers of Islam, made us enemies of the Prophet himself. All over the world the Muslims hate us, even the ones who aren’t Arabs, we are seen as the enemy in a holy war. We take solace from the governments of countries in the Middle East that seem to support and like us, while ignoring completely the groundswell of hate among those countries’ general population, the teaching of hatred against us in the Islamic schools, and the effect of Arabian mass media. We encourage democracy in these countries until we are dismayed by the results, namely our sworn enemies being elected in free elections. These people don’t hate freedom, per se, just the American brand of it that we’ve forced down their throats. It’s pretty clear to me the Bush administration has sat on its hands during the present Israeli/Lebanon conflict. They’ve made mouth music, using phrases like “lasting peace in the Middle East” being a requirement for our participation in ending the crisis. If history is any example there will never be lasting peace in the region, I doubt there would be peace even if Israel were pushed into the ocean, there would still be bickering and internecine warfare. But that is no reason for Americans to be hated further by our government’s inaction based on policy favoring Israel, even when world opinion is that Israel is actively engaging in despicable acts, punishing all of Lebanon for the acts of a few Hezbollah guerillas. The Israelis claim the Hezbollah are using local Lebanese people as human shields and then bomb the shit out of the human shields to get at the militia behind them. We shouldn’t support Israeli atrocities any more, our loyalties are misplaced and short-sighted, resulting in every bomb Israel drops being seen as coming from us as well. Real leadership in America should rise above blind support for Israel’s decisions, but that would involve a foresight and wisdom the Bush administration has not shown up to now, the ability to see both sides of an issue without sticking to a myopic good versus evil approach. When Lebanon had their free elections we promised them we’d support them in a gesture of goodwill. That it was only a gesture was proved when we failed to support them as Israel was bombing the shit out of their infrastructure, I assume the next country we promise support to would do well to remember this latest broken promise on our government’s part. Hopefully in our next free elections the American people will elect a government which doesn’t see its mandated mission as pimping for business interests. It’ll take a long time (and I’m pretty sure I won’t live to see the day come) for intelligent and compassionate foreign policy to change hatred to friendship, but it’s a direction our country needs to strive for if we hope the 9/11 attacks won’t just be another chapter of an increasingly violent and truly sad American history lesson. |
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