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| The Vultures on Their Shoulders |
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| shared guilt across the board |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, April 02, 2003. Americans are the laziest ethicists on the planet. We enjoy the melodramatic because it allows our thespian tendencies to emerge on camera for the scrapbook. You know, “and here’s grandma registering concern for the starving children in Ethiopia and here she is in solidarity against the war in, oh, Iraq.” And here she is supporting her right to have an abortion, and there’s her brother in law demonstrating against the clinic she’s entering, and both went home and slept the sleep of the clean-minded. Both love the conflict, because they can pander to clearly identified choruses just as surely as Leno performs to his band when it isn’t going well during the monologue. The abortion debate would vanish as soon as all unwanted pregnancies go away, or were even substantially reduced. But it’s so difficult to be a hero holding a condom, and it’s hard to be a martyred heroine demanding your right to have sex responsibly. It’s so dramatic to talk about saving babies and the unborn and disallowing women to decide about their own bodies. And behind that is the patriarchal and genetic fear of unknown parentage and the enjoyment of sex, which scares the hell out far more people than have ever admitted it. Last Saturday I saw a parade of anti-war demonstrators dancing down Pearl St. No doubt they thought they had really turned someone’s mind around. But being pro-peace in Boulder is about as courageous as leading a Support our Troops Rally in Colorado Springs. It’s so pointless as to be silly. I hope they had a good time, assuaging their guilt. And if it isn’t guilt, it should have been. We’re in this war because it is the way George Bush interpreted the world and what to do after the Towers fell. Is anyone surprised that he has acted this way? Can anyone say that this was not absolutely predictable? I don’t think so. It could have been decided at the ballot box, but no. Because the cosmos did not custom design a candidate that reflected their views 100%, I’ll bet most people in that parade on Pearl did not vote at all. OR they voted for Nader. And they’ll pay only tenuous attention to politics that doesn’t loudly proclaim their importance till the next election, when they’ll whine again. Studying politics and voting isn’t as sexy as posing as concerned citizens, however irresponsible. For example, if a government, any government, routinely and for various reasons kills, say, ten thousand of its own innocent citizens a year, and that this has gone on for two decades, and there is not much to indicate that the same government won’t be there for another two decades, can we agree it would be best to prevent the slaughter of those additional two hundred thousand people? Okay. If we could do it by attacking them, losing five thousand of our own and fifteen thousand of theirs, would it be worth it or not? Assuming a vastly improved government arises, we’ve saved one hundred eighty thousand people, more or less. And at our loss. I don’t know. I really don’t. In the case of Iraq, many of you would say, diplomacy is all and let the sanctions work and keep up the pressure. You may be right. Others might say that a country gets the government it deserves and that only they could make that decision. But that was not what many of you were saying twenty years ago when communist revolution was still an option. But some of you would say no violence under any circumstances because violence begets violence. But lots of things beget violence. Religion. Sex. Soccer. The Dixie Chicks. And fear. The civilized goal would be to choose the right combination of actions that reduces the aggregate violence overall. The American Left has nurtured so many mutually exclusive templates of thought they’ve biodegraded to the point where they just want that nobody can blame them for pro-active acts. They hide behind respect for different cultures, when so many cultures deserve little or no respect at all when the feathers and sensuous dances and beautiful music disappear and the witch doctors and priests emerge, and there is no law or pretense of law. We have a proactive President, a horrible thing to those who hate his domestic goals, as I do. There are those who hoped for this, because it would inflame the Left to action, they thought. So they got their wish, and the Left whimpers in the corner. They do so because any decision would require choices with clearly defined lines of culpability. Just like the 85% of American combat soldiers in World War II and Korea who never fired at the enemy because they didn’t want the guilt of killing or exploding retribution, so the soft thinking American Left dissolves in fear at the very thought of making a public choice they’ll have to defend outside of, say, Boulder. There were other choices, but because there was something politically incorrect about these candidates, the Left passed. Which is to say, although they know other candidates would not have lost us every ally and gone to war so readily, because these folks wouldn’t support child care for illegal migrant workers they could not be voted for. So, you know, the posturing Peace Marchers have their share of responsibility for what is happening now, good and ill. They’ve always tried to guilt trip Middle America, but never acknowledge the vultures on their own shoulders. I posted this on the forum last night, actually wanting to send it directly to you (all right, so I'm not so tech-savvy as might otherwise appear). |
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