Downward Spiral?

G8 Riots in Rostock, Germany

I don’t think I’ve ever been more disappointed in our nation in my nearly 70 years than I am at this moment. I’ve seen more than my share of ups and downs, but we’ve reached a new low.

During my life, there have been many triumphs; building the nations highways; sending men to the moon; the election of JFK; passage of civil and women’s rights; defeating polio; and of course our victories on the international sports stage, to name a few.

There have been dark days; the Viet Nam War; the unrest of the 60s even if it did produce some good; the assassination of JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., the attack on 9/11 leading to our illegal and unjustified invasion of Iraq. But even after those atrocities, we stood tall as a nation, fierce in our independence, our commitment to a country united, and to justice and civility in the face of any enemy.

But this year, after the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African-American president in our history, I have witnessed the ugliest and most diabolical attacks on a first-year president I’ve ever seen. Not the usual political nonsense, but personal and hateful attacks.

This isn’t the usual joking around the way we saw with President Ford, for instance, with Saturday Night Live’s Chevy Chase falling down steps and stumbling over chairs. We aren’t getting the usual late-night talk show humor that poked fun at Clinton over his dalliances, or over G.W.’s lack of eloquence. What we are witnessing, by what can only be called the disloyal opposition, is character assassination, some of which seems to have racist overtones.

I’m bummed, not because of the typical political give and take that has defined our democracy for some 400 years, but because the rhetoric has taken a turn that could spell the beginning of the end for our country as we have known it.

There are people, and these are not just fools hollering in an alley, but leaders of national organizations, many of them churches, that are calling for Obama’s death, either rhetorically, or literally, and by doing so they are enabling the lunatic fringe, the ones who go off on their wives, and friends, injuring or killing them in a fit of rage, or who decide they are doing God’s work by killing doctors performing legal medical procedures. They are enabling these people to take this same action against our president.

If one of these people, who belong on major doses of drugs if not locked away, makes an attempt on Obama’s life, successful or not, there will be hell to pay in this country. There will be a backlash that will make the heads of those out-of-control preacher’s spin like that of the little girl in The Exorcist.

But what is most troubling is that there are no leaders on the conservative side of the aisle with the stones to stand up and speak out against this kind of talk. On the contrary, they seem to find it humorous, or commendable, like Mitt Romney who said, referring to people who shout everyone down at town meetings, “The Dems have derided these people as a ‘mob’ of ‘crazies’, I call them patriots.”

He went on to say, “When government is trying to take over health care, buying car companies, bailing out banks, and giving half the White House staff the title of czar, we have every good reason to be alarmed and to speak our mind.”

The fact that two Republican presidents were the first to appoint czars, Nixon was the first with an energy czar, followed by Reagan’s Drug Czar, seems to have been conveniently overlooked. It was Bush who asked Congress for $700 billion to bail out the banks.

When the shoe of derision was on the other foot, Romney felt differently about dissension. In April 2007, he said that he decried the “Divisiveness, The Bitterness, The Smallness, The Disunity” of Washington.

But I guess the new Romney, like his Republican colleagues, would now embrace folks like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and the rest of the Chicago Seven from the 1960s. Or, Bertrand Russell, Jane Fonda, and all the patriots who marched, hollered, and went to jail, all because they felt strongly enough about the wrong direction of our government that they were willing to disrupt the 1968 Democratic convention, and protest an illegal war. It’s nice to see the conservatives finally recognizing these people’s patriotic contributions.

Honest differences and heated debates have been an integral part of our political process from the first days of our republic. Shouting over each other, disrupting public discussions, and strapping guns to your hip at presidential events, and calling for the death of our president are not part of that history.

There is a very real danger of civil protest and disobedience turning into violence and mob rule. We need only one nut, on either side, to draw their weapon in anger and we could unleash one of the ugliest chapters in our history.

Do we really want a country where we take to the streets firing guns to intimidate either our government or the opposition?

Riot Marines in training

Do we want to see troops, and tanks in the streets of our cities trying to quell the violence of militant mobs? That may be our future.

I’ve always reflected on the peaceful way in which we bring about change in America, contrasting our approach to countries where people march over the slightest misstep by government, calling for huge strikes, firing weapons in the air or at each other, and burning their cities.

One part of me, at times, finds our apathy toward public policy disturbing; our reluctance to demand our government end the war in Iraq is a prime example. I get frustrated like anyone with the snails pace of change in our country.

On the other hand, I realize that our relatively peaceful approach to change, generally involving a good deal of debate and compromise on both sides, is largely responsible for most of us being able to walk out of our houses without fear of being identified as “the enemy” and becoming a target for abuse, or worse. But, we must have two opposing factions willing to talk and compromise; I don’t see that today.

I fear our way of governing may be coming to an end; that our nation has lost either the will, or the desire to invest the time and effort to reach peaceful accord; we seem to want instant change, change that meets our personal criteria without compromise, and are willing to resort to threats, lies, and even violence to achieve our end. How does that differ from the violence we see in other countries?

I fear that we are in a downward spiral that could see the United States of America go into the history books as the nation that used to lead the world in peace and democracy. I hope I’m wrong, and I hope the as-yet-to-be-identified leaders who can return us to political sanity are out their in both political parties.

The Great American Race

Camp David Peace Talks

President Jimmy Carter has jumped into the middle of the debate over whether the vitriol aimed at President Obama by various talking heads, and a few politicians, is race-based. He says unequivocally that this is the case, and I agree with him.

Carter, who walks the talk as shown in this picture where he brokered a peace between Egypt and Israel, something few thought would happen in their lifetime, should be one of the most respected men of our time.

As a “child of the 50s & 60s” I want whole heartedly to believe we are emerging from the darkness of discrimination, bigotry, and the hatred that I saw directed to people of color as I was growing up, but the ugly truth is that for many in this country, these feelings of superiority were merely pushed below the surface by the threat of being publicly ostracized by society during the struggle for human and civil rights in the 50s and 60s.

Starting with the Republican reemergence to power under Reagan, and again in the early 1990s with the rise to power and influence over the Religious Right by people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and other religious ideologues, the business of classifying people is alive and well. The conservatives see the world as white and black, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, not as the United States of America.

This Meant People Like Obama

With Falwell gone, and Robertson relegated to near obscurity in most of the nation, individual religious Bible-thumpers are leading the cause, primarily in the Southeast, but also in small churches around the country. They are teaching the gospel of hate, intolerance, and discrimination, and wrapping it in the cloak of Christianity. They are enabling those who embrace discrimination to act out their feelings. And their congregation are teaching this hatred to their children.

They are joined by people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, who throw verbal fuel on the fire every day with their debased and incendiary comments aimed at those who have not, or cannot let go of their hatred for people who are different.

The leaders in the Republican Party, of which there appear to be none, seem content to let this process go on unchallenged. One can only hope that there is one man or woman with the stones to stand up and say what these people are advocating is wrong.

The Bible talks about how slaves should be treated (Deuteronomy 15:12-15; Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 4:1), and those who choose to discriminate point to these passages as evidence that God, whom they believe is white, using their beliefs to justify their depraved philosophies about white and male superiority, and the human race. They ignore the fact that the Bible was written by men at a time when slavery was a common practice for the Egyptian and Roman empires who used slaves from conquered nations to build their monuments to society, and that we have tried for 2000 years to evolve to a higher moral purpose, one that would seem to have been espoused by Jesus, if you happen to be a Christian.

We need to understand that racism is a deeply ingrained instinct in virtually every human on earth. We have been programmed over the last 1000 or so millennia to distrust anyone not of our tribe. We know our tribe by sight, by sound, and by their actions in terms of the food they eat, music they listen to, and the religion they follow. If you doubt this, simply look at the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other regions of the Middle East where tribal conflict prevent them from forming unified forms of government, or tolerating people not of their tribe. Marriages between tribes are forbidden; women have no rights; and those not of their faith are labeled infidels. These are people still living in a biblical time warp.

This is not a problem unique to America. Discrimination exists in every corner of the world whether it’s the Japanese and Chinese, Koreans, light and dark skinned Cubans, northern and southern Italians, it’s everywhere. In our country, we have discriminated against the Chinese, the Japanese, Irish, Italians, virtually every “foreigner” who has set foot on this land, but we have saved our longest and worst discrimination for the Africans.

It may have been important at one time in our history to control who came and went from your tribe, before the advent of agronomy and husbandry, in order to protect our limited food supply from being raided by others, but today we have the ability to grow crops and animal protein in sufficient quantity to feed all the world. Our survival is no longer dependent on identifying our tribe, or threatened by the existence of other tribes in our vicinity, but old habits die hard.

When I hear someone tell me that they aren’t racist; that they don’t see the color of a person’s skin, I immediately assume they are either trying to deceive me, or themselves. When a man or woman walks into a room with flaming red hair, I immediately see the color of their hair. If someone with an extremely large nose, or no nose, or weighing 350 pounds comes into my view, of course I see their unique features. And, if a black, brown, red, or yellow person enters my space, I see them as well; that is perfectly normal.

The difference is, or should be for all of us, that we see them as people after we take notice of their uniqueness, and reject any feelings of discomfort or fear that may be left over from our ancestors hundreds and thousands of years ago, or stories we’ve been told by others. We live in what should be a civilized society where we no longer have to fight for survival in terms of being threatened by people from outside our tribe.

If we are to move on to a greater peace, a greater society capable of solving a myriad of problems, we must put this race business to rest. Those of us who reject hateful thinking toward others must stand up and be counted. We need to use every opportunity to discredit those who use race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation to divide our country, and our world. We need to turn off the talk shows and TV stations that promote division in society. We need to send email to advertisers on these stations and networks to let them know they will lose customers if they continue to support bigotry and discrimination.

We are the great American race made up of people from all over the world, but we are only great as long as we are united. We have the power of the people on our side regardless of what a few might say. We are each leaders in that part of life where we interact with others, and it’s up to us to bring about the change we need and require by insisting on inclusion, not exclusion.

Déjà Vu – The Dead End That Is Afghanistan

Tilting At Windmills

We are screwed in Afghanistan, and our exit strategy needs to focus on figuring out how to get out of there with the least cost of the lives of American and allied troops. Let me explain why I say that.

First, I need to say that I have no problem that we, and our allies hit the Al Qaeda bases after it was determined that they were behind the 9/11/01 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, and attempted attacks elsewhere — we do have the right to defend ourselves.

Where we went wrong, and I have to give the Bush administration full credit for this, as well as numerous other boondoggles, was to think we could go into this country, change its government and its people, and turn it into some kind of United States clone, or whatever the Bush-Cheney regime had in mind.

I don’t often read George Will, and I quote him even less, but in a recent column he quotes a Dutch commander of coalition forces in a southern province of Afghanistan as saying that walking through the region is “like walking through the Old Testament.” Therein lies our problem.

The people of Afghanistan, by and large, don’t want to live the way we do. They reject our religion, our values, our morals, and pretty much everything else we embrace. These are people still living in the Middle Ages. Of course there are more progressive Afghanis in Kabul and a few of the larger cities, but the vast majority want nothing to do with modern civilization. It will take generations before they emerge from the darkness that is their society.

They might want a television, but they want to watch shows very different from anything on American TV. They may want cell phones, but they don’t want all the nonsense applications that are available for iPhones. They want to pick and choose those parts of the modern world that fit their vision and belief of what life in Afghanistan should be like, and they should have that right with a caveat. If we can accept that the Mennonites in our country reject modern conveniences, we can accept that same for the rest of the world.

I’m reminded of our trip to Cuba around Christmas in 2001 – yes, it was a legal trip. Though we’d been cautioned not to talk politics with the locals — they could get in trouble depending on what they said — we did have a couple of casual conversations with some Cubans.

One thing that many Americans may not know is that the Cubans are well informed. Yes, they get propaganda from their government, but they watch CNN News every day, and see what’s going on in the world. Many of them are probably better informed than Americans who would rather watch American Idol than the news.

In talking to some of them, they said they did want more liberty and freedom. They mentioned freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but they all insisted that they didn’t want to go as far as the United States. They pointed out that our society is full of citizen-on-citizen crime and violence. They said they want more freedom, but they don’t want the problems that we have in the US with drugs and crime, so they seem willing to have selective freedoms while retaining their sense of safety. I can tell you that we walked the streets of Havana at all hours of the night with absolutely no fear that someone would step from a dark alley and rob us.

We are more than a little self-centered in the United States. Yes, we are a super power; we have the largest economy in the world; the highest standard of living; and many things to be envied, but we also have huge problems that we tend to ignore; crime, poverty, drugs, etc. Our conceit manifests itself in the belief that everyone in the world wants to be just like us — they don’t. They do want some of what we have in terms of the good life, but in many cases, they reject our morality, our particular form of government, and much of what leads to our violent society.

So, back to Afghanistan. This is an ancient culture, much of it living in the past, that doesn’t want the world we’re trying to impose on them any more than the North Vietnamese, and many in South Viet Nam didn’t want what we were trying to shove down their throats, and the French before us. It finally became obvious, first to our citizens, and eventually our government, that we were fighting a losing cause in Viet Nam. The parallels with Afghanistan are frightening.

The Afghan people don’t want us there for the most part. And, like the Vietnamese, these people are fighting for their homeland, much as we fought with passion for our freedom from the English. We can go home – they are home.

They are committed to giving up their lives for their country, their way of life, and what they believe in, while we are there with little or no goal or purpose, save converting them to some form of democracy, and we are not willing to die for our cause.

Our original mission, to destroy the capability of Al Qaeda to strike us, or anywhere in the world, was accomplished early on in the war. Now we are staying on, partly out of fear of a resurgence of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but also our missionary-like zeal to export our way of life, to turn this country into some sort of model for democracy, a task that has in large part failed in Iraq. It’s almost as if we’re trying to convince ourselves that our way is best.

The difference in the last few wars, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan, and victorious wars like WWII, are the political and human principles involved. In WWII, a war we entered most reluctantly, we had a clear and defined enemy in Hitler and the Nazis, and Japan. They were the invaders, not us. They were the ones running over countries, killing people seemingly without remorse, not us. Our only goal was the defeat of Hitler & the Japanese. Once that was accomplished, we basically got the hell out of there. We did help with rebuilding their countries, along with our allies, but we were not about the business of long-term occupation, or nation building. That was never our goal. We have a small contingent of troops in some of those countries, but even that is now being questioned.

What we are about in Iraq and Afghanistan is nation building. I’m no expert on the subject, but you can find any number of those on the Internet, at least some who will validate whatever view of the topic you personally embrace.

What I think I know of nation building from my reading is that you first have to destroy a nation to rebuild it. The Romans ran roughshod over much of Europe, trying to change those countries to be more Roman; they failed in the long run.

England, France, Spain, and Portugal ranged across the Middle East, Africa, and the New World in their attempt to expand their empires, colonize, and reengineer the countries they had invaded to embrace their way of life. For the most part, they failed. They are gone, and while remnants of their culture stayed behind to blend with the indigenous people, they are back within their own borders.

The formation of the United States was an exercise in nation building, but it came from within. When our forefathers decided they could no longer tolerate the yoke of the English crown, they revolted and built their own nation based on a new set of ideals, but in the process they had to destroy nations that had lived on this continent for centuries. The Six-Nation Federation of the Iroquois had existed before the United States, and it was destroyed, as were the nations of indigenous peoples all over North, Central, and South America as new nations were built by invaders.

We destroyed Iraq. We can rationalize our actions all day long by vilifying Saddam, but the bottom line is that we destroyed a nation, and now we’re trying to put it back together, but a lot of people there want no part of what we think they should look like, how they should dress, or what they should eat. We haven’t quite destroyed Afghanistan, but we face the prospect of a decades long conflict that almost certainly will fail.

We need to find a way out of Afghanistan. We need to build accords with other nations, with NATO, and with the United

Afgan Legacy

Nations, that makes clear that we, along with our allies, reserve the right to strike at international terrorism wherever it is proven to exist — key work proven. We need coalitions to put pressure on governments that support, or at least tolerate terrorist organizations inside their borders. We need to see fighting terrorism in the same way we fight organized crime. It’s not about sending in armies, it’s about stopping the flow of cash; capturing, trying, and imprisoning leaders through a just court system, and putting pressure on any and all governments aiding and abetting terrorism.

If we don’t, our children, our grandchildren, and possibly our great-grandchildren will still be fighting in Afghanistan year from now, and possibly returning home in flag draped caskets.