Coming up Next – A Rant
June 10th, 2006
Written By: Adam Sussman
(Why This War Is Good)
How bad is your local news? I live in the second largest city in the United States and our local news here is amazingly silly. Then again, they are catering to a mass audience and as the old saying goes, the masses are asses.
One of the main reasons for keeping this blog was for me to force myself into tackling ideas, policies, society, science, religion or whatever else there is in the world that deserves more attention then the two talking head actors from our local news provider.
I am starting to see quite a few more regulars coming back to my blog and I have to admit it is very nice. I would like to say you have caught me at a very interesting time.
You ask, “Shandy, what is so interesting about this time in your life?”
Well for one thing, for the longest time I belonged to the cable news ass club. You know what I mean; I’m too good to watch local news but yet I am still watching talking heads go at it on my favorite “smart” cable news shows.
Something happened over the course of the past 10 years of watching the news as I went from watching the news and having to form my own opinions to watching the news and having the ideas spoon fed to me.
This also goes with listening to the local talk radio. I used to say I belong to this camp because I like 68% of what they have to say but I don’t have time to really understand the issues so let me tune in on the car ride to the office and let so & so tell me how it really is.
I started to see a huge problem with this approach. I am not sure but I think they call this Group Think. I would be at parties or family get-togethers and I would hear someone proclaim to be in my camp and we would buddy up and I would hear someone else proclaim to be in another camp and all of those people would buddy up and we would all jump around and sing “when you’re a jet, you’re a jet…”.
No, seriously though it’s the season for political debates and when these buddy systems occurs I am always taken back when the people who proclaimed to be in my camp are regurgitating the same information I had heard on the cable news channels yet they had no personal connection to the ideas they were spitting out. This goes for both camps! I woke a few years after 9’11 to a society of little talking heads running around pushing sound bite policies.
Maybe I just woke up. Shandy, get to the point!!!
What the hell is going on with our government? We just took out the main man behind the man who we all thought is the main man because the real main man is not alive since the tapes are all dated… Argh! So confusing! Either way…
My parents feel I have become a moralist. I want what’s right!
If being in Iraq is the right thing for this country then why do so many people disagree? If being in Iraq is not the right thing, then why do so many people disagree?
Why do I have to be in a camp when I do not agree 100% with their policies? There was a time before my time when people used to feel good about their administration. This was a time before I thought about these kinds of issues.
Lucky for me I come from an educated family and I also married into an educated family. Everyone around me is all very smart when it comes to knowing who is who in government and what the real issues are. Which is why it is so mind blowing to me how my two families could disagree 100% about every major issue yet make articulate and educated points based on fact and reason. (We are very big in our families about making a person fight for their opinions and make sure it is based on logic, not rhetoric.)
I am all for discourse especially when it is followed through with passion, but I must ask the question; don’t we have a duty as a leading nation to ensure the world is a stable place? Friends and families disagreeing with policy is one thing but nation’s whose ideals are at extreme ends of each other is catastrophic!
I am the grandson of a man who fought totalitarianism first hand with tanks and all. I am the son of a man who spent his whole childhood playing in the bombed out neighborhoods of London. As a child I spent holidays with friends and older relatives from the old countries who had tattoos with numbers on their arms. It was an issue we never raised as kids but we could see even at such a young age by looking into their eyes across the table as we said our holiday prayers what dictatorship had done to their lives.
What the hell do I know? Is it about gas and about big multinational corporations? It could be. But when we have a growing population in one part of the world who passionately and violently despises other parts of the world for what ever reasons, history has already shown us what’s to come.
When I was a kid in grade school I was small and had a smart ass mouth so I got pushed around a lot. There was one particular bully who had started to make my life rough for me.
I had learned two ways to handle someone bullying me around. My mother used to tell me to just ignore him and if I did he would grow tired of me and go away. My father used to say, walk up to him at lunchtime in front of all of his friends and break his nose. Just smack him one real good and they will all leave you alone.
My father comes from a place that when he was a young teenager other boys were regurgitating their parents anti-Semitism and he had to make it clear at the time no one would push him around. He really had no choice.
But when I was a child, times were different and I chose to follow my mother’s ways. It was a peaceful approach and I did not risk getting my ass kicked. So for a few weeks I ignored the bully and all of his buddies but it only made things worse.
I was isolated by my own friends for not standing my ground and became a pariah to my class. Finally one day we were all playing dodge ball and I became their target. I finally had enough of their abuse and caught one of the handballs in mid flight. I ran right up to the bully, (crossing the line and cheating) and pelted him right in the face with the ball. When he grabbed his nose in shock I kicked him in his nuts. When he fell over, I gleefully hocked a nice size bit of phlegm on him.
I am proud to report; I earned some respect that day.
I am still confused as to how we should handle our Middle East problems. I do believe IF EXECUTED CORRECLTY that us controlling Iraq is the right play but obviously this has become one big quagmire.
Over the past few years I wanted to get a better understanding as to what was going through the minds of the WWII axis of evil’s leaders. Additionally I wanted to know what was going through America, England and Frances minds. After completing reading tons of history on the topic it became evident to me millions of lives would have been saved if the decisions on behalf of the major European nations (especially England) were to stand up and fight. They did not.
There are dozens of logical reasons why so many countries capitulated and as we all know now, we saw that this capitulation had created an unstoppable violent regime.
It took a new administration in England and the force of the United States to stand up and put a stop to the growing regime. Tens of millions of lives were lost, countries were literally destroyed, and other countries went bankrupt.
Are we facing this same type of situation? The leader of Iran got on TV and said they were going to blow Israel off the map. Other countries that have no belief in civil liberties and democracy are building bombs that can wipe out cities from afar. Can they do it today no, but how about in a decade?
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in the year 1925, years before he got into power. In the book he talks about his master plan to change the world and goes into detail about how he will achieve it with a non violent appearance, just evil genius political manipulation. At the time of release and even into several years of his Chancellorship his plans were thought of as so outlandish no one took them seriously.
He started to wage his war on terror twelve years later.
June 10th, 2006 16:02
Well you started the debate so I will give my 2 cents. In my opinion the war against terrorism right now is not like any other war we have ever had to fight. We can’t think of it in the terms we are used to. That is the reason we are having so many problems. This is a religious war. We are not dealing with rational people. When we beat the Germans and Japanese they knew they had lost the war because it was just a war. Rational people realize when they have lost and give up. We are at war with people who believe that dieing is better than losing. They have all been told that the US is on a crusade. There are many there that don’t agree with this but the leaders and most of the young do. Once a war starts no matter who is right there are people on both sides that have lost somebody they care about and then it becomes personal and then begins an infinite loop of revenge. Bush thought that he could go over there and free the Iraqi’s and they would be grateful and everything would be ok. What we ended up doing is pissing off all the militant Muslims all over the world and uniting them under one cause. They may not like each other but they are very united in hating us now. In their minds the worst of their kind is still better than having non-Muslims occupying a Muslim country. I have no idea what the solution is. I don’t even know if pulling out our troops is the solution right now. I do believe that invading Iraq when we did was the wrong decision. There are more people now mad enough at the US to cause us great harm than before we attacked Iraq.
I am not trying to fight with anybody or insult anyone. I may be way off and would love for somebody to explain to me why in a civilized way. I love to debate with intellectuals. I learn from debating with people.
June 10th, 2006 20:31
I enjoyed the allegory. However, I am left wondering: isn’t it the US that plays the role of bully in this tale? In today’s soundbite driven society, it is easy to look at incidents and not think of the history preceding the event. Each action that we take, and each action taken against us, is the culmination of all the events that have led us to this point. None of these events occur in a vacuum.
How can the US conduct itself in such a heavy-handed and isolationist policy in the global community, and not expect backlash from those at the short end of the stick? The US has contimually shown contempt and hostility towards the UN and the World Court. We abuse our control of the IMF, subgugating any economy that our multinationals need to help with their bottom line. Our environmental policies are shredding the resources of the planet, basically treating it as our own toilet.
It is indeed a scary playground, and we better watch out for the next Shandyking - sick of our shit, and ready to kick some ass.
One last point. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with the “War on Terror”. 9/11 does not equal Sadaam Hussein. If Bush and cronies were truly interested in fighting terrorism, they never would have committed troops to Iraq. The seige in Iraq is an illegal occupation. An impeachable offense, followed by actions that violate international law and human rights. Counts that have led leaders of other countries to stand trial for crimes against humanity.
June 11th, 2006 14:07
ogletree said, “This is a religious war. We are not dealing with rational people.”
Religion is, by its very nature, irrational. “Faith” is the suspension of rationality. That’s one good reason to keep religion out of government.
But people don’t want to be rational…
June 12th, 2006 09:32
I would not say, ““Faith” is the suspension of rationality”. It takes a lot of faith to believe in anything you can’t prove. Including evolution. I think zealous faith is the suspension of rationality”. There are a lot of unanswered questions. It takes just as much faith to believe a God that has no beginning created something as it does to believe that we come from something else that has no beginning. No matter what you believe you have to accept that something has no beginning.
June 12th, 2006 11:14
Ogle,
“This is a religious war. We are not dealing with rational people. When we beat the Germans and Japanese they knew they had lost the war because it was just a war. Rational people realize when they have lost and give up. We are at war with people who believe that dieing is better than losing.”
I understand what you’re trying to say here but let’s not lose sight of several facts.
1. Recall the word Kamikaze?
Kamikaze is a word of Japanese origin, which in the English language usually refers to suicide attacks carried out by Imperial Japan’s military aviators against Allied shipping towards the end of the Pacific campaign of World War II by crashing their planes into warships.
2. The war with the Japanese and Germans concluded because we overpowered them and forced them to end it. It took a bilateral assault with Americans coming from the west and Russians coming from the east to beat the Germans into submission. If you have a chance, check out some history on Hitler’s last days. Up to the final hours of the war he told people to keep fighting “Till the end”. As for the Japanese, it took us dropping two bottles of hell on their cities wiping out their ability to continue to attack. If we did not do this, they still would have fought to the end.
3. What I hear you saying that I agree with is there is no face to this war. We are led to believe we are fighting the boogieman and he could be your next door neighbor.
Greg,
I am glad you enjoyed the analogy.
“I am left wondering: isn’t it the US that plays the role of bully in this tale?”
Okay, I see what you are saying here but my grade school bully was not known for helping other students when they were in need. He was known for taking lunch money, causing terror against those that did not agree with him and for flexing the small power he had using several side kicks. Young Shandy on the other hand was not looking to overthrow the bully out of power; he was just looking to co-exist.
“How can the US conduct itself in such a heavy-handed and isolationist policy in the global community, and not expect backlash from those at the short end of the stick?”
This is an excellent question and with all honesty where I am torn the most. Prior to the envision our administration was acting on shared intelligence which came from several other leading powers (England and Russia if I recall). This is where I am torn because I believed that our combined intelligence was highly accurate and I expected the coalition to walk up to mile marker 560 in the middle of an Iraqi desert and pull our some massive WMD’s. As we know this did not happen!
“It is indeed a scary playground, and we better watch out for the next Shandyking - sick of our shit, and ready to kick some ass.”
This is where you and I may disagree the most. If two of my buddies lean over and tell me the guy standing over in the corner is confiding with is friends that he wants to cause me serious harm and that my buddies highly suspect that he is carrying some weapons to use against me when I least expect it. In a proactive defense for my life I have no problem disabling that person (if I could). Unfortunately as was the case of the War, if I found there were no weapons on him following my preemptive ass kicking I would look like a total asshole.
Were my buddies misled or did my enemy and his crew get wise and remove the weapons as a bold political move? This would not be the first time something like this has happened. In fact Hitler used strategies that boarded along the same type of sophistication before he took over Czechoslovakia and Hungry.
I conceded in my first post that its one hell of a quagmire we have gotten our selves into and I would like to have seen our Administration perform with better intelligence and not show the world we are some isolationist cowboys running around doing as we please because we please (like the bully) but that we our preemptively striking on behalf of democracy and we did so with the sophistication and intelligence backing the most powerful nation in the world.
I would also like to think that the big brains that run the show would have learned from the Somalia situation with what hitting a beehive looks like. Just see the movie Black Hawk Down.
As for your final paragraph, the jury is still out. I am still not convinced “War on Terror”, Iraq and 9/11 have nothing to do with each other. The reason I say this is because all the information is not available. In a few years the truth will present itself in one form or another.
NevDull,
Isn’t rationality subjective?
and Ogletree
“It takes a lot of faith to believe in anything you can’t prove. Including evolution”
That’s the whole point over Creationism vs. Evolution. Science is not saying trust the theory of evolution on faith but trust it because science (Darwin) has been able to demonstrate the logic behind its truth using the principles of the Scientific Method. Carl Sagan refers to this quite a bit through out the move Contact.
Is evolution a fact, no, just like the theory of the big bang is not a fact! But these go beyond the reasoning of believing in one man who was told to walk up a mountain under the guidance of a burning bush.
June 12th, 2006 14:25
No, rationality is not subjective.
And no, it doesn’t take faith to be rational. It takes the ability to say “I don’t know” sometimes. Being rational doesn’t mean being omniscient.
I believe that evolution happens, but if a better, reasoned explanation comes along, I’m willing to toss it out. If it were a matter of faith, I wouldn’t.
If proof came along of the nonexistence of God, would the Pope say, “oops, I guess I was wrong”?
August 24th, 2006 09:37
This is war against Muslims, not war against terrorism.