The United States is an amazing country. The most powerful country which has ever existed on this strange earth, with all its strange inhabitants, is an interesting place to live. It is sometimes frustrating how odd we are, and how slow we are to catch up to the closest thing to reality that the small but expanding minds of man can understand.
There are a plethora of signposts which say “Hey Powerful People, Get Real, Change Course Now!” We’ve entered into a preemptive war. We’ve stayed in it even though there is every reason to get out, the most important one being that we should not have been there in the first place; and how can we make a wrong right by continuing to do it? In the face of logic and science, many of us still choose to believe that some God is out there pulling the strings, punishing or rewarding us.
We are a confused bunch of earthlings, busy as can be, screwing things up. We are polluting the earth as if we’re in hurry, we are crushing other species as if we are worried that they take up too much space, we are still killing each other as if we don’t believe that the rest of our species are our brothers and sisters.
Yet I have some faith left in this funny huge country of ours, just as I have faith in our species to collectively figure out that we can easily do better than we are doing, and allowing to be done.
On television today, during a speech by our little Bush of a President, CNN stated: “we are sorry to interrupt this broadcast to bring you this breaking story; [blah blah blah]… Oakland airport shuts down because an unidentified man ran down an exit ramp [how scary].” I was discouraged. When we can’t even concentrate on what our idiot of a President is saying long enough to criticize it, how are we ever going to start doing better?
I turned on CNN again this evening, and watching them tear the President’s speech apart, watching them articulate how ridiculous this war is getting, made me thank the Lord [in this case Anderson Cooper]. Here is the great thing about our [so called] democracy: we can always change our mind. The speed of our communication can only help us. Even though it takes “press pound to leave a numeric page, press 2 to talk to a psychiatrist, press 3 if you know what to do after the beep” just to leave a message with a cell phone rigged to make you use more minutes, you can still share information fast with your circle of friends and family; even more so with the internet.
Our media has the power to change the course of history. Even though they played a huge role in getting us into war in Iraq (just remember Wolf Blitzer taking us on the play by play through the “threat of WMD in Iraq,” and then through the Shock and Awe campaign), here they are now trumping up the peoples support to get out of there. I remember a few years ago when most people I talked to were at least sympathetic of us going to war in Iraq; they would get into arguments with me about it. If we were a better country we would not have gone into this illegitimate war in the beginning. A healthier media, more interested in spreading truth, than generating revenue, would have reminded us at the time that even if Iraq had WMD, and lots of them, we had no right to go to war with them. They would have told us the truth that the country was not all that bad off under Saddam. They would have told us how unwelcoming he was to terrorist groups, and how little interest he would have had in ever attacking America. We were Bushwhacked, sure, but we were also misled by a media who was blinded by the $$$ signs attached to the revenue a war could generate for them and their shareholders. But by the nature of their greed, they now have to give us what we want, more anti-war rhetoric, because we are tired of spending so much money on a losing battle, and lots of Paris Hilton, because we are stupid.
It is too bad we are going to end up leaving Iraq in such tatters. But if it does end up a terrorist strong hold, and as Bush puts it “a base out of which THEY will attack us,” who can we really blame but ourselves? We deserve it. After all, we declared war on a country which had never attacked us (bad form any way you look at it). It could be that some of our other far-less-than-innocent ignorances are contributing to our misbehavior. Learning from our mistakes could lead to recovery. It may be that the dumber we get, the closer we are to getting smart.
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