Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Bullying, Barbarism, and Belligerence

The news is really getting hard to read. I think it's becoming more difficult, because it is not easy to discern the extremists from the liberators, or their barbarians from our criminals, or threats from ultimatums.
I just read that America has made a very forceful presence off the coast of Iran to do "warship testing." As so many have "predicted" the first week of April or the middle of April for the war with Iran, I'm thinking this bully method is going to "accidently" start the whole mess and then say it was only an accident. Considering how volatile things are right now, war tests and games that close to the trouble is nothing but trouble. G.W. is making me think of the thing kids do fighting in the back seat with their finger just an inch out of a sibling's face, all the while saying "I'm not touching her!" Then there's a bump and somebody's got somebody else's finger up their nose and the fight and the crying is ON! Then the child whom I perceived to be the perpetrator of that situation then becomes the self-proclaimed helpless "victim." It appears that G.W. is attempting to have happen. Somehow, in the perception of an experienced mom, I see the American administration and the Iranian administration at the same juncture, except at global proportion.
And our news is horrendous, right here at home. I realize that reading about or hearing about innocent people being beheaded in another land is horrifying, but so is reading about a guy in Texas that killed his ex-girlfriend, then dismembered her, then cremated her body parts on a barbeque grill. And the woman in Georgia that was sentenced to yet another life sentence for killing her boyfriend the same way she killed her husband a few years ago. Perhaps Americans don't realize this, but our headlines make the foreign papers. I remember hearing about the reactions of the man that killed all of his daughters because he didn't want them to grow up and dishonor the family. I can't remember what country he was in, I think maybe Pakistan. What he did was horrible, and certainly I don't understand how he rationalized, that by murder, he was protecting the family honor. But then I don't understand the logic of the Georgia couple that "disciplined" their son to death; or the Ohio couple that confined their young son in a closet, to go to a "family reunion" in Kentucky and came home to find him dead, so they also attempted to cremate his body, but only after making a false report of a missing child.
We are not the world's monitor. We are not the best example of civility and we do not have half the history of the countries that we are telling what to do. We really are looking just pretty belligerent in our aggression and demands, while we are doing the same and worse than those we are attempting to correct. We have nuclear power and we've declared war on a country that didn't attack us and was not an imminent threat. What would we do if the tables suddenly turned? What if other nations decided we needed to be corrected and curtailed? I dare say the Patriots would react as strongly as Iraqi insurgents. Now, let's think this over. Do we really think we will have the right to claim innocence with Iran and deny provocation? Do we truly believe the world should behave as we do? There are more grisly bizarre murders in America in a month, than reported beheadings in Iraq. And I dare say, there would have been no Americans decapitated in Iraq, had we not started the war there.
He who gets mixed up in a fight which is not his business, is like one who takes a dog by the ears while it is going by.

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