Sycorah: just because I don't make the decisions you'd want me to, doesn't mean at all that i don't respect your views, what you'd decide to do...it doesnt mean i dont love you
Sycorah: instead it means i know you care, i care back, but i'm just myself and need to evaluate things myself
Sycorah: and, hopefully, someone would love me more for the decisions I make because those decisions make up a part of who I am
reMiked412: yeah.
Sycorah: so, yes...what you were saying. If i simply made decisions based on what you'd want me to do, then I wouldn't be an independent person that you'd be caring about
reMiked412: hehe
Sycorah: I'd kind of be a puppet :-/
reMiked412: yeah.
reMiked412: you're right
Sycorah: maybe
Sycorah: or maybe we're just both a little right
reMiked412: isn't that usually the way it is?
reMiked412: *sighs*
reMiked412: if I care about you, of course I want to see you make wise, sound choices. but mostly, what I want to see is you making choices; growing from them, becoming the woman that you were meant to be.
reMiked412: and maybe someday your choices will bring us apart; there will be sadness, if that happens, but sadness isn't the same as joylessness
reMiked412: there will always be joy in your existence
reMiked412: and in the friendship we have now, even if it doesn't end up lasting.
I think what I’ve gained an appreciation for, more than anything else over these past years, is how profoundly broken our world is. I’ve seen and thought about the Rwandan genocide, I remember watching the second plane hit the WTC live, I’ve studied the Holocaust and seen all kinds of anger and hate spewing from everyone, everywhere.
I know how broken the world is.
And I hate to say it, but what’s influenced me really hasn’t been any of those things at all. It’s the old cliché – a death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic. I hate to say it, but it’s true. The brokenness of this world hits me most when I think about all the people I’ve lost over the years. Not to death, just to… the world.
I’ve seen friends turn to drugs, alcohol, boys, girls, anything to satisfy their emptiness. I’ve seen people yell, scream, cry, hate, mourn. And you know what keeps popping into my head every time I see another friend pulled in by the gravity of our sinful world?
“If only.”
If only I’d been there. If only I had been there the night he decided to sleep with her.
I had a friend sleep with a girl one night, ten minutes after I’d decided to say goodbye to them to go finish off my term paper.
If only I’d cared more.
I’ve often felt awkward around one of my friends – she lost both her parents to death within about six months – wasn’t sure how to best reach out to her, so I didn't. Later, she turned to drugs and the rave scene. What if I’d handled that differently?
I had a friend begin spending time again with an abusive ex-boyfriend. I found out later that even as we'd been growing closer, she’d also been going to see a counselor because her self-esteem had crashed, and hit rock bottom. I’d had no idea that as I was opening my life up to her, she’d felt uncomfortable sharing the most important part of her life with me.
I had an anorexic friend and I didn’t even know it. I cancelled a dinner appointment with a friend because schoolwork was too intense; she went to a party instead that night and got raped there.
Every time someone I care about gets hurt, the only question left – in my heart, on my mind, and screaming from the tip of my tongue – is What if?
What if I’d cared more? Had taken more time? Had listened more graciously, more closely? Had fought harder to let them know they were better than this?
Would the world have been a better place if only I’d taken more action?
That’s why Neville Chamberlain is the character that’s always most fascinated me in history. What was his motivation in 1937 when he tried to appease Hitler? I’m sure he wasn’t an evil man; he wanted to save lives, to keep things peaceful; not to be remembered as a warmonger and troublemaker. It was all he could do to keep hawks like Winston Churchill under control.
And for a brief moment, I melt thinking about him, because I know just how he felt then. Well, I suppose I don’t know for sure, but I can hypothesize, and I can empathize with my hypothesis. And I think to myself that he was a good man trapped in a hard place.
“It is easy for those who live in free nations to demand courage of those who don’t,” someone once said. I don’t know who it is, but I think he/she was right. (Likely to be an old, dead white man.)
And then the next example that comes to mind is Adolf Eichmann (spelling?), from “The Banality of Evil”. He was a good man, too, trapped in harder circumstances. Traffick human beings for the Nazis, or die with them. So he made the rational choice, and went along with the program. He then went home to his family, where he was providing for them, and when Nuremburg came along, he impressed his interviewers with his politeness, sense of morality, and… well, boring-ness. Hollywood always imagines the villains to be in dark suits of armor, or with interesting foreign accents and some kind of grandiose egos and aspirations. But Eichmann sat there, answered questions honestly, and impressed all with how profoundly un-dramatic he was.
And he was profoundly, incredibly, and wholly evil, because he had stood back and tacitly consented to a system of mass execution and wholesale slaughter.
And then I think of Rwanda, where the UN prevented anybody from taking action back in 1993, actually pulling out its peacekeeping force. I think of Iraq in 1991, where the international community withdrew, leaving the insurgents to fight and die after we lied to them, promising aid. I think of Munich again, in 1937, where the world’s last best chance to stop world war and Holocaust was surrendered.
And I think to myself, I know how these people felt. I know what it’s like to be too busy, to not want to put your own reputation on the line, to not want to take these risks.
I know what it’s like to be a coward.
It doesn’t feel like that when I’m making the decisions.
Things will turn out fine without me. Let someone else take the slack, take the blame. I couldn’t really do anything, anyway. It’s not fear; it’s excuses.
This is none of my business; I’d just be intruding into a person’s life. What if it backfires? Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. And then I start moralizing, to try to justify my behavior. And then I lose a friend, and I remember that I could’ve done something and that I did nothing. And then all my excuses do nothing to assuage the guilt.
I made myself a pledge, at the end of last year. I pledged to myself, to my friends, and to my fellowship that I would never hide. I promised that I would never run away; that I would never lie; and above all, that I would never stop caring.
That’s why I want history books in Jordan twenty years from now to be different than they are today. I want it to say that their new democracy is rough but flourishing, as best as they can tell; that they are poor but their economy is growing.
I want Syrian bars to be full of talk about the next election; I want Iranian churches decrying the latest tax cut by their government. I want the Palestinian newspapers to disagree about their President’s legislative plan; I want Saudi Arabian pollsters going door to door. I want Jordanian flag-burners to sue for the right to burn their flag, and I want the courts to give them a fair hearing. I want medical care opened up to all the people who have lost a limb or been raped under their government’s laws. I see all these things in this broken world and I fume and I mourn and I remember all the times I could’ve done something but I didn’t.
These are hopes and dreams that everybody has, I hope.
But I also understand that sitting back and letting this broken world run its course is never going to accomplish any of these dreams.
Iraq is a particularly telling story. We installed Saddam Hussein. We gave him weapons of mass destruction. We sent him off to war against Iran and armed him in the process. Of course, we armed Iran in the process, too. In the 1980s, he used our weapons to kill hundreds of thousands of his own citizens. In 1992, he invaded Kuwait, under the impression – correct or not – that he’d gotten permission from us to do so. When we repelled him, we stopped at his borders. We protected our oil ally and proceeded to ignore a country where the people were suffering in much worse conditions. Worse, we then imposed UN sanctions, which robbed the Iraqis of food and medicine. The corrupt oil-for-food program lined the pockets of UN and Iraqi officials while accomplishing nothing for the nation. In late 1992, the US promised rebel forces that we would support them in civil war, financially if not militarily. They held up their end of the bargain, and we hung them out to dry. Both in fighting and in retaliation, tens if not hundreds of thousands of them died.
Never did we once ask ourselves what the Iraqi people needed, or wanted, or what we owed them. We left them to be someone else’s problem. We made moralistic excuses about blood and oil, and we told ourselves that everything was going to be okay, that we didn’t have responsibility in the region and that nation-building wasn’t practical, ignoring half of historical precedent.
People fought and died and were raped and murdered and tortured and oppressed, and we simply didn’t care.
I don’t blame us. I blame me, for doing the same thing in my friends’ lives.
But no more.
I don’t believe this war was for oil as money for some fairly simple reasons that have to do with the economic nature of monopoly: to put it shortly, the more oil sources we have, the less tightly Halliburton etc. can control them. The less control/more supply there is, the more profits drop (simple law of supply and demand).
I do sometimes believe that this war was about oil as a resource, but I think we have to be careful about condemning that. Is it really wise to allow a well-armed, anti-civilization dictator to sit on the world’s second-largest supply of the world’s most important resource? Its importance is not merely to line the pockets of the rich; oil heats homes, produces everything from plastics to transporting food; it powers militaries and protects the ability of normal Americans to drive to work in the morning. Our oil suppliers can essentially hold us hostage.
Tell me, who suffers more under high gas prices? Poor or rich Americans? Rich people are more likely to own stocks in energy companies, and they are less likely to feel the hit anyway.
Importantly, I would contend that people like Saudi Arabians suffer thanks to their country’s monopoly on oil. It cripples the US’s ability to pressure the government to improve its atrocious human rights record; they supply us with the only important resource, and so they can control us. We have no power over them so long as they are our monopoly, and that has crippled our efforts to persuade them to change. That’s sparked terrorism, that’s sparked misery, that’s sparked hatred and rage and anything. If Iraq’s oil wells are going again, then perhaps we can finally demand change in Saudi Arabia.
More importantly, though, I want to rewrite the region. Is that the same motivation as the Bush team? I believe it is, but let’s pretend that it isn’t.
If you want something badly enough, and somebody else wants the same thing for different reasons – then what? Then you have to decide whether or not you can agree on tactics and plan of action.
I don’t mean to defend everything about the war. Prison abuses are ridiculously unacceptable. The violence hasn’t been handled well. Disbanding the Iraqi army was stupid. On and on, so on and so forth.
But I won’t oppose my country for taking action; I won’t oppose my country for finally caring about the rest of the world. It is
not a matter of patriotism or faith. It is a matter of the fact that I am tired of sitting around and hoping everything turns out for the best. I am tired of our moral complicity when we turn around and ignore genocide and crimes against humanity. If we must act unilaterally, then we must; our world’s multilateral arena has a horrible record when it comes to caring enough to take risks.
I am tired of our inaction, and while I quibble over the details, I am proud of a man who can lead our country into trying to impact the world despite the difficulties involved.
Neville Chamberlain had difficulties. Adolf Eichmann’s very life was threatened. But I hold them accountable for the great crimes they committed, and if the President has had to endure slander and criticism for the sake of his convictions, then I won’t join those who deride him.
This world needs to be impacted, and it is our charge to do everything we can to care about people – the people that God loves so much. Is that our motivation for entering the war? I firmly believe that that’s a major part of it.
Thomas Sowell explains it well:
“Those who do not understand what an on-going price has to be paid continuously to remain free are not only quick to balk at any costs that they have to pay or any restrictions they have to endure, they are also quick to attribute cheap motives to those who have the responsibility to make the hard decisions required to protect us from the dangers that the blind refuse to acknowledge.”
I won’t turn my back any longer. “Who made us the policemen of the world?” The fact that we are here means we have obligations to others here; our capability to act gives us the responsibility to act; and the fact that fellow human beings are suffering means we must act with all haste to do our best for them.
I believe that the use of force is sometimes justified to see that happen. I’m tired of our isolationism telling people that our world is okay; our inaction letting people know that we won’t stop human rights abuses; our tolerance for injustice becoming unjust in and of itself.
Perhaps we’re doing things wrong. But ideologically, I believe in this war. I believe in acting for change using every tool at our disposal, and when one tool fails, we step up to the next one. When medicine fails, step to a stronger medicine. When the stronger medicine fails, step up to surgery. If surgery fails entirely, amputate if you must. Do anything you can to save the patients’ life.
Lives are at stake here, and I believe in this war.
I don’t think it’s an issue of cowardice. I think it’s an issue of catching good people and trapping them in bad situations; I’m prepared to believe in the use of force to make the world a better place. To my mind, the greatest sin the world has committed throughout history is inaction: far more people have stood by and watched atrocities than actually committed them. When we are now in a position to change things, I won’t condemn people who try. I will criticize, and debate, and we’ll struggle over nuances, but ideologically – I believe in change. I believe that change is so crucial that if all else fails, we must use force.
I want to see this world rewritten.
