Maggie's Farm

Get well soon. It passes. I found that looking at great art in those image banks online helped when I was so sick this weekend...a fever loosens one's associations and one sees new things in old favorite pictures and sculptures!

Bush's speech: Hubby asking my opinion while I packed everybody's lunches. Me snappishly intoning: we have to stop a bloodbath. The resrt of the world is uncivilized and will butcher each other and as the greatest power on earth we have to keep them from it. Like the Brits' thankless role in Northern Ireland, trying to stop the warring factions from killing each other. If we don't put ourselves in harms's way trying to keep the peace, more civilians will die. Husband snarling: Bah, it''s all about the oil. The Shites have the oil, the Sunnis want it, why should we defend Saddam's Sunnis...

I beat a hasty retreat with the kids, unable to answer that.

Retreated to get the munchkin to school on time, and me to the office on time, Habu. Hubby is cynical, and my off the cuff remarks were too simplistic. I don't disagree with you, entirely. I was better able to contemplate the prospect of people in other countries killing each other in their tribal/religious disputes before I became a mom. Guess all those hormones and years of adjudicating sibling disputes addled the old brain. It's satisfying as well as right to get fighting people to get along instead of killing each other. Not sure what we should do in Iraq, but don't think Americans are at their best as isolationists any more than as extreme policemen. If the UN had ever been any good, it would have been ideal to have a kind of Jedi Knights of the Universe who could have gone around and intimidated warring tribal factions around the globe and helped resolve their disputes.

Yes, and beggars would ride....

Habu and Mom2,

I am not a pacifist and I was not urging a group hug. I'm too cranky a person to ever pretend to do that...I was merely saying that there are times when the greatest power on this earth has a duty to intervene when the murderers on the planet are on the rampage ...My relatives fought Hitler and the Japs, and in Korea, etc. as I'm sure yours did also. We are probably all equally proud of them. Or do you think we should have stayed home and let the Axis and later the Communists butcher whomever they pleased and take over the world?

In my youth, I worked in the inner city with a mix of kids some of whom were junior hoodlums, others who were their victims, and I frequently had to intervene to restore peace, punish malefactors, and generally law down the law. If adults don't set the ground rules you get Lord of the Flies. There were times when, in exhaustion, I would exclaim "What's wrong with these people...they are completely uncivilized.." But one stayed and tried to show a better way.

Also, to the mom who said that war is a regrettable but natural state of man, I wonder if you have always lived safely in the good old US of A that is only invaded by illegals, never by anybody with guns, bombs and storm troopers? I grew up in countries with bombed out buildings, trigger happy young soldiers on corners with automatic weapons, thuggish police hauling off people to torture and death without trial, and constant terrorist bomb attacks. We mourned our dead and swiftly punished the perps without the pathetic whining that went on in this country after 9/11. Everybody I grew up with had relatives who had fled invasion or lived uneasily with an occupation or tried to lay low under tyranny or survived concentration camps and for whom war meant terror, loss of family, livelihood, hope and all that people had worked for over generations. They did not think there was anything natural about war.

However, nor did they think that if you just ignore bad guys they will go away. Comes a time when you have to play policeman to avert future bloodshed. Our President knows this, even if all of us do not agree with him all of the time.

Playground fights, of the type we all resolved disputes with in youth, pre PC nonsense, are one thing. As others in the blog have observed, they often taught bullies a lesson, settled things. Even now, I never intervene in children's fights unless weapons are being used, a group is ganging up on one, or someone is being dangerously hurt. But to idly do nothing while whole groups of people are threatened by others with weapons is immoral.

I think the UN is a frigging disaster, but I would rather that every nation in the world contributed a few people to some kind of global peacekeeping force than that the full burden fell on us Americans. You cannot simply avert your gaze or perhaps hope that all those savages will kill each other off and not threaten you. To the extent that people in the developing world are allowed to wage war within or between their countries, they will eventually threaten us. Even if you didn't want to stop the wars on humanitarian grounds, you might consider that people who get used to using weapons on each other may turn them on you next.

But the UN has failed, and I am no fan of how it has panned out. We tried it, it didn't work. That does not mean we can just bunker in and wait to negotiate with the victors of the world's increasingly bloody internecine struggles.

John Donne reminded us that no man is an island...

Mom 2 - I was saying that just because war and violence are part of human experience does not mean that we should callously stand by and do nothing while thugs and murderers attack people. I don't think Jesus called us to show compassion only to our own tribe.
I most certainly do not renounce strong and violent counter measures when necessary. My beef is with people who think that non-Westerners or non-Christians do not deserve our compassion and our aid when necessary. He died for all of us, not just gun-toting North Americans.

Habu relax, this crank and nag will not bother you any more. Go happily back to your beer and your porn and polishing your rifle. It takes all sorts. Where I come from, we enjoy differences of opinion and learn from them.