Maggie's Farm

Hot-button issues like immigration, ObamaCare, bailouts, taxation, national security, faith divide us mostly along what has been labeled conservative-liberal.

At root, however, the differing views are more rooted in who gives and who takes.

Our “betters” are largely insulated from the consequences of their views, catering to themselves and our “lessers.”  Then, there’s the “rest of us.”

The primary divide is between the rest of us who struggled, strived and gave versus those whose advantages parachuted them into powerful positions they abuse for their own wealth and to then take away the more meager advantages earned by others to give to the lessers who haven’t.

The rest of us favor immigration by those willing to work, but not to those who aren’t able or who just demand benefits.

The rest of us favor aiding the truly poor or disabled to adequate health care, but not to those who waste their money on frills and then demand providers to impoverish themselves and us not be allowed to make our own life decisions.

The rest of us favor business creating jobs and opportunities, but not lazy management and crazy schemes then feeding at the taxpayer trough.

The rest of us voluntarily pay our more than fair share, but not basic services being cut to enrich politicians and government workers who create more ways to tax in order to feather their own nests by creating more dependent lessers.

The rest of us support and serve in danger to preserve our freedoms and protect others’, but not to be frittered away through lack of priorities or will.

The rest of us thank G-d for our being and opportunities, but not to tolerate those who would deny us or others theirs.

The rest of us may become polarized but at root are not.  The rest of us just feel caught between those who consider themselves our betters, who perpetuate themselves by allying with the lessers without due claim upon us, whether at home or abroad.  These betters denigrate the legitimate concerns of the rest of us, but their scorn is hollow, ludicrous,  and, indeed, energizing.

Our parents and grandparents were great generations whom we identify with because they were the inspiration for the rest of us.  My baby-boomer peers have largely been the selfish punk generation of wastrels. Coming again, the generation of the “rest of us.”  Those who want to lead, who deserve leadership, are recognized as authentic in being of, by and for the rest of us.

Today, modern Israel’s 62^nd birthday, is a good time to ask the question, “What if there wasn’t an Israel, would things be different in the Middle East?”

The world would still be dealing with and suffering from MidEast extremists: First of the Soviet proxies, but without Israeli intelligence penetrating them and its military defeating them, exposing the Soviet Union as an unworthy sponsor; Then of the Islamist haters suppressing its peoples and fighting each other while harboring attackers of the West, but without Israel’s development and democracy serving as an unavoidable contrast to the potentials of freedom and sanity and its military and technology exposing the fundamental weakness of their self-created backwardness.

No one in the Middle East takes seriously that the Arab-Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli conflicts are the primary, secondary, tertiary or lesser cause of MidEast instability or its threats to the West.

Outside the Middle East, however, we have the core delusion among many of those raised on the puerile pap created by the Left that the modernity and successes of Western civilization somehow oppress the natural decency and advancement of Third World countries.

President Obama is the poster boy.  But he is not the cause.  He is merely the product.  He and those who follow him, thus, fall back on the false premise that Israel is the problem.

No, the problem is their core delusion that we can escape history by denying it, even reversing it, though that still would leave the real root cause of MidEast instability, regional petty satraps, backward hatefulness, and those outside powers – from the EU to Russia to China – who benefit from retaining rule or access to oil.

If the initial thrust of President Bush’s strategy of spurring democratization in the Middle East proved hollow, then our subsequent neutralization of Iraq’s WMD potential and funding of terrorists and our struggling effort to retrieve Afghanistan from being ruled by  as much a threat is at best a holding action.  We, as Secretary of Defense Gates admitted, lack a strategy toward even containing Iran, its imminent nuclear armaments, its support for those who kill our soldiers and Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s and their peoples.

The exaggeration by Saddam Hussein of his own WMDs was to counter Iran.  The US and initial allies entering Iraq missed the proper focus then as we do now.

Weakening Israel is not a strategy for peace in the Middle East but another abdication of what could reduce the dangers of the Middle East.  The US administration and apologists are blaming the “salamis” for the failure to ice the botulism.

President Obama and followers are not the root cause of Israel’s current dilemma.  They are the natural extension of the escapism that infects Western thought, that undermined President Bush’s brash, perhaps fruitless, but correct focus that peace can only come from shattering Middle East excuses and delusions and providing more fertile ground for the emergence of rulers more concerned with the betterment of their own peoples’ lots.

Israel shows the way, not the barrier. The barrier is the purposeful misfocus, the dangerous inanity, of the avoiders of truths. Isn't 62 years enough time to prove that if modern Israel didn't exist the catering to Middle East tyrants would still be the core cause of dire oppression there and threats to the West's security and prosperity?