Busy Week

Grief & Sorrow
What can you really say to the Japanese people that hasn't already been expressed by better voices than my own. I do admire their grace under fire though, and only hope that this disaster will soon turn to face the light of a quiet dawn.

Recriminations abound, but let's remember that we live on a rambunctious planet, one that is in constant flux and that we are merely guests. This is a moment for humility, not anger.

Libya Going to the Dark Side

And Ghadafi marches on while the world debates the price of oil -- not its conscience -- in this suddenly lop-sided conflict. It is a conundrum though. The knee-jerk side of American thought right now (myself probably included) is to take the bastard out. I'm reminded a bit of an old movie: The Wind & the Lion. The interesting part was the role (image) of a small band of American Marines caught between an inter-Arab conflict exasperated by a colonial powers dispute. Just like the conflict in Libya, a great deal was perceived to be at stake -- oil not being on the list. Of course, we also had Teddy Roosevelt as president in this flick, which isn't a commentary on our current leader, but rather an indication of how cautious American foreign policy has become. We don't really make decisions anymore, instead we debate the matter, check with our buddies, Congress, take a few polls, see what Rush Limbaugh has to say...meanwhile, everybody gets blown to bits and were off the hook. This isn't policy, it's a broken Ouija Board. Oh -- those Marines? Sided with the Arabs and killed a bunch of Germans. Because at that moment, it was the right thing to do.

It seems that we lost both our integrity and the definition of a 'friend' shortly after World War II. Two things appeared to have spawned this national confusion. The first was that war became obsolete -- at least as far as how we had defined it, or really, how we understood its purpose. Secondly, we embarked on the only option available to us, that being world competition via a 'Cold War' whereas territory, attrition and reparation was traded in for "our interests."

This is the point where we lost our integrity and subsequently, any perception of trust that might have been afforded in different times. We also began to get left behind because we no longer had anything other countries really needed -- at least nothing that was free of either a subtle extortion or an abundance of lip service. And pretty soon our track record in the developing world began to convince struggling democracies that it didn't pay to get too close to us. Our back could turn at any given moment and if some boil erupted on the landscape, these countries didn't have to look far for the source of the disease. Sadly, America has always had great social and democratic ideas (not ideals) but concurrently, some really bad manners.

So what to do in Libya? And Bahrain (currently facing an siege by the Saudi military)? And Yemen...and on and on? When do these 'interests' of ours, this material junk we cherish take a back seat to what we used to represent? Are we so trapped in consumption and global markets that we can no longer either define or comprehend the difference between right and wrong? Are we really that confused as a people, as a nation? As they like to say on the first day of rehab, "Just when is that moment of clarity going to show up? It needs to be soon because people are dying.