Wednesday, September 29, 2010

I want my country back

I posted this one on Facebook directly a while back. But it's still worth a look.

I want my country back; the cry has become by the Republican and conservative powerless.
Well, welcome to my world. It is time, perhaps now, for you to feel the pain that many, many others have been feeling for eight years.
I am not defending the current healthcare bill or the deficit spending going on in Washington D.C. right now. Both, quite frankly, horrify me.
We need some kind of healthcare INSURANCE reform, because, while our healthcare system is in some ways the envy of the world, too many do not have full access to it. There is no denying it.
The deficit? That is a discussion for another time, but it needs to be stopped.
But those on the right who are raising non-issues like the President’s birth certificate and “socialism” are crybabies. They lost an election, and now, suddenly, they care about deficit spending, when we built up a huge deficit in the preceding eight years, one that set record after record, without even taking the costs of the War on Terror into account.
You want your country back?
Well, I’ve wanted my country back for a while now, wanted it back since it became apparent that our leaders response to 9/11 was changing us into something we absolutely are not, something we have never been.
When I grew up there was something called the Soviet Union. Today’s children do not know about it, except as a historical fact.
It was a monolithic, oppressive nation/empire comprised of several communist/socialistic regimes that surrounded what we now call Russia. We were at war with Russia for almost 40 years. They called it a Cold War, but it got hot in some places.
We lived under a threat of nuclear annihilation my entire childhood. We developed the first atomic bombs, but after we “refined” that into the hydrogen bomb, with its megaton-possible explosive potential, the Soviets developed it too, in part because of stolen technology.
We thought we could die, any day. We thought that we would look up in the sky one day and we’d see not one, but hundreds of mushroom clouds. I grew up in New York City, and even at 14, I knew I was living in a first-strike target. There was a public bomb shelter in our apartment building’s basement with Civil Defense crackers by the box load.
Once Russia got the bomb, we had to build more bombs, and they had to build more bombs, and we had to build more bombs. It became an escalating cycle that threatened not our planet, but certainly human life as we know it on the planet.
It wasn’t pretty what we did, but through it all, we had what we all agreed was the moral high ground. We built those weapons to prevent their use against us.
We were the good guys.
Nuns in a parochial school taught me that we were the good guys. World War II was not as distant then as it is now. Korea was closer, and I remembered watching the TV news when Saigon fell.
We were the good guys. We went to Europe to free those conquered by the Nazis, putting the war in Europe at a higher priority than the war in the Pacific, even though we had been attacked by Japan. But we cleaned up the Pacific too. We went to South Korea to defend it from North Korean aggression. We went to South Vietnam to defend it against North Vietnamese insurgency.
Those explanations seem very simplistic to an older person who has read much deeper into what happened. North Korea, they now say, might never have invaded South Korea if the latter country hadn’t been left out of a speech listing who our best friends were. Still, that is the county I grew up believing in, the country I was taught to love, given good reasons to love.
And we were the good guys for another reason. Because we were actually good.
The Soviets were bad. Evil.
They put their own people in prison with show trials or no trials. They would go to other countries and pick people up, putting a black bag over their heads and kidnapping them, taking them to other countries in the Soviet bloc. People just disappeared in Russia, never to be heard from again. They kept gulags in Siberia where they exiled political opponents who were too high profile to be simply made to vanish.
They invaded other countries on pretextual reasons, or for no reason at all. They just wanted to be bigger. Hungary was one. They sent troops into Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia. Afghanistan was the most recent one when I was a young lad.
They killed innocent people. We still use Adolf Hitler, who killed 6 million Jews and perhaps 5 million others in death camps as the gold standard of evil. But Josef Stalin had a lot more time to do what Hitler did, and he was never directly opposed as Hitler was. He killed, they say, 17 million people.  Throw in a famine he helped make worse in Ukraine, it rises to 23 million.
And the other main thing the bad guys did that we didn’t do is torture.
We were attacked on 9/11 and while posturing a stance of strength throughout the prior presidential administration, our leaders have actually been acting out of pure terror.
When you abandon your principles and do things that you criticized the other guy for doing for years, that ranks as sheerest hypocrisy. We had a justified cause to go to war in Afghanistan. I might even say justification for going actually nuclear, the consequences be damned.
But we chose to divert to Iraq. I have interviewed a man who stormed the beach at Normandy more than once, and he has brought it up each time. He is against war. He was for the creation of the United Nations because the world absolutely needs an organization that is devoted to preventing war between the nation states of the world. He is scandalized by the war in Iraq.
We all know that our troops there have done incredibly brave things every day, have fought with distinction, valor and honor, but they shouldn’t have ever gone.
The country I grew up in was a country that defended the little guy, the little countries, from the big bad Soviet Bear, from the Nazis and Japanese imperialists.
We didn’t kidnap people. We didn’t take our own people and put them in prison camps without benefit of trial. We didn’t make people just disappear. We didn’t build concentration camps that people were never, ever going to leave from. We didn’t put black bags over people’s heads to take them or to mistreat them.
We did not, ever, torture them.
We weren’t the good guys just because we said we were. We were the good guys because we did the right thing, and while you could find examples of excesses in all our wars, those were exceptions to the norm.
But under the prior presidential administration, we did all those things.
To me, the most egregious sin isn’t actually the torture. I think that is the inevitable outcome when you first make a determination that the rules you hold will not apply anymore.
You know, I’d love to help you fight “socialism.” I won’t fight healthcare reform because we need the system fixed. But the bad parts of this proposal? Sure. I’ll be an ally in the fight for a sound fiscal policy, for budget restraint and against deficit spending.
But I won’t let you use all this vile language to do it.
You want your country back?
Go to the back of the line.  I’ve wanted my country back for eight years now.
I want us to be the good guys again.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

We need a new political party

I saw an item on the Huffington Post.com in which former President Bill Clinton says the "new GOP" is making George W. Bush look like a "liberal."
I also saw a recent item there where Clinton "fired back" at Rachel Maddow, who said that Bill Clinton was one of the most successful Republican presidents ever.
I think Clinton might be referring to the Tea Party candidates who are now winning primaries all over the country. Now, the strength of this movement will be shown in the November General Election.
Is the Tea Party shifting the balance of the national debate? Or is it just fracturing the Republican Party? We can't know until the party shows its teeth against the entire electorate in a county or a state. In states where the traditional Republican voters outnumber the traditional Democrats, the Tea Party might have some strength.
In most states, the electorate is usually more evenly divided. Some Republicans are going to stay away from the polls because they don't agree with the extremes the Tea Party represents. So the Tea Party's success in primaries might ultimately help the Democratic Party.
And as for what Maddow said about Clinton, I find that amusing. He was elected because he was a "new" more moderate Democrat. He tried to swing left in his early first term, but the GOP Revolution of 1994 put an end to that. He then began to work with a hostile Congress and got a lot farther by compromising than he did by running and governing from the left.
I understand why he objected to being called Republican. But I think somewhere in the midst of these two stories, there lies the future of the United States.
If there was a political party that was immune to the extremes on both the right and the left, a true centrist political party, this country could work a lot better.
That's what we needs. Most of the people in this country agree on most things. They really do. But the moderate majority is the nice, peaceful folk who live on a fertile plain in between opposing armies.  When those armies want to duke it out, they do it on our land, leaving spoiled earth behind. They divide most of us, asking us to give up on most of the things we think important because we are told THIS one issue is more important than THAT other.
I turned 18 in 1984 and got to vote for president. I think I voted for Ronald Reagan.
Four years later, my choices were George Herbert Walker Bush and Michael Dukakis. I pencilled in a communist candidate, I think, because I knew Dukakis couldn't lead and Bush was stained by the corruption in Ronald Reagan's White House. Iran-Contra, the S&L crisis. It was too much to vote for four more years of that, even though the original George H.W. Bush was more of a moderate than anyone seems to remember. (Voodoo economics.)
I've flipped back and forth. I actually voted for Mark Sanford as governor of South Carolina, for his first term. But not for his second term.
I couldn't put on any particular hat for this election. Obama talked pretty but was being pulled by the extremes. At the same time, he had not done anything of note as a state senator or as a U.S. Senator in the two years of his office he spent before actually turning his attention to running.
I might have voted for the libertarian this time around. I can't remember.
Twice now I've vote in such a way that my ballot might be described as "sending a message."
Doesn't work.
This country needs to be put in the hands of the moderates for a while.We need a moderate political party.
Any takers?

P.S, There were two columns in The Charlotte Observer op-ed today. Not quite a call for a moderate political party. But definitely cries about the extreme voices on each side causing problems.
The GOP misreads American History by David Brooks is one.

We've let the verbal bombers hijack our national discourse by Leonard Pitts is the other.