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.