After I avoided watching that Zany new program, ‘Homeland’ on TV today, I
told Mary:
“Someday when we as a nation are down and out and struggling
for a bit of understanding and mercy our new overlords will pull out a show
like Homeland and say, “this is when you had a chance to change things.”
The things that we do, and the attitudes we take while doing
them, will all be used against us on the way down, and everyone goes down
eventually. The barbarians will have
their scribes repeat our own words to us and then say them out loud to our
children as they do the things to us that we have done to them.
We are so powerful that we cannot see anything from anyone else’s
point of view, and if we could, it would hold no value to us. Just as we now think that one American life is worth 60 Iraqis, our eventual fall will reflect a different changing
math game of attitudes that our educational system has ill prepared us for. We
will also become confused because all the words coming out of their mouths will
be harsh and foreign because we never thought to learn any of it other than, 'How much for the woman?'
We don’t respect other cultures – we are powerful and just
run other cultures over with our proxies and corporations. We make Disney
versions of all we touch, we cheapen their religions and mores, and when that stops
working, we piss on them from the plane’s door as we’re taking off. Everything
we touch gets remade in our image and sold back for profit that we then take
home with us to but cool stuff.
We talk about American exceptionalism, and the innate
goodness of our system of government and I think that’s about right and true, but
what I think isn’t the point. I also think we have every right and obligation
to protect ourselves from others that would harm us, but maybe so do they. I
just think that we are being short sided in not seeing the fact that billions
of people don’t see things the same way as we do, and that this way of thinking
will do us harm in the long run, however long that is.
What we do to others, others will do to us – just as soon as
they can.
Although it occurs to me that maybe I have this all wrong,
that maybe we understand them too well. Perhaps if we take our foot off their
necks for even a minute to try to understand what they are saying they would
kill us all. Maybe our government isn’t lying to us and the trillions of dollars
we spend to defend ourselves are well spent and perhaps they are right that it is really not
even enough? Maybe the government’s credibility problem comes from the left
wing radical truths of the paid fact finders and not from the repeated accounts
of history?
I just think we should but ourselves in other people’s shoes
before we fuck with them. It’s called empathy – look it up, it might come in
handy if we lose or come in second place.
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