Surge on Mexico

Lately we've been hearing from the administration about how the Surge in Iraq worked. They say it kept violence down in the areas it was active, but others point out that it exposed the weaknesses of the Iraqi government and showed that they are not making progress towards self-rule. The surge originally was supposed to buy the government time to get organized and get control so we would not be the ones providing all the security for the country.

I heard an argument for staying in Iraq voiced as, "Do you want $4 per gallon Gasoline? We can't pull out!" Oil production in Iraq hasn't been that great lately, anyway. If it was, we would expect them to pay for their own defense. I believe that our presence and the disruption of being invaded and occupied is part of what helps keep prices high, as well as promoting instability in the region. To say that we are there to provide stability seems quite a stretch to me. The problem with Iraq maturing to the point of self-government is that after the Saddam years, there is no one of any power or capability left to govern. Saddam made sure that anyone of any ability was "suppressed" (usually killed, but also exiled). Today, corruption and mismanagement is the rule. To expect a leader with a stabilizing influence that is not just trying to enrich himself or promote his own agenda is probably hoping for too much.

As I was thinking about all these issues with Iraq, it occurred to me that much of the same can be said about Mexico.

The problems with Mexico are similar in that corruption and mismanagement is causing a poor economy. In Mexico's case, the lack of opportunity this creates causes people to migrate north in search of better opportunities. Immigration resulting from a corrupt system is thought by many to be a big problem, a threat to us. So Mexican corruption causes us security concerns.

Therefore, we are equally justified in invading Mexico. We can liberate them from their crappy government and fix their dysfunctional system and make them more prosperous and less of a threat to us here. As they say about Iraq, we have to take care of their problem there so they won't follow us home. I believe an invasion and surge into Mexico is a valid response to this international crisis.

Mexico's oil wealth is an added bonus. The revenues from oil will make the war fund itself. The Mexican people are so downtrodden, they will surely hail us as liberators. As soon as a free democratic government can be put into power, we can leave them as a strong and stable ally.

Of course that's absurd. However, the line of reasoning is very similar to what we have been told about Iraq. You can hear the steady drumbeat of concerns about immigration being repeated by the same types of people that thought the Iraq War was and is a good idea, so it's not that crazy to expect the propaganda on immigration to morph into more extreme solutions and more intense rhetoric. Just brace yourself for more lunacy, that's all I'm saying.

Many decried the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes on countries as a horrible idea. Bad governments are allowed to continue all the time all over the world. When is it right or when do we have an obligation to go in and take over? If a country is exterminating a minority or can't provide for their people, is that enough to take over? We can't afford to run around the world trying to right all the wrongs, but at what point do we pass some threshold where it starts to seem like the right thing to do? And why can we not, as Americans, come anywhere close to consensus on this issue?

Temporal Binocular vision

My wife was telling me about something that she read in the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. The assertion was that Middle-easterners are focused on history and Americans are focused on the future. My wife believes \that history should play a part in the decisions we make, and that those decisions are for what will happen in the future.

I thought about what she said about history and future, east and west, Muslim and Christian. I believe that Science Fiction has always appealed to me because it is a way of hoping for a better future (and sometimes showing a worse future to avoid). I think in some ways, it is my theology.

The problem is that either option, a person that only looks to the past, or a person that only looks to the future is like someone with only one eye. Using both eyes, you have binocular vision and you can focus on something and take in it's depth (actually, you have depth perception with binocular vision, so the analogy comes close).

New technology is a double edged sword. If you charge toward the future with a new innovation you have to keep in mind the effects. If you do not have a good idea of what happened up to now, or what usually happens when someone makes a similar change, you can have unintended consequences. Ignoring the past can cause problems, either with the technology itself or with society's resistance to change.

Only through being grounded in the past can you learn from it and move confidently into the future. This isn't just introducing technology, but in politics and diplomacy, too. Look at Iraq for instance. If we paid the slightest attention to Viet Nam, we would have known that it was not going to be easy, but instead, we just looked at securing oil for now. Sometimes politics are short sighted.

The problem with many people that are focusing on the future is that they are focusing on the future of next month or next year, and not 5, 10, 50, or 100 years from now. In a way, it's not even fair to say that they are looking toward the future, they are looking toward their immediate short term needs. This country used to do things like buy the Louisiana purchase because they knew there would be a time when it would make sense to control all the land between the seas, this during a time when a trip of 100 miles could be a week long ordeal, and there wasn't even a way to get across the country yet. That's foresight and vision. What we do now that passes for thinking about the future is the equivalent of wondering what's for lunch.

We're getting a little better with science in analyzing long term impacts of current decisions. Climate change science is helping to focus scientific thinking in this respect. Evolution, Geology, and Astrophysics all teach us to think about things in the long term. In science, it's easier to predict things. Certain principles can be studied and replicated, most fields of study have similar patterns that can be expected.

This vein of thought when focused on politics is not very satisfying. Politicians are not rewarded for looking at the long view. The current news cycle is the predominant focus, and the 2 year election cycle prevents anyone from thinking beyond the immediate future. True leaders had a sense of the length of history and their place in it. Many people do not realize that Abraham Lincoln was horribly unpopular in his time, but his steadfast focus on mending the Union saw him through some terrible times and kept him working through all the setbacks until he succeeded. Now he is considered the best President we have ever had. John Kennedy put us on the moon, in a time scale that was beyond what he could have hoped to still be President, if he had lived and been re-elected. We need this kind of leadership today when we look at the way we will use energy and what we will do with our nation's debt in the future. Because one thing is for sure about the future, stick around long enough, and it will come to pass.

Who's in Control

I realize that inspiration for some ideas don't always seem related, so bear with me here. I was listening to the Savage Love podcast, an online broadcast of a sex advice column by Dan Savage. Savage Love is the name of his popular newspaper based advice column that has been around for years, usually in some little local newspaper you find in a rack next to the gum machines in your favorite Bar & Grill.

What I heard in passing in the middle of a explanation was a bit of a revelation. The idea resonated with me and later evolved into a different train of thought. Dan was saying, "This is about control and dominance, so much of sex really is, isn't it? ...humans are all about domination and control. Human society is all about domination and control, why shouldn't human sexuality [also be about domination and control]...." He mentioned marking your territory, taking possession, submitting to someone else's authority, and demonstrating control over others. The context here was sexuality, and Dan Savage didn't dive into the way that this mirrors society as a whole or human traits in non-sexual situations, but you could immediately see the connection.

Later, on a long road trip, my wife and I were talking about how parents try to control their children. I told her that I thought that parental control was only an illusion. You can try to shape your children's behavior, but you can't control their thoughts and desires. You can exert influence, and you can modify behavior through punishments and rewards, but you can't change what they think or what they want to do. We acknowledge that people grow up and are given their own freedom and independence gradually over time, but what many parents don't recognize is that their children have already developed their own way of doing things and thinking long before the parent finally realizes this. We also discussed abuse (parental and spousal), which is a sick twist on control, but that is another subject.

Human society is all about control.

My wife recently graduated from nursing school and started working at a university (teaching) hospital. Before graduation, she was required to shadow a working nurse. She was assigned to a hospital in a system in our city has struggled to maintain profitability. Their hospitals have a reputation as horrible places to work. The atmosphere is bullying, and management never offers the carrot, but is always quick to use the stick - or maybe the sledge hammer. This was a health care system being run primarily as a business, and failing miserably.

While there, basically as an unpaid intern, they started bullying her to come to work for them. This period, just prior to graduation, is when most of my wife's class was busy searching for a job, sharing their experiences with each other. My wife was certain of one thing, she did not want to work for this hospital. It wasn't just that the atmosphere was dismal, it was also that the pay and benefits were nowhere near as good as other hospitals, and the workload was higher. Things kept getting creepier. Managers would "announce" to groups in front of my wife that she was going to work for them, when she wasn't. She finally had it out with the HR manager, when he wouldn't leave her alone. She listed all the better benefits with the hospital she was going to work for. He remained unconvinced, which was his own fatal flaw. If he couldn't see the problem, how could he hope to correct it?

I told her that it was all about control. They mistook the temporary control they had over her during the intership as the same complete control they thought they had over their own employees. They thought that they could just dictate to her to take a job with them because she was assigned to go there like she was working for them. That's the way they treat their employees, so why should they treat her any differently? They were so lost in their warped mindset of controlling others that they didn't understand why she didn't do what they told her to do with her life.

Although she is working for an educational hospital now, and she doesn't get bullied, it is still all about control. This is a different type of control. The school/hospital tries to teach their nurses everything that they will need to know, so that they will understand the best way to do things. This is a more subtle kind of control. They seek to control the way people think through their influence. Given enough free access to information, they trust that people will learn the truth. Understanding should make employees do what is right without being told every step and it will also make them better employees. This is a better type of control, one that recognizes that the person being controlled must ultimately come to the same conclusions themselves and agree that their duties are the best course of action.

And I think this speaks to the great divide in our country right now. I believe the blue/red, republican/democrat, or conservative/liberal debate is also one of freedom versus control. Look at what conservatives attack nowadays. "Liberal" professors on campuses trying to subvert young people's minds. "Liberal" media trying to bring down the conservatives. Attack conservatives are people that are trying desperately to maintain the control of the worst aspects of capitalism in our society.

Capitalism in it's pure form means everyone is voting with their pocketbooks, and only economically viable ideas survive the Darwinism of the marketplace. But excesses and breakdowns in our form of capitalism make it easy for people with lots of money to exert too much control over government and society. In an overly controlled workplace, you see this with a tough profit minded boss trying to dictate what all the employees say and how they act. In our society, you see big companies trying to bend government to their will, restricting regulation and lowering taxes. They don't want any government control of business's behavior. All the while they demand government supports them handsomely with tax breaks and subsidies. We have anything but a pure form of capitalism when you consider that everything goes easily in favor of those that already have the overwhelming majority of the capital. They usually get the best government money can buy.

So the people that support this system (most notably those that benefit handsomely from it) would like everyone to believe that taxes are always bad, regulation is crippling society, our education system is trying to imprint a liberal way of thinking on our youth, and the media is actively against everything they stand for. It's all about control. If you try to impose any kind of control over them, taxes or regulations, for example, they scream bloody murder. If you try to let people explore the truth about the world, and they read up or educate themselves and then learn that things aren't that great, they get really angry. They feel themselves losing the control that they are seeking to impose on society.

My wife summed this up quite simply: one seeks to keep you down, the other seeks to lift you up.

This reminds me of several parallels. Remember how the Soviet Union sought to control their population through oppression, fear, misinformation, and propaganda? In the end it didn't work. Religions don't want you to think too hard about or question what they say, they want you to blindly believe in their gospel so they will continue to have control over you. And look at the way that the interpretation of Islam is used control women in Muslim countries. The common thread here is that people with free will are able to learn the truth. They will then act from the lessons learned and take control of their own lives. This will remove the illusion of control from oppressive governmental, business, and religious leaders. Those that think they are in control now stand to lose everything they care about. Desperate people will say anything to stop from losing that control.

Political Abyss

I get more irritated and depressed every 4 years when the election cycle climaxes. Politics and politicians and watching what they do to get elected makes me sick.

Who gets elected? The person with the most money. Who gets the most money? The candidate that convinces the corporate bigwigs to donate the most money. How do you shake the corporate money tree? That's the question. Everyone says that they wouldn't be throwing that much money around if they weren't getting something for it.

How do you spend this money to maximum effect? Lies and smear seem to always work pretty well. When you're in the primaries, you veer to the far extreme of your party and you pick up the hard core issue voters that are involved in voting only because they are overzealous about their own pet issue. Then, in the general election, you veer toward the center and try to pick up the barely interested people that were leaning toward the other party.

Advisers tell the candidate what to say, which often times has nothing to do with what they actually intend to do once elected. "Third parties", supposedly not connected to, or under the control of a candidate, dig up dirt or manufacture stories to prove that only a mental deficient or a someone that was totally deluding themselves would ever consider voting for that scumbag on the other side.

The average concerned citizen holds their nose and picks the lesser of two evils and prays that the country doesn't go down the tubes. Over half the eligible voters stay home and the pretty looking, pretty talking, moderately intelligent candidate that is only talented at pandering wins! Yea! The country is saddled by yet another unimaginative politician for the next 2 or 4 or 6 years, foisted on us by less than a quarter of the populous by a system that is rigged to virtually guarantee that anyone with real talent or integrity will not be holding any office.

Once elected, they spend most of their time raising more money to get re-elected next time. Decisions are often made for political reasons. What can I do now that I can later point to during the next election to show that I am good and those other guys are bad? Of course, real problems just keep getting swept under the carpet, and false issues, like immigration or gay marriage, are thrown out to make the restless masses get upset and start throwing mud at each other. Meanwhile, the ship of state cruises onward toward the iceberg while the captain is reading polls about how the passengers feel about him and planning the next day's gala ball in such a way to make the passengers love him more.

It doesn't show any sign of getting better any time soon. God help us.