Bane Macleod

The Beginning Of The End

Sometimes I sit here and think to myself "It's always been like this, I just didn't pay as much attention before." Hoping against hope that somehow it's just me and not the fact that the world's opinion of the US is at an all time low. The Bush presidency coinciding with the attack on the WTC and the vulnerability of the United States that it exposed, has me feeling very down sometimes, and truth be told that gets to me too.

You see, in my learning I have always lived in the United States, benevolent neighbor to the world, the big brother everyone but that one guy down the hall (USSR) looked up to and at least in their heart tried to emulate. Now it seems we are less the loving big brother than the commandeering older sister whos always going through your stuff just because she can.

In my school I learned how the United States had a great history of helping out countries in need while barely touching on the fact that most of the time those countries were ones we had just bombed to hell and back or who had been smeared across the map by someone we armed.

For me this feeling stretches all the way back to waiting for the election results to come in. I remember the media giving Florida to Gore, and I knew he had the presidency. I had already figured it out, you see, whichever one took Florida had the election. Then about an hour later the anchor came on and apologized, it seemed that there was a big swing, and the projections were off.. Bush was going to take Florida. It was like a bad dream, and it got worse..

The projections flipped back and forth that night, but finally came the announcement that Bush would be the president. I remember feeling a great disappointment, and thinking to myself, "This is the beginning of the end.". And it turned out I was right. A president that somehow in the short course of two years has gone from being a laughingstock, to being a semi-hero with astronomical approval ratings, to being an icon of whats wrong with the United States.

War, war is the answer to everything. Well, war we have. Not just one but at minimum three fronts. Admittedly one is the always on war on everything bad and unsavory about the world, but I hardly suspect we will be leaving our bases and pulling out of other countries anytime soon.

Second, Iraq. We all know we can whip Iraq, thats a given, with the help of the UN we did it once, and realistically we could do it again with or without them. And indeed it seems to be the case that if we are going to do it anytime soon we WILL have to do it without them.

Now finally North Korea. This troubles me for a few reasons, the first of which is this isnt just a little pissant nation-state with pretentions of glory, this is a nation with an armed force of over 1 million, with missiles capable of hitting the US coastline. That to me is scary. Not only could they hit, say.. Los Angeles, but Munich is a good 1000 miles closer than we are, and Seoul, South Korea even closer than that.

I think this is what brought it home to me..

The commentary also said it would be "foolish for the United States to think that we sit idle with folded arms to wait until it gives orders" to initiate the attack.

Quite honestly the DPRK wont likely attack the United States, but them launching a strike on another place just for giggles? Who knows, but when I read that the first thought that jaunted into my mind was sitting there having a sandwich in Santa Monica..

And seeing an ICBM fly overhead.

If we are going to do something we can't be alone, we need the rest of the world. We need to stop treating everyone like they were dumbasses and start picking our friends a little better. For a long time it was ok because we had the bomb, so it was a security blanket of some sort I suppose. But its not that world anymore. The world is filled with bad men, and good men, and also stupid, impulsive, loud mouthed men. Unfortunately we are currently presided over by the latter, hopefully that will be just a glitch in our countries history, and not be the beginning of the end.