American Courage

I’m going to scare you now, and John McCain is going to scare you later. Hillary Clinton has already started. Certain peoples of the world hate America, and George Bush has merely fed their fires. Our bombs and occupations kill, maim and enrage families and tribes. Encouraged by righteous speakers who declaim our devil ways, angry people seek effective means to right wrongs.

It’s not a time for weakness. The next president will inherit a foreign policy laid to waste by an arrogant, chauvinist campaign to protect our interests. Bluster and blitzkrieg asserted our might and destroyed our reputation. Part of the world hates us outright, another part resents us, our friends are embarrassed and the rest take advantage of us.

There seems to be a sense in the world that dominant aggression and unbridled violence is a profitable enterprise. In the absence of any moderating authority, governments both elected and stolen take up arms against rebels and both sides wreak cruelty in ever more horrendous holocausts. As resources – oil – become more scarce, the world will do business with anyone to feed the engines.

John McCain is going to tell you that many of these violent people wish us great harm. Many people – maybe you – harbor a secret dread that someone somewhere in the world is brewing a catastrophe to top the new holy day of September 11. He is going to tell you that our enemies are legion, and determined to bring us down.

He will insist that we need a warrior, a fighter who will take the war to its conclusion. He has already responded to Mrs. Clinton’s 3 a.m. phone call ad, saying that the majority of Americans would prefer that he – John McCain – would be there to take the call.

But if his response intends to follow George Bush’s model, he will pit our soldiers, aircraft, ships and satellites against the enemy. He will strike first and hard, he will brook no threat to the American way of life. He will make war and make it pay.

We need a president with the strength to make peace.

We need a president who will seek solutions that influence regimes, bringing change through economic cooperation and democratic advocacy. We need a president smart enough to wield our power for defense, and to shape our overwhelming military to detect and neutralize threats with direct, effective action without entangling our nation in the expensive, deadly long-term occupation of any other country.

We can’t afford to be scared. We need to have the strength to elect a peacemaker. We need to advocate with our votes a desire to win security by stabilizing the world instead of destabilizing civilizations. America needs to stop wasting its money and soldiers. We will not be less vigilant, we will merely stop squandering America’s most dedicated, courageous resources. So many young people killed and maimed, and after all these years, we can’t afford to stay and we can’t easily go. There’s got to be a better way to interact with the world.

We need a president that’s good enough to join the world’s effort to preserve the biosphere. There’s an overwhelming common interest in habitable air, water and soil. On this course, I have no doubt that anyone elected president this year will administrate a much greener term than the current polluted chief executive. However, our next president needs to be big enough to accept responsibility for our footprint, require commerce to respect the long-term consequences of their quarterly interests, and inspire our ingenuity to find cures that heal the environment.

And we need a president that can bring peace among ourselves. We wage an uncivil war against people who seem to disagree with us. We tolerate hate, and cooperate with injustice. Certainly there are people who condemn the greed, oppression, corruption and violence, but we also blithely accept a democracy operated by a two-party system, the electoral college and nonsensical, exploitation of the poor.

Wait – not so blithe? Expect a president that can change things, knowing that the things that cannot be changed eventually change no matter what, and you will have a chance to vote for it.

DISCLAIMER: Any facts assumed or implied herein stem from an individual perception and the gary may, or may not, know what he is talking about.