Last Friday the Circle Jerks dedicated a song mid-set to Bush and his Republican war-mongering cronies, he thought they might relate.  Before he broke into a spirited “I Want to Destroy You,” the lead singer alleged that instead of being so worried about what people are doing everywhere else we should be paying attention to what’s going on here and leave these other people alone.
 
I didn’t drive all the way to Hollywood and Vine to think, but that’s what he made me do. I realized that the United States is balancing on a precarious tightrope. On one side is our old isolationist way, on the other is the United States’ world-wide police badge and baton. On both sides there’s hypocrisy.
 
Before World War II, the United States mostly stayed out of the world’s affairs, apart from our rather nefarious Monroe Doctrine and our preoccupation with Manifest Destiny, we were okay as long as the Western Hemisphere was okay. WWII left us the most powerful nation in the world and the North American continent was untouched by the horrors of the war in Europe.
 
If we still held this belief would we expect our government to go after countries for human rights issues like we do now, to help rebuild nations after opponents have knocked them down as we did with Britain and much of Europe after WWII?  If we isolated ourselves how different a place would the world be?  Could Europe have rebuilt without the Marshall Plan and all the other things the U.S. did to help?
 
On the other hand the U.S. has been policing the world in riot gear for decades now. Allying ourselves one minute with a country and when things don’t go our way, after years of selling weaponry and giving aid, we withdraw our friendship and declare this “friend” a no-good terrorist, snake-in-the-grass, lying, thieving, evil, blah, blah, blah.
 
We can then guarantee that these people have “weapons of mass destruction” because we’re the ones that gave them to them, and the plans, and the chemical warfare, and the training. Either that or we ally with the worst sort of nation, the ones that already are bad and for whatever the reason, good lobbyists come to mind, we give them help and side against mistreated populations with the real evil empires. What a mess.
 
I don’t pretend to know it all, I don’t understand anymore than anyone else. I do know that our country has the potential to be great, to use our power for some good. That one Chinese proverb says that it takes only one stone to turn aside an avalanche. Maybe we could be the ones to make the world a better place, instead of always making it worse.
 
I realize now that what the public asks for isn’t so simple. We can ask our government to stay out of other nation’s affairs but then will we tell it to go and save the world? When we tell our government to make the world a better place we leave it to them to decide what would make it better. Whether they decide saving the rainforests will make it better or increasing the defense budget to billions of dollars, we’ve left it in their hands. It’s difficult when deep down you feel that what your country is doing is inherently wrong to see in it the ethos that made it what it is. But to villainize is to dehumanize, and that’s all any of us are. Saddam, Bush, conservative, liberal, human.  Sometimes I forget that.
 
Monica Pardee is a journalism major at Cal State Long Beach.

 

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