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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (5169)	12/20/2003 9:10:15 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

My hopes for the Nation: What I imagine is really an enlightened self-interest where the U.S. mostly provides for itself, and provides to others in reciprocation for good faith transactions and humanitarian efforts. If too much secrecy is practiced the whole process is destabilized - so the only way to run a "clean house" is, to indeed, have a clean house. The U.S., IMO, would be a more stabilizing factor for the world as a NEUTRAL power acting as honest broker, benefactor and advocate. Any other energy we add to a dynamic system such as the world's political front will necessarily have some negative recoil. It's like a drowning man's thrashing. Rather than saving his life, it drains him of it. It is impossible to be unilateral in a sustained way except in a colony like ants. The social structure of ants in fact has worked for 60 million years. There were reigns of humans that, for thousands of years, were successful but where individual thought and any sign of a well-developed, broadly-embraced, social conscience was absent by modern standards. Regimes this cruel continue to exist but fly under the radar screen of the U.S. business-controlled news media -it is a mischaracterization to call it the "liberal" or "conservative" media because what it cares about is "money" and money knows no politics. Some in this country now would have us all live as ants. Just do as we say and no body gets hurt. That is certainly more true than one would hope it was. And rather than saying, "We are better off than those living elsewhere!", it would behoove us to ask "How can those elsewhere live as well as us." The American Ideal is best demonstrated by the freedom we have at home, in concert with the friends and acts we cultivate abroad. Ostracism or confinement is far better than stoning or beheading. You can always bring the ostracized back into the fold after acts of contrition. If we seek someone to promote honest governing practices in an Arab nation, where do you go? Our "allies" there? The grinning princes of Saud are hardly concerned about our interests -- they have deals to make with our rich guys. Right now the teat ain't dry. If we pulled the plug on oil tonight, they'd all fold tomorrow. We'd be better off fusing Helium-3 from the moon (technologically feasible right now) than exploiting inferior sulfur-rich oil from former Soivet block Islamic states and protecting existing supplies of Mid-east oil. Anything we can do to get off the oil jones is worthy of our efforts.