How Rude!

When flickers of what lies behind the gilded walls they’ve come to live within appear, it must be jolting. And that jolt, that sense of shock is telling of just how attached they have become to the walls they live behind. The millions to billions secretly squandered away in foreign bank accounts have afforded Mubarak, Gadhafi plus others like them the ability to create images making them appear strong/ invincible in the sight of their public and giving them the underlying framework helping for a sense of safety in case crisis hits and expenses arise needing to be addressed in the shadows.

It would seem the two are crucial to intervening and crumbling walls that keep Gadhafi or those like him hide behind. It would seem important to make sure all can see the face of power withering and being singed out front and in public. Also publicly axe that security cash reserve and to make sure, even if they are too blinded by arrogance to be scared right away, that eventually they will run into a situation when they have run out of their billions and they are forced up out from the shadows to be treated to the scrutiny of the light.

Further, make sure stable leaders from outside the conflicts denounce the tyrants while simultaneously they shake the hands of the people that rose up from the streets to assure them their efforts won’t be in vane. We need to have people helping their efforts to set up a new government, but it must be their government. We can’t simply slip into what we view as a power vacuum and, using American taxpayer dollars, set up an environment of convenient chaos so our oil companies, banks or other large corporations, that don’t hire many Americans overseas and hardly pay any taxes for the work they do there, can reap the harvest of what rightfully should be the bounty of the citizens of those nations as we have done in the past. Otherwise they will eventually rise up and turn on us for the product of seeds a bunch of foolish rich guys and greedy politicians generations before us had sown.

We cannot act as though these things go unnoticed or that such actions don’t eventually catch up to us as we have seen that delusion come crashing in on us too many times over the past few decades with increasing frequency and volume to believe that can be sustained. We need to allow people to create their own true stable legitimate governments and go through whatever that means to get there. We can help them to see the virtue in stability, agreeing to disagree and the usefulness of compromise.

It all depends on which side people choose to look at things from in terms of how they see the path to intervening or helping in such efforts. If the conflict is seen from the perspective of the silk robed expensive suited despot then the view of those in the streets looking for liberty and freedom would be that they are rude, ill-mannered or uncouth. It must seem to those dictators and their cronies as though they are crashing the fun and the good times. It must seem they are trying to ruin the spending spree of bloody cash ripped from the hands of the people.

From the perspective of the people that have had that cash, food, education, opportunities, freedom of expression and real political empowerment constantly taken from them, the view might be quite different. To them it may seem the time has come and the big party at their expense is over. It would seem we should support the latter as the very nation Americans hold so dear was founded in exactly the same way. To the British Monarchy in December of 1773 the Boston Tea Party must have seemed quite rude, unsettling and the cause of considerable indigestion.

We need to retain that perspective when we decide where to intervene and where not to. For example, our forces heroically intervened in the Balkans in the 1990’s, yet today, though there are no wars there, we have bases there still where American soldiers frequent prostitutes on r&r that are not women engaged in that profession of their own free will.

Many are slaves kidnapped from their homes by force or false pretense. Regardless of a person’s view on prostitution itself, there is sinificant difference between keeping slaves that spend lives being repeatedly raped with willing adults exchanging money for sex.

In other cases they are not even adults, but children that contractors for companies like DynCorp contracted to work on American aircraft buy the passports of. They then hold them as slaves to be raped continually and even bring them to military and company functions with no reprimand or sideways glances. It has become a part of the culture there. (http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/06/26/bosnia/index.html) When that happens, our mission in such places has obviously run its course and gone grotesquely askew. For, what are we saying by our tolerance of that and such actions to all those looking on?

In such cases we are the ones intruding and behaving as the bully despots, though of course we don’t intend to. Instead of wasting our money in Bosnia or giant bases in Germany, taxpayer money could be better spent. For instance in helping countries that are now blooming anew in the Middle East to find stability without intruding too much on their rights to their own natural resources and to control their own destinies. Dissent turned out to be quite positive in those nations no matter what the power hungry thought of the convenience.

With a little training, positive reinforcement and agreed upon partnership, we could help them become a part of a global networks and finally realize what they were always kept in the dark about by shadowy holders of power that have seen their times come and go whether they wish to acknowledge it or not.

To read about my inspiration for this article go to www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com