No, it’s not just this Syria kerfuffle but that does sort of help clarify things for me.
It started a long time ago when a few things occurred to me:
As much as I loved being an American and I did feel that we, as a world power, did have some obligations to the world that maybe Ghana or Tonga or Croatia or Singapore or Iceland (as examples) wouldn’t necessarily have, but I did not feel that we needed to be policemen to the world.
As much as I disliked seeing human rights abuses, it seemed that the motivating factor in deciding what innocent people we wanted to assist was more about whether they had oil or not, not whether we felt that their kids didn’t deserve to die.
Whenever I hear that we are planning on “arming rebels,” I think less about the evil regime they are attempting to bring down but our lousy track record in these matters. That and how in a lot of cases, those rebelling are often just as bad - but different - than those they are rebelling against.
Like any good Lib, I don’t dig wars and I don’t dig putting our young men and women at risk for their lives unless we have a damn good reason to do so. That reason should be about national security, saving American lives. War on terror, I’m on board. War on brown people who resemble terrorists in some minor ways, not as much. Wars for oil? Fuck you.
(Admittedly that’s not a very anti-Liberal view.)
There are Americans who go to bed hungry. There are jobless Americans. We’re still recovering from a pretty severe recession. As much as I think it’s neat that we might send aid that will build a school in some third world country, I am disheartened that we are cutting education funding here.
Benghazi didn’t make me think “Obama and Clinton screwed up and people died;” it made me think “why were we there in the first place?” And as much as I am sad that Syria’s government are apparently pieces of shit who will gas women and children in order to stay in power, I don’t know why we have to go in there and do anything about it.
In short, I am a Liberal who finds himself agreeing with a lot of the “America first” crap that is spewed at Tea Party rallies and Ted Nugent shows. (Not the anti-immigration crap; I am all for comprehensive immigration reform.)
But it is making me wonder if there are others out there like me, Liberals who want more conservative policies with regard to our influence and presence in the surrounding world? Or if I am missing something (or a few things) that, if someone points it out to me, I can go back to being even more in step with being a dirty Lib?
A liberal position of “We shouldn’t get involved because we aren’t actually well meaning and we’ll just screw it up anyway” isn’t really the same as a Tea Party attitude of “we shouldn’t do anything to help because foreigners are all subhumans who deserve to die”.
By virtue of the size of the economy and of the military, the US has an obligation to help when it is appropriate to do so and when the help given assists those on the moral high ground. In Syria, I have no problem with attacking Assad but before doing so I’d like to know exactly who does this benefit and what happens if Assad is ousted.
I don’t see that saving American lives is inherently more important than saving anyone else’s lives. When you get to those pearly gates, St. Peter isn’t going to ask you “What Americans did you help?”, it’s going to be “what people did you help?”
Yes, there are Americans who need our help. But we can’t do this at the same time as making sure that millionaires get their tax breaks and we spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. It isn’t foreign aid that keeps the American underclass in perpetual poverty.
Benghazi meant that we can’t secure every embassy and consulate in the world- nothing more and nothing less.
Cite is from 2011, but it shows a trend since 2008. If you can find a cite indicating that the trend has reversed in the last fiscal year, go for it, because I couldn’t find one. (Yes, I looked.)
As for “there are no Americans who go to bed hungry”: haven’t you heard that all generalizations are wrong?
Edit: Also, more on topic, I pretty much stand with you on this issue, OP. I’m tired of the Constant War style of governing that says we have to intervene in every world conflict. (Or even every world conflict where someone uses chemical weapons or whatever.) Some years of peace and rebuilding the economy and infrastructure would do us a world of good, no pun intended.
And if you say that, while a guy running for the same office says saving American lives is more important, Americans will vote for the other guy, right?
(Of course, I say that as someone who doesn’t believe in St Peter, and so finds a big chunk of your post weird and irrelevant.)
I’m quite certain that saying that American lives are more precious than ordinary mortals is indeed an electoral advantage in the US.
I don’t care if you believe in the St. Peter story, in fact this is likely nothing more than a legend with no scriptural background or real religious significance. But as a rational person, I find the notion quite odd that we value human life based on the geographic location of where one happened to be squeezed out of one’s mother’s vagina.
Really? No homeless people out there who don’t get regular dinners? No poor families who sometimes don’t have a lot of food? None at all?
The EXTENT of this phenomenon is likely exaggerrated by some, but it absolutely does happen. A “One in five kids” number has been tossed around which is almost certainly the purest bullshit. But some people don’t have enough food every day, that’s just a fact of life.
Well . . . rationally, what’s the correct response if someone says he’ll give you a dollar or give it to someone else? What’s the rational answer to “your call all the way: who dies, folks in your town, or folks in some other country’s town?” To “should you and people near you value life based on geography?”
From a purely rational standpoint, is that view (a) odd, or (b) completely understandable?
[Over dinner, new Babylon 5 “political officer” Julie Musante asks Sheridan about “lurkers”.] John Sheridan: It’s our version of the homeless. In many ways, we have the same problem Earth does. Julie Musante: Mmm. Earth doesn’t have homeless. Sheridan: Excuse me? Musante: We don’t have the problem. Yes, there are some “displaced” people, here and there, but, uh… they’ve chosen to be in that position. They’re either lazy, or they’re criminal, or they’re mentally unstable. Sheridan: They can’t get a job! Musante: EarthGov has promised a job to anyone that wants one. So, if someone doesn’t have a job, they must not want one.
. . .
[Musante runs down a list of all the social problems EarthGov has suddenly solved.] Sheridan: And, uh w-when exactly did all this happen? Musante: When we rewrote the dictionary.
I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison- it’s more like a question of helping an American have a somewhat better life vs. a third world child who will live or die depending on the extent of aid received.
As one who does believe in a Christian version of the afterlife (dunno about St. Peter checking people in, but it’s as good a way of looking at it as any), I agree that a Christian sort of God isn’t going to be particularly interested in where in the world the people you helped were, but just what you did to help.
Overseas, we wind up doing a lot of harm with military interventions because, like Professor Harold Hill, we don’t know the territory. If we want to help people around the world, there are plenty of things we can do that don’t involve blowing shit up, like distributing treated mosquito nets to reduce the incidence of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. And if we do that sort of thing in the wrong way, the downsides are generally considerably more limited.
When contemplating American policy, it should go without saying that Americans are largely going to put a premium on solving American problems. Maybe it’s not the Christian ideal, but you have to deal with people as they are, rather than expect them to be the paragons of virtue you’d like them to be.
While we may have the money to intervene in Syria and solve domestic problems at the same time, our elected officials quite clearly only have a limited amount of time and attention. Congress already wasn’t going to accomplish much this year, and Syria pretty much kills any hopes there. Didn’t Obama talk in his inaugural address about raising the minimum wage? Forget its even being raised as an issue anytime soon - it’s gotten squeezed out.
That cite is for only state funding of elementary and secondary education. Total education spending has only gone down once, from 2010 to 2011 it went from about 910 billion dollars to around 900 billion. It is estimated to have increased to 930 billion this year. The actual total education funding increased from 2008 to 2011 by 2.5%. chart
If you really believe that the government should treat human lives the same regardless of where a person lives that so much is being spent on education should be a scandal. All of the government spending should be on people in third world countries who might die and not to marginally improve the lives of the richest people on earth.
Fair enough, but look back at what you actually wrote:
It seems you’re now saying no, wait; of course we value human life based on that geographic location, and of course we see saving Ameican lives as inherently more important than saving anyone else’s lives; there’s nothing at all odd about that; why, such a comparison is unfair by dint of obviosity!
Old hippie here, liberal to the core. I’m not averse to helping the downtrodden wherever they may be, and our position as a world power provides both opportunity and, I believe, obligation to do so. Tempered, of course, by practical realities including acknowledgement of the limitations of resources available and the difficulty of having a positive effect at long range.
Maybe when I was younger the stars in my eyes made it easier to separate the “good guys” from the “bad guys” and so decide who to support and who deserved – err, correction. But now I too am having a real problem with situations like Syria. I wholeheartedly condemn the use of chemical weapons. And I’m willing to accept, arguendo, that the Assad regime is responsible. Now what? If I could wave a magic wand and punish the perpetrators, I’d do so. Instead though I can deliver some high explosive, and punish somebody who probably isn’t responsible. With “collateral damage” in addition. Lots of funeral and hospital pictures displayed around the world, all displaying our handiwork. Does this actually help anybody, or advance our national interests?
Best case scenario afterward is, I guess, some kind of regime change to a group that didn’t, and presumably wouldn’t, use chemical weapons. But is that the insurgents? Are they the “good guys”? Will they improve the lives of their countrymen, and/or be friendlier (or less hostile) to us? I can’t tell. And does this advance our national interests? When the pot and the kettle are the same color, can we justify “helping” either of them?
It would be nice if we had an actual liberal candidate for office. But that dream, like yours of changing American policy with your single vote, is pie-in-the-sky. Your options are to vote for the conservative asshole, the slightly-less-conservative asshole, don’t vote, or expatriate.
Thanks, puddleglum, you saved me the effort.
[QUOTE=Not Really All That Bright]
Am I being whooshed?
[/QUOTE]
No, you are not being whooshed. It is an exaggeration to claim that a significant number of Americans go to bed hungry because we are spending money on foreign aid.