Dominated by fear

What’s amazing is how much political rhetoric is spewed about foreign invasion …  From immigration to foreign policy, people talk about this as though it’s a near certainty that everyone else in the world is chomping at the bit to invade these United States.  From one of my favorite WordPress reads: “If a foreign power decided to invade and take us over, whose side are people like Obama and his fellow congregants going to take?”

If you make all of your decisions based on “what will happen if someone invades us” then you are essentially being ruled by your fears.  In this case, a wildly irrational fear.  If someone actually tried a large-scale military operation against the North American landmass, it would probably be over before it even started.  Terrorism, that’s another story, but even so, we can’t go around questioning everyone’s loyalty in such a scenario because we simply aren’t in that scenario.  Besides, the United States was founded by anti-patriots in the first place.

Sometimes I think that people with these political ideas are ruled by their own insecurities — why else would they let their fears determine how they think the government should treat people?  This particular blogger also believes we should not be afraid to use nuclear weapons, apparently okay a) with the massive number of civilian casualties, and b) with the very real possibility that his own environment and society will be harmed by the use of such a device.  To what end is this even useful?  So he can keep buying cheap Hanes at Wal-Mart and drink shitty lite beer?

Vote for Ralph Nader if you don’t want someone in office who panders to the lowest common intellectual denominator.  And yeah, that sounds elitist, but I’m okay with being ruled by benevolent “philosopher” kings.

~ by Daniel on 20 April, 2008.