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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Why is it ‘isolationism’ to oppose killing those who didn’t attack us?

By David McElroy · September 11, 2013

Keep us out of warIt was 12 years ago today when 19 men hijacked four airplanes and crashed three of them into buildings in New York City and Washington, D.C. Many millions of words have been written about those attacks and their cause, but it seems that most people are still just as clueless about why the attacks happened as they were 12 years ago.

George W. Bush famously told us that the attackers hate Americans because we are free. In a speech to Congress, he said, “Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

Bush was out of touch with reality, even though his defenders continue to look for ways around this. Those who attacked this country were very plain about their grievances and their motives. They hated this country because of the U.S. government’s constant interference in the affairs of their nations. This isn’t news to anyone who’s followed the history of the last hundred years and who’s listened to what these groups have said.

The U.S. government has spent the last century intervening in the affairs of people in the Middle East (and elsewhere). Our rulers have supported tyrants and claimed it was in the name of freedom. They’ve spent billions and billions of our tax dollars to give dictators the weapons with which to murder their people and each other. Our government has chosen which groups to support and which regimes to bring down, all on the basis of which groups were willing to act as puppets for what people in D.C. wanted. (And they sometimes support a dictator today and then call him the devil tomorrow when it suits their purposes.)

That’s why they hate us. It has nothing to do with our “democratically elected government.” It has nothing to do with our freedom of religion, speech and so forth, although they surely wouldn’t respect those things. They hate us because of things that have been done to their nations and families — in our name — by the U.S. government.

But our politicians don’t want to learn that lesson. They want to continue interfering in other countries’ affairs and continue dictating winners and losers. They don’t want to admit that all their efforts simply create more reasons for more people to hate us and then to come to this continent seeking revenge.

Barack Obama’s insane desire to attack Syria recently is proof of that. He and his advisors can’t accept that Syria’s problems are Syria’s business, not ours. His absurd speech Monday night that tried to explain his position on Syria is a portrait of political incoherence. Not only will he not accept that Syria’s civil war isn’t cause for a U.S. attack, but he’s dishonest enough to pretend that the Russian government’s intervention with the Syrian government — which might stop the U.S. attack — was part of his brilliant plan to bring peace. Are you stupid enough to buy that?

It’s not just Obama and other warmongers such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham, though. We can also see the same insanity and refusal to learn from those in the media.

I was disgusted by this column in the New York Times this week from Bill Keller, long-time (but now former) executive editor of the Times. Keller lambasts the “knee-jerk isolationism” of those of us who oppose attacking Syria. He spends most of his column making the tortured comparison of the current situation to the Americans who opposed U.S. involvement in World War II prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. No, I’m not kidding.

I’m not an isolationist. I favor completely free trade with anyone who would like to trade with anyone in the United States. I favor complete freedom to travel across national borders for whatever peaceful exchange people want to make. I favor visiting their countries and learning about them. I favor allowing them to freely visit here and immigrate here. I favor free people being allowed to interact with each other in whatever ways they voluntarily choose. That is not isolating oneself.

What I oppose is anyone using my tax money to kill people in my name — when those people haven’t threatened me or anyone else in this country. I oppose murdering people through the legal fiction called war. I oppose pretending that there’s a “good side” that should be supported in a civil war between a brutal dictator and a group of fighters who want to set up an Islamic state in his place.

We who oppose war aren’t isolationists. We’re realists who understand history, morality and logic.

We who oppose war understand why this country was attacked 12 years ago today. We want to stop giving people in new places reasons to hate us and new reasons to attack us in the future.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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