Why Can't We All Just Get Along?
In the course of my ventures forth into other Weblogs, I came across Joanne Jacobs, clearly a bright, thoughtful person who knows and cares a lot about schooling. I was particularly pleased to see this entry discussing (though also somewhat simplifying) the work of John Ogbu, a man whose work formed one of the cornerstones of a paper I wrote in graduate school on Afrocentric schooling.
Then I saw this entry, and its attendant discussion:
How can the U.S. stop nuclear proliferation, stop arms sales and promote human rights? By going to war against Saddam Hussein's regime. In this case, peace is the pro-nuke, anti-human rights policy.
Yet these people fail to think of the alternative; their school system and tax dollars will mean nothing if we let Saddam have his way.
It really does seem as if history repeats itself. In 1936, the French and British had a clear opportunity to stop Hitler, when he moved troops into the demilitarized Rhineland area. Those who argued against this commonsensical action would have fit right in at a California "peace" rally...the arguments are all the same.
Like I'm supposed to believe that 'peace' activists aren't going to advocate raising taxes anyway? Like I've said a million times already, they're not anti-war, or else they'd support any measures to getting rid of Saddam, they're just anti-american and want to see us fall.
It's troubling to me that such an insightful person and her correspondents can see the world so differently from me--I can't dismiss what she's saying as the views of someone who is ill-informed or unreasonable. I'm left to wonder if we're all living in the same world. I would be the last person to argue that Saddam Hussein is harmless, but we have far more pressing problems to address first. Of all the agents of violence coming from the Middle East (al Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Israeli Army, etc.), Iraq seems to me to be the least dangerous. And it escapes me how seeing things that way could make me anti-American.
8:11:26 AM 
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