I must say that I am impressed with how the Republican pick for VP turned out for the party. I don’t know yet whether I can support either party, though, for the election. I love a lot of the words Obama uses, but I don’t understand how he thinks he can do many of the things he says he wants to do, not to mention the fact that I am concerned about regressing to protectionism. There are other things, but that’s not really the subject of this post.
What I do really struggle with is the recent degradation of our world standing and the things that led up to it. It makes me ill to consider what happened in Abu Graib and other places like it. It makes me want to cry when during a political discussion my son tells me that “what it all boils down to — at the most personal level for me — is that I made a decision to serve in the Army (in response to 9-11 – my addition) and gave this country five solid years in my mid-twenties because I believe in a set of principles…” and i was sold out; “…they’ve betrayed everything I stand for.” Strike the “want to” in the last sentence.
I think this is one of the things Obama hopes to address/has been addressing. You would think that it would be one of the things that John McCain would want to fix as well – referring to the type of disaffection being experienced by my son and millions like him here in the US, not to mention those abroad who thought we were better than we apparently are. How does one fix something like this? With respect to Vietnam, we just buried it and I guess it went away (?!) – but that war was certainly no better, and probably in many ways a lot worse than this last one in Iraq. Maybe THAT’s why many of us from “that” generation are so jaded and willing to accept what happened more recently.
I suspect there will be more later, but I wanted to get the most pressing things on “paper” – the whole experience is turning out to be very affecting.
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