Where Does The Time Go?

Age creeps up on you. You just go along living your life which is always in the here and now where you're always the same person, or so it seems. But then comes the time when you notice that the walk in the park or game of tennis leaves you more sore than you'd expected the next day and then the time comes when you start using the handrail to go down stairs. And then the day of realization: it's age. You're just not as spry or sure-footed as you'd always been. When the beautiful young people call you 'Sir' you know you're over the hill. The point here being that things happen slowly, incrementally, until one day your entire life has changed.

The same things happen in the larger spheres of our lives. The economy: Free trade seems like a good idea then one day we find that almost nothing is still manufactured in our homeland. And open borders seem like a good idea until wages seem to stagnate because there's a huge pool of people willing to work harder and cheaper than we are. Is this the wave of an incoming bright future or a deathknell to the good life? I have my own opinions and no doubt you have yours. But again, this doesn't all happen all at once. From the proliferation of cheap goods at Walmart to the loss of good-paying jobs takes time and the relationships between any one or two developments is rarely direct or linear. This does not mean the relationships are not causal. But can we do anything about it, or is it like life and age that moves on inexorably out of our control? From Thomas Jefferson's "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." to Abraham Lincoln's "Fourscore and seven years ago our Forefathers brought forth on this continent..." it has been at least an American, if not human, conceit that we can decide and can act to control our environment. One thing is certain: if we do not act we will not control.

One day we're told that Saddam Hussein is tied to 9/11 and Al Quaeda and we must go to war to defend ourselves. We do and three years later Iraq's a more dangerous place than under Saddam, the terrorists and terroristic threats worldwide are multiplying and there are no, were no, and THEY, THE WAR'S DESIGNERS AND INSTIGATORS KNEW BEFOREHAND, THERE WERE NO WMDs. By the logic of the time of Nixon, this administration should be run out of town using the appropriate congressional powers. The Congress knew how to do this when Clinton was in office and over what? Now, many, many tens of thousands of people are dead, killed because of what our government is doing in our names and with our money. But the Congress won't even conduct investigations of how we got into this mess and if anyone is culpable.

The President didn't go to the FISA court for NSA warrants because their actions are obviously unconstitutional. Warrants require naming suspects and evidence to be seized and what the Administration wants and did and is still doing is more or less searching everybody looking for evidence. And there is even an extension making the rounds at the Justice Department that if listening is okay then physical searches are too. Will people start to care once police cars line their streets and homes are systematically searched?

When I was a kid and had my toy soldiers I always thought of the battles they fought as changing everything, that normal life as we know it didn't happen; that no one went to work or on picnics because there was a war on, and in my child's universe that was true. But that is not true in real life. Except for those occasions when the war hits home, like 9/11, or the firebombing of Tokyo or the advance into Germany people simply went on with their lives. Did the war change nothing? Of course it did, but with inflation and lost sons and shortages people learned to cope. As Nazi Germany arose from the 1920's until in the government in '33 until "official" war in '39, life went on. Even so many of the most persecuted, eg, Jews waited too long to emigrate: "It won't get any worse, will it?"

If Americans don't care that their young men and women and country are caught up in a war of aggression --if other countries did what we are doing they would be considered guilty of war crimes, and we Americans should know since we to a large degree wrote the definitions, if Americans don't care that their Congressional representatives lack the spine to investigate and act accordingly, if Americans don't care that Iraq seems to be only the first step in an imperial aggression of remaking the Near East into our servant, if Americans don't care about the loss of their Consittutional rights --even those specifically stated in the Declaration of Independence when our then King George was the Third, if Americans don't really care about impoverishment and war and torture and $9 trillion in debt and the loss of liberty along with safety, if Americans don't care about these things then they will not act to change things and Americans will lose all. In a democracy, and all nations can work to achieve democracies through their own efforts, not as a gift from an invading army; in a democracy the people are supposed to be in control. But only if they act. Do we think the Japanese foresaw Hiroshima and chose aggressive war anyway, or that ordinary Germans foresaw the concentration camps and the destruction of their homeland and said "Keep up the good work, Adolf?" A lot of people in both countries probably did cheer the fascists on, but most, I imagine simply didn't pay close enough attention, disregarded the canary in their coal mine as an alarmist and when they all woke up, when reality pinched them, it was too late to avert disaster. There are a lot of things to be afraid of in our world; our own government shouldn't be one of them.