My best hopes and prayers for the people of Sudan, but I remember that I have a book on my shelves by Edgar O'Ballance called The Secret War in the Sudan, 1955-1972, reflecting how long this conflict has carried on during my lifetime. I fear it's roots and the pattern of conflict can be seen in even much older history.
“Helping others matters if we want to be a powerful nation. While we should root out corruption, we should remember what matters.”
The thing is why should we want to be a powerful nation? Why can’t we be a prosperous nation who cares for our own first, and then once our own are cared for, who can care for others out of our excess? Nobody tells Switzerland that they have a duty to be a powerful nation and thus must invest billions in foreign aide. Switzerland is just fine and somehow manages to wield a lot of soft power. Nobody tells the Scandanavian countries that they need to become powerful nations.
I see a solid argument for giving out of our excess, however we have a $1.83 trillion deficit and every thing the federal government is ostensibly supposed to do for the American people is under funded and falling apart. It is one thing to give from abundance, it is entirely different to be forced to sacrifice for others. It is deeply immoral to force the single mom in Chicago who got crappy maternal care in the U.S. to pay for maternal care in Sudan. It is wrong to force retirement age shop workers in rural America to pay for agricultural development in Africa (or anywhere else).
Americans in general have no responsibility to care for the rest of the world when they cannot care for their own. Nobody else is going to care for our poor. Europe isn’t going to give us infrastructure grants.
We murder a million babies a year in this country and have more than half a million homeless people on the streets yet running hospitals in Sudan is suppose to give us some sort of moral capital?
American Christians absolutely have a duty to support their brothers and sisters in Sudan, as do Christians throughout the world. We are not doing as well as we could in that regard. However it seems deeply unjust to claim that the average American owes something to the rest of the world so we can remain “powerful”.
America, for many, many decades, positioned itself as the leader, the most powerful one. They influenced and persuaded other countries to do things their way, all in the name of democracy. They convinced European countries to give up their nuclear arsenal, telling them that they, America, would protect them. Ukraine was the third most nuclear armed country in the world. They gave them up because the US promised them their protection. It was safer for America to be one of the few countries with nuclear capability. To now say, not our problem, is not only short-sighted and cruel, but dangerous to US national security. You can leave Africa without help or protection, but you will pay a price. The world does not work the way Dr. Tara so naively says. It works, sadly, in a tangle of dangerous, aggressive countries working tirelessly for their own power and world dominance. The US can never abdicate the power position it, itself, sought, desired, plotted, and sought to have. America wanted to be #1! Millions died due to American meddling in their countries so America could secure that #1 spot. The countries vying to take that power position are even more cruel. Americans don't have the option to stay home in their fortressed country and sit in front of the fire with their Kentucky bourbon and a pair of toasty American-made slippers. That is the price they pay for seeking great power. Don't whine now.
We can absolutely take our ball and go home. The rest of the world spent the better part of the 21st century bitching about how we flexed our power and bitching about when we didn’t. I couldn’t talk to a European for five minutes without one of them complaining about the American boot on the throat of this or that country. So now it’s time to give them what they wanted for so long. If it is now occurring to the rest of the world that the Chinese or Russian boot is worse than the American boot then they should have thought of that before they spent the last two decades wanting to get rid of the American boot.
I do not feel like I have any obligation to live up to agreements made by people I didn’t vote, out of interests that weren’t mine, thirty years ago. Governments break promises. They break them to their people. They break them to each other. I’m not going to pretend I care about the U.S. government breaking its promise to Ukraine (after it broke its promise to Russia) any more than I am willing to move because where I now live was once treatied to native Americans and my government broke that treaty too.
Every empire dies. The American empire has died. It is beyond salvation. The best we can hope for is a more equitable sharing of powers between the major three power players to prevent the rise of either China or Russia as the super power. That said at the end of the day, no one is going to invade America. No one is going to nuke America if we mind to ourselves and don’t get pulled into foolish wars that are not our problem. Sure if we voluntarily abdicate power life will get harder, but it’s not going to be harder than it was for the people who settled and built this country. Given time we can innovate, we can build, we can adjust. We can also move toward a Monroe doctrine focusing on our economic power over our military might.
We bailed Europe out of two world wars. We saved China from Japan. We spent God knows how much money and blood trying to maintain peace and stability as the “super power” and what did we get for it? A country in shambles. A federal deficit that the average person literally cannot fathom. Ceaseless criticism and complaining with how we ran the world. Now the same people who spent the last two decades demanding an end to U.S. Imperialism are weeping over the end of U.S. Imperialism.
I don’t care. As long as I am tripping over homeless people and having to tell my kid not to pick up trash on the street to throw away because it might be laced with fentanyl I don’t care. As long as we have hungry kids here I don’t care about kids elsewhere. As long as our infrastructure is crumbling I don’t care about the rest of the world.
There are 8.2 billion people on this planet, Americans make up less than 5% of the world’s population. If the other 95% can’t manage their own countries and their own alliances then forgive me for not thinking it is the responsibility of the 5% to care for the 95%.
My best hopes and prayers for the people of Sudan, but I remember that I have a book on my shelves by Edgar O'Ballance called The Secret War in the Sudan, 1955-1972, reflecting how long this conflict has carried on during my lifetime. I fear it's roots and the pattern of conflict can be seen in even much older history.
“Helping others matters if we want to be a powerful nation. While we should root out corruption, we should remember what matters.”
The thing is why should we want to be a powerful nation? Why can’t we be a prosperous nation who cares for our own first, and then once our own are cared for, who can care for others out of our excess? Nobody tells Switzerland that they have a duty to be a powerful nation and thus must invest billions in foreign aide. Switzerland is just fine and somehow manages to wield a lot of soft power. Nobody tells the Scandanavian countries that they need to become powerful nations.
I see a solid argument for giving out of our excess, however we have a $1.83 trillion deficit and every thing the federal government is ostensibly supposed to do for the American people is under funded and falling apart. It is one thing to give from abundance, it is entirely different to be forced to sacrifice for others. It is deeply immoral to force the single mom in Chicago who got crappy maternal care in the U.S. to pay for maternal care in Sudan. It is wrong to force retirement age shop workers in rural America to pay for agricultural development in Africa (or anywhere else).
Americans in general have no responsibility to care for the rest of the world when they cannot care for their own. Nobody else is going to care for our poor. Europe isn’t going to give us infrastructure grants.
We murder a million babies a year in this country and have more than half a million homeless people on the streets yet running hospitals in Sudan is suppose to give us some sort of moral capital?
American Christians absolutely have a duty to support their brothers and sisters in Sudan, as do Christians throughout the world. We are not doing as well as we could in that regard. However it seems deeply unjust to claim that the average American owes something to the rest of the world so we can remain “powerful”.
America, for many, many decades, positioned itself as the leader, the most powerful one. They influenced and persuaded other countries to do things their way, all in the name of democracy. They convinced European countries to give up their nuclear arsenal, telling them that they, America, would protect them. Ukraine was the third most nuclear armed country in the world. They gave them up because the US promised them their protection. It was safer for America to be one of the few countries with nuclear capability. To now say, not our problem, is not only short-sighted and cruel, but dangerous to US national security. You can leave Africa without help or protection, but you will pay a price. The world does not work the way Dr. Tara so naively says. It works, sadly, in a tangle of dangerous, aggressive countries working tirelessly for their own power and world dominance. The US can never abdicate the power position it, itself, sought, desired, plotted, and sought to have. America wanted to be #1! Millions died due to American meddling in their countries so America could secure that #1 spot. The countries vying to take that power position are even more cruel. Americans don't have the option to stay home in their fortressed country and sit in front of the fire with their Kentucky bourbon and a pair of toasty American-made slippers. That is the price they pay for seeking great power. Don't whine now.
We can absolutely take our ball and go home. The rest of the world spent the better part of the 21st century bitching about how we flexed our power and bitching about when we didn’t. I couldn’t talk to a European for five minutes without one of them complaining about the American boot on the throat of this or that country. So now it’s time to give them what they wanted for so long. If it is now occurring to the rest of the world that the Chinese or Russian boot is worse than the American boot then they should have thought of that before they spent the last two decades wanting to get rid of the American boot.
I do not feel like I have any obligation to live up to agreements made by people I didn’t vote, out of interests that weren’t mine, thirty years ago. Governments break promises. They break them to their people. They break them to each other. I’m not going to pretend I care about the U.S. government breaking its promise to Ukraine (after it broke its promise to Russia) any more than I am willing to move because where I now live was once treatied to native Americans and my government broke that treaty too.
Every empire dies. The American empire has died. It is beyond salvation. The best we can hope for is a more equitable sharing of powers between the major three power players to prevent the rise of either China or Russia as the super power. That said at the end of the day, no one is going to invade America. No one is going to nuke America if we mind to ourselves and don’t get pulled into foolish wars that are not our problem. Sure if we voluntarily abdicate power life will get harder, but it’s not going to be harder than it was for the people who settled and built this country. Given time we can innovate, we can build, we can adjust. We can also move toward a Monroe doctrine focusing on our economic power over our military might.
We bailed Europe out of two world wars. We saved China from Japan. We spent God knows how much money and blood trying to maintain peace and stability as the “super power” and what did we get for it? A country in shambles. A federal deficit that the average person literally cannot fathom. Ceaseless criticism and complaining with how we ran the world. Now the same people who spent the last two decades demanding an end to U.S. Imperialism are weeping over the end of U.S. Imperialism.
I don’t care. As long as I am tripping over homeless people and having to tell my kid not to pick up trash on the street to throw away because it might be laced with fentanyl I don’t care. As long as we have hungry kids here I don’t care about kids elsewhere. As long as our infrastructure is crumbling I don’t care about the rest of the world.
There are 8.2 billion people on this planet, Americans make up less than 5% of the world’s population. If the other 95% can’t manage their own countries and their own alliances then forgive me for not thinking it is the responsibility of the 5% to care for the 95%.