so to exist is to hold contradictory beliefs. because to exist is to exist in an unjust world. there are ways to act morally in an immoral world, but there is no way to be moral in an immoral world. and one cannot comment on any present action without considering the history of all actions that led to the circumstances of the present action.
so let’s talk about 9/11. i’m of the mind that g.w. didn’t do it himself but probably allowed it to happen as a means to an ill-defined war on terrorism. but whatever. let’s say it really was those brown guys, the enemy, the terrorists. we have been told they did it because they “hate freedom”, “hate america”, “hate our way of life”, and so on. let’s zoom in on the latter, our way of life. like, instead of droning the shit out of them, one thing it seems that was rarely considered was asking “what about our way of life is so fucking repulsive that these people, these terrorists, were willing to crash planes into buildings?”
for one thing, it could be the coalescence of our economic and foreign policy. let’s not forget the west’s long involvement in the middle east. we could talk about opec. we could talk about the dictators we supported and then didn’t support, the shah, our elusive criteria for determining who is our enemy and who is our friend. we could go back further, to when we cut up the map, like we (we as in the west) had done earlier in africa. maybe what’s so repulsive about our way of life is that ignorance is bliss and that our economically imperialist system values profit more than people and that the public doesn’t seem to care like at all. they just want cheap gasoline for their suvs.
what scares me about hillary clinton is that, while it is true she has experience in foreign policy, it is also true that this experience is dangerous ... our support of israel is myopic and the double standard w/ which we treat them vs. say iran is hard to swallow, especially considering the history of israel qua nation-state. hillary is status quo, a continuation of the most troubling aspect of the obama administration. for what it’s worth, what scares me about donald trump is like everything.
a question is how do we seek institutional change, from within or without. from within, change is slow and weak and incomplete; from without, it basically does not exist. one can sell out or sit ineffectively from the sidelines. to exist in a system such as ours is to exist unfairly - you and i and we are the “for the sake of which” that our gov’t operates as it does. so to fill up your tank with sub-$2./gal gas is to act immorally. even if you’re on your way to the capitol to give some house republicans the old 1-2.
