WASHINGTON, DC – Gunboat diplomacy was bad enough when the worst we had were gunboats, lobbing a few cannonballs at a place we knew had fewer cannonballs, and they knew it as well. Usually, the other side capitulated rather than be blown up. One has to wonder whether that reasoning will stand up when this country is threatening any and everyone.
Tariffs were just the early barrages. Every country on the planet was put on notice. Our dear leader and his demonic cohorts accept no limits.
I’m quite old, and with any luck, I won’t live to experience the Mad Max world even Albert Einstein saw coming.
Russia wants Ukraine, so it is trying to get it. China so far has resisted taking Taiwan by force, Israel is bit by bit fulfilling its river to the sea fever dream while murdering tens of thousands in Gaza, and, with impunity it seems, attacking its neighbors. Since our benighted leadership has thrown over all legal constraints and invaded another country, as Obama did in Pakistan, to gather up or kill some bad guy, any high or low ground has been ceded to the lowest of the low here.
Column after column has been sent forth to warn about the consequences when governments calculate how far they can go and inevitably go too far. The next conflagration won’t be fought with gunboats; it will be fought, albeit for a very short time, with nuclear weapons. The aftermath of that is well known.
The world is facing a cadre of old men in the last vestiges of their sanity who, having achieved power, seem to be unaware that everybody dies. In the winter of their lives, they appear to be almost eager to bring a nuclear winter on us all.
There are few left who experienced the trauma of World War, so today those without memory want to dismantle the organizations and rules that have prevented it. The United States had been seen since 1945 as a bulwark against chaos. But in the last few decades, we have slowly and inexorably become the problem. Trump’s cohort of soulless hell spawn are just one of the gangs who seem entirely unaware of the consequences of their actions.
It’s been 80 years, the span of my lifetime, since there has been a world war. In the same span of time, there had been many advances in medicine, most notably in vaccines to combat scourges that I remember. Polio maimed and killed tens of thousands of children. Mumps, measles, chicken pox, flu, and COVID have been kept in check. Yet, today, perhaps because of those successes, people seem to fear the cure more than the disease. They have no collective memory of what it felt like to have painful rashes and fevers or swollen glands that kept us in bed for weeks, or pustules all over our bodies, or our friends and family members living in metal tubes that breathed for them. That’s all forgotten. After 6 +decades of mandated vaccines, some sadly have suggested that there needs to be more testing. It’s been 60 years of testing. There are unfortunate reactions by some to vaccines, but that does not mean that we should overturn the successes and gamble on the outcome. Perhaps after a few decades of desperately sick children and adults, if there is still the capability to return to sanity, we will once again recognize the efficacy of vaccines.
M.A. Callahan
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
