Culture of Life, Bush, the GOP, and the Democratic Party
Recently a retired general was asked if he'd like to be the Iraq and Afghanistan "war czar" or overseer. He said no, principally because the Administration doesn't know where it wants to go. Well, there is one principle that ought to be more than a slogan for the Bush Administration which could help it a step closer to figuring out specifically what it needs to do for the next two years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what will work to carry out the strategy. It is a life-preservation analysis.
The "Culture of Life" are three important words that both parties should embrace, and they ought not be abused by hypocrisy. A culture of life is collective and it is individual. It should be rooted in majoritarian movements and individual causes.
To care for and protect life requires depth of reflection, implication thinking and perseverance. It has to involve a patient, long-term policy committment on both sides of the aisle.
However, to be pro-life with respect to the unborn must also mean pro-life with regard to making war decisions for national defense of life, and not for mercenary motives mixed with attenuated links to actual defense of persons. It also implies quality of life domestically.
Where war or domestic policies are not so rooted in the service of Life, then it is no longer national defense and no longer meaningful domestic liberty, but national avarice or berserkness.
Rather than coerce other peoples in regions with resources our companies want to exploit, a Culture of Life government would coerce our companies to re-tool for renewable energies at a pace that obviates the disingenuine game of mercenary war. The coercion and the result are a lot less expensive than mercenary war. There is no other way to act on one's words about a Culture of Life.
Case in point: if Iranian PT boats approach a US PT boat in Iraqi waters with hostile intent, the Iranian PT boats ought to be engaged and sunk. It doesn't warrant a wholesale war against Iran.
The industrial interests in premature death, whether military-industrial, resource-industrial, or abortion-industrial, require checking. Each have a monetary interest in life-taking for gain. In many ways, with deep governmental relations treasuries, they are quasi-governments that lobby/donate/politick far more than any individual natural person (e.g. parent of a Marine or GI) could ever afford to.
From campaign donations to lobbying to manipulation of markets, mass advertising, and in some cases intrusion into the mind-shaping influence of public schooling, these interests challenge government and individual rights sovereignty more than individuals who protest the abuses of authority by specific administrations and congresses.
It is my hope that the parties come together over this Culture of Life theme, cease fire among themselves, and line-up our national policies consistent with preservation of life and quality of life domestically and abroad. National defense is to defend human lives.
At present, it looks more and more like this Commander in Chief will not engage in implication thinking about the Culture of Life in the international context. He does not appear to openly think through the impact of past and future decisions on the Culture of Life he claims to support. He does not think through, but selects partisan ideologies to execute from a menu of slogans that have not delivered more than gridlock. It is not that the other party has successfully reached across their own ideologic catatonia, however, more recently, they've done a better job at it in the White House (beset with other problems).
These are the same ideologies which have kept the nation not-so-progressive toward the Culture of Life and quality of life we all claim to prefer.
Is the answer to use the impeachment power more than the founding fathers intended its use? Such a process may be a hardship, however, hardship has a way of cleaning out the closets and organizing a country to discipline itself to avoid trials tomorrow.
Unfortunately, it is the partisan way to brag about being right and taking credit for outcomes with spin rather than to take responsibility for error, failure and redouble efforts to turn it around. Those who will not humble themselves from this disastrous way of doing business must face hardships to humble them.
The legal equivalent to the partisan political climate of the Clinton/W.Bush terms resulted in added requirements in rules of courts nationwide for conflict resolution and mediation before trials could be scheduled. Rambo litigation had been eating litigants, lawyers and court schedules alive in the 1980s. It had led to abuse of discovery, abuse of witnesses, abuse of costs, and had damaged the very purpose of the system of redressed grievances. This is what we now have government wide on key issues.
There is the principle of "the extra step," and it is the rule that when we're tired and ready to give up, that is when we dedicate ourselves to take one extra step to seek breakthrough and resolution. There is a difference between productive conflict and destructive. Knowing this difference is a first step to resolving problems that government and participation in it were meant to solve.
