I'm a news junky, I admit it. I am glued to the TV each Sunday morning as I get my weekend fix. A strange thing happened yesterday morning. Before Chris Matthews’ show came on, the viewing audience was teased with snippets about what to expect on his show. There was something about the CIA spies who couldn't see straight, so it was apparent the show would deal with last week’s report about the so-called failures of the pre-war CIA intelligence. Here's the weird part. When the show began, it was a rerun of one of his shows filmed before the war. There was no explanation why and no crawl at the bottom of the screen explaining that this was a re-run. Here's where it gets weirder. Last night on MSNBC, when they usually show a rerun of Chris's Sunday morning show, they showed the current show that should have been aired yesterday morning. Did this only happen in my area or was it the same where you live?
One amazing thing that came from Chris' current program last night, was a prediction that Ron Reagan Jr. will speak at the Democratic Convention. How cool would that be? That tidbit of information should give the Republicans stomach cramps at the very least. Imagine, Ron Reagan who is a superb speaker, standing at the dais and speaking to the world about his differences with the current administration. Verbal nectar for the gods! That's what it would be for us. Verbal Ipecac syrup is what it would be for the Republican Party. A dose of this kind of medicine might be good for the Republican folks even if it is hard for them to swallow. Maybe it'll clean them out and open up their minds. Republicans did not invent the closed mind but some of the extreme Republicans seem to try their damnedest to act like they did.
There are extremist on all sides. In my opinion, the extreme Democrats want all peace all the time and the extreme Republicans appear to want all war all the time. Peace means we don't kill one another and war means that we do. So what does that say about the two parties? If the extreme Democrats could try to accept that sometimes war is necessary and if the extreme Republicans could try to accept that war should only be used as a last resort, then maybe we might make some progress toward a more peaceful world – a world where war is something we try to avoid rather than something we wage boastfully. Perhaps the declaration of war would be realized for what it truly is, the use of our most precious commodity. Maybe we would see war not as something we use freely but something that must be used sparingly, because what we lose in war, we can never get back.
In my personal opinion, war is the most primitive way to settle a dispute. I wish mankind would invent a better way. We've had ample time to work on that, and all we've managed to do is make the outcome of our disputes deadlier not saner. I bet if we spent as much effort, money and time trying to figure out how to avoid war as we do trying to figure out how to make it deadlier, we might come up with something that would make us actually safer. We also might even be universally admired instead of universally hated. Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't be. I think the problem is that we accept war as a naturally occurring event rather than admitting that it's a powerful and deadly event and man’s worst invention.
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