Confused

I am confused. Really, really confused. Allow me to share:

Since Condoleeza Rice became Secretary of State, she has been traveling all over the world proclaiming our release of captives, getting in some good sound bytes about how we are making the world safe for democracy, advertising our crusade for freedom. I think she means the war that we are fighting in the Middle East, with the support of very few allies and against the wishes of the United Nations. Pardon me, but I cannot see how forcing countries into premature and unpremeditated democracy is a viable foreign policy. To me that seems like operating without sterilizing the equipment: inviting infection and corruption and eventual collapse. Yes, of course human rights ought to be defended, and women shouldn’t have fewer rights than their husbands and sons and brothers...but we are so inconsistent about our fight. That is what confuses me. Are we really fighting against countries that don’t have a separation of church and state? Because then we ought to be invading Norway next.

Does no one else find it hypocritical to say to the rest of the world, “you are inadequate and your governance insufficient because your constitution does not function exactly like ours,” when we are incredibly disproportionate consumers of the world’s fossil fuels and other resources and show no remorse about it (i.e. refuse to ratify the Kyoto Treaty, among other worldwide agreements)? And isn’t it a bit hypocritical to go after the rest of the world’s speck when the plank of homelessness, undereducation and inadequate health care still plagues our eye? Bush’s new budget tries to “solve” our 400 billion dollar deficit by cutting taxes of the wealthy (!) and cutting funding to social service agencies. Did you know we are opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve o oil drilling? Guess how healthy that is for the wildlife preserved there.

While we make sure the world watches us play superhero (or is it playground bully?) and speak in the voice of the Obnoxious American, the European Union is quietly going about its business of ensuring basic human rights on the continent. It is doing so not by waging war on those places whose resources are too scarce to initiate change, but by inviting them into the continental partnership and offering political and financial support and economic solidarity so that the newbies can achieve that balance. Did you notice that of the ten new EU countries, none of them can really be considered a “first-world” nation (to use terminology that is already obsolete)? Nope, these are re-developing nations, struggling to lift themselves out of an economically checkered past, recovering from a communism gone wrong or life under the rule of the other. The EU gives them motivation and incentive, and then it gives them help.

We are stealing from the poor to give to the rich, and then refusing to see any reality but that we are the ideal. Therein lies my confusion.