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October 19, 2001 on 5:58 pm | In Main |We took Sean to the park after I got home from work today. He used the full sized swing on the playground for the first time. I can’t tell if his balance is good, or if he as a firm grip on the chains, but he stayed on the swing for 5 minutes or so. At the playground, the sprinklers were on, probably to water the winter rye grass seeds. Sean stepped into the sprinker spray, and got caught with the water spraying directly into his face, so he didn’t know what to do. By the time I got him out of the spray, he was soaked. It’s a good thing it was dry with the temperature around 90, so we didn’t have to worry about him getting cold.
Some people are suggesting we look at what the US has done to cause the recent terrorist attacks. I say we need to punish those responsible, but while we are doing that, we might want to look at the effectiveness of our foreign policy. When I look back at the last decade or so, I see a disturbing trend that we push too hard for stability or to maintain the status quo. While I see how corporations could push for this for overseas investment reasons, I think the problem is that we end up supporting some pretty terrible foreign governments. Not only do we keep thugs like Saddam and Gadhafi in power, but we allow so called royalty of Saudia Arabia and Kuwait to pillage their countries. I think all of our recent foreign policy disasters aren’t caused by the fact we got involved when we shouldn’t have, but by the fact that we did not go far enough. A good example of this is Afghanistan today. We worked hard to prevent the Soviets from conquering Afghanistan, but when the Soviet invasion was repelled, we didn’t pay any attention to who resumed control of the country. This allowed the Taliban to take power. With just a little bit of effort, we could have ensured a more stable, if not democratic, government took power. I really think this country needs to think hard about whether we want to be isolationist power or a dominant world power. I don’t think we can continue to go down the middle road. At this point, I can’t honestly advocate which particular choice we should make, just that we need to make a choice. The libertarian in me says that we should be isolationst, but I can’t also help think that the United States could go a long way to installing democratic goverments across the globe.
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