Syria: What To Do?

No choice can be clear. No choice can be definitive. Ultimately, we have no idea how any of the presented scenarios will impact Syria. Even simply remaining outside the problem and ignoring it is fraught with peril, if Syria falls to elements who have the intent of creating a paradise for fanatical & radical elements of Islam. What we're going through with Syria now is akin to situations that have sprung up throughout history, where some nations have had to determine whether intercession in the affairs of another nation were to their betterment or detriment.

This isn't about President Obama, or the partisan split in Washington, D.C., or even about military jingoism and the furtherance of failed Imperialistic policies. It comes down to this: how much do we care about the people of Syria? You can cloak this issue in any talking point you choose, wrap it in discord, fluff it with care & concern, but as each second ticks away, bodies fall. They've been falling steadily for two years. It's Syria's civil war but it's humanity's view of the future: are we willing to accept the wholesale slaughter of a nation by its government?

We're ones to talk. America has its own chemical weapons, America has killed thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions in war. We fought one of the bloodier civil wars in known memory. Where do we get off dictating who can do what to whom?

It's not really that simple, anymore.

Human history is replete with atrocity. Just in the last 100 years, tens of millions have been fed into the meat grinder that is geopolitical conflict and dictatorial overreach. We have now harbored weapons for close to seventy years that have the capacity to eradicate all human life on the planet. We have stood each other off with pointed sticks, cold steel, hot lead, the fiery hearts of stars, the insidious clutches of vile microbes, and the misty smoke of caustic chemicals. We have reached the pinnacle of destructive power. No amount of wishful thinking or eye blinking will make it all go away.

But we live in an unprecedented time, when technology has placed the happenings on our planet in our living rooms in minutes, and given us access to people globally in seconds. What happens anywhere is suddenly accessible at almost any moment, and people who were lines in a newspaper or on a map are now flesh-and-blood before us. Conflict and strife are no longer distant rumblings; the people involved in them are no longer strangers.

If we want peace, we have to make it. Preferably through forbearance, forgiveness, and friendship, but we must also accept that we, as a species, being on the cusp of breaking from the long, gloomy traditions of violence that plague us, cannot always simply toss aside the tools of war. If we must take up arms against a sea of troubles, let those who take them up do so with the noblest intent, despite whatever may have come before. Let a precedent be set that says we will end destructive conflicts with words, with gestures, with diplomacy, where we can, but we will not be afraid to end them as we must.

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent," Isaac Asimov wrote in his novel "Foundation," and it is definitive in its indictment of war mongering as a means to an end. That phrase, however, means more when yours is a society that is no longer locked in the shackles of conflict, when your leverage is not merely at the end of a gun barrel. Right now, we are incompetent, and remain so until we can tamp down the sparks that set alight the conflagrations that engulf races, cultures, countries, and creeds.

So let us choose wisely, but let us choose, and let us know that whatever the choice, there will be consequences and repercussions, unseen and unbidden. People will still die, but perhaps we can pave a better road to peace by showing our resolve to have peace. When it is over, we will bury the dead, ask forgiveness, and move on, as humans always have, hopefully wiser and more resolute not to let it happen again.

Revolution Declared, Revolution Unfinished

The day was July 2nd, though it is not the day we celebrate. On that day, a document was sent forth to be read everywhere, writ by the hand of Thomas Jefferson, that said that the thirteen British colonies in North America were no longer colonies, but states, and that those states were -- of a necessity viscerally felt -- no longer beholden to the British Empire. In the moment of this document becoming public, all hope of reconciliation with the mother country was consigned to futility, and the states were left to gamble what little they had, that they could, in fact, create the very nation they claimed they would.

We sit with two hundred thirty-six years of hindsight before us, and a checkered, quirky, sometimes nonsensical history behind us. We are at the latest of a series of crossroads, whose origin can be traced to that hot Summer in 1776 and the decisions made by the founders of our nation. Men all, slave-owners some, intellectuals most, these founders put down the blueprint for a nation in the words scrawled across that parchment. It was only a promissory note for a nation, but at least the thought was now on paper and public. It was not a guarantee of anything, only a hope that a nation could be built upon more human and reasonable principles.

Of course, the blueprint was flawed from the start, because these Founding Fathers, though intellectual and progressive for their day, were unwilling to challenge the conventions of their world. They allowed slaves and slavery to be written into the fabric of the nation, which lent a hollow sound to the phrase "all men are created equal." And in that, too, was the further hypocrisy of claiming inalienable rights, then denying those self-same rights to women.

Many of the Founding Fathers knew it was flawed, but they chose expedience and the desire for union over correcting all the wrongs of human society at that time and building a nation cleanly from the start. The native tribes of North America were left out. Slaves remained slaves. Women remained bound to men. In this, the foundation of the United States was shaky, and that weakness would cause crumbling that led time and time again to conflict that was wholly unnecessary. Even with a civil war, the foundation could not be shored up enough to keep the nation from facing the occasional shaking to its core. To this day and even in this century, we hear the creaking of floors, wrench at stuck and  squealing doors, and note the slant and slope of the window frames which keep so many shut.

They knew, these men, that what they started in July of 1776 would not spring fully formed from the earth, nor would it be a perfect union. They felt, rightly or wrongly, that it was more important to get the nation built, get it standing, and that it would be left to future generations to improve upon their workmanship. They were not afflicted with such hubris as to think they had, at a stroke, done so easily what thousands of generations of humans before had not been able to manage. Their belief was that if American citizens were given freedom and liberty, and the tools to maintain them, they could immeasurably improve what was begun.

So we stand here on another July 4th, Independence Day, and we are split. Some among us believe in America that is perfect as she stands, and see every attempt to change her as an affront to the founding. Some see a nation rife with hypocrisy and feel that we are deluding ourselves in thinking we are free. Many just want to live a normal life, and not be drawn into every battle over the meaning of being an American. Whatever your belief, whatever you may think, it is important to know this: this day we celebrate, is the birth date of an idea, a concept, not a full-fledged utopia. The revolution that began with this bold declaration, far from being over with the battle of Yorktown and the passage of the Constitution, would go on. It would go on at every point where people decided that our nation was not quite right yet, where some small matter or large injustice required adjustment.

It goes on even now.

What this day should mean to us, is a re-dedication to the cause that so emboldened the Founding Fathers, the cause of Freedom, Liberty, and Justice For All. We should recognize that what was begun with the reading of those words, "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another..." has never truly ended, nor can it. Though the flags are in their cases, the canons silent, the muskets propped up in the chimney corner, and the uniforms packed away, the American Revolution rolls on. Every American who looks at their nation, appreciates all that it gives them in the way of law and liberty, but knows there is more work to be done, especially where such law and liberty are not equitably apportioned to every single one of us. It remains the work of the sons and daughters of the American Revolution, and all who have joined them from shores far and wide, to continue the fight, and never surrender.