Voice of Experience
This post will make the most sense for those who have witnessed
war and are not freaked out by the cold calculus of accepting death as a
constant
and the loss of buddies as gut-stirring but as inevitable as taxes. Most
of the rest of the world has been forced to experience war first hand. Perhaps
that's why the rest of the world is unimpressed with this administration's
gung-ho attitude, so typical of raw recruits and so uncharacteristic of adults
who've peered into the abyss and lived to describe it:
"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can,
only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
"Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies,
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those
who
are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It
is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the
hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.
Under
the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
–
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I hate to diss fellow bloggers, but the warbloggers
seem to have a paucity of combat experience. We would never entertain
the
views
of
programmers
who've never hacked code, or historians who've never read history. Why would
we listen carefully to warbloggers who've never watched tracers arcing toward
their position?
Every warrior knows that perfect safety is a fool's paradise.
The premise of the current war on terror is that we can entertain our way
out of the terrorist threat. It's entertainment to feel an illusory omnipotence
that will hunt down every evil-doer and infidel–a kind of adolescent road
rage, really. The old heads in your squadron know to protect such greenhorns
from their enthusiasms, at least until they learn or die. "There
are old pilots and bold pilots. There are no old, bold pilots."
The warbloggers' broad lack of combat experience is so obvious
a disqualifier that I
apologize for not pointing out this disconnect last winter.
The Bush Administration dismissed European
caution last winter as a malady of "Old Europe," as if cultures which
include Dresden and
Hiroshima bring nothing to the dialogue. Reflecting on this, and the consistent
disapproval of our unilateral course, emanating from the lands that all of
us hail from, I wonder what the people of those cultures might bring to
our
current
election
cycle.
Second Hand Smoke
It must be frustrating to be a rational non-American. One
suffers from a kind
of
secondhand
smoke,
a victim
of behavior
you can't
stop.
Or like a neighbor to an appealing but uncontrollable, rowdy and violent
adolescent.
While non-Americans can't vote, I know many feel the same
urgency so many of us do, and may be even more anxious to help, their energies
otherwise
constrained.
Aid and assistance from non-Americans can be galvanizing to the conscientious
objectors to unilateralism, who often feel cut off from informed discourse
and often seem numbed by what
has happened.
In addition
to tech support and assistance, here are some projects that anyone in the
second superpower can contribute to:
Fact collections
Who, when, what, where, why, with attribution.
A fact is simply what an authoritative source reported.
True authority
is part
of the research, including background like how Rev. Sun
Myung Moon set up the Washington
Times to look like a legitimate newspaper, or Murdoch's Fox
News.
Though conservatives seem fact-averse, a year of unfolding
revelations might help some see the breadth and depth of the "vast right-wing
conspiracy" that
people laughed at when Hillary labeled it, but now has been well documented.
Armed
with the right sets of facts, someone could build a series of timelines,
contrasting spin vs. reality. I imagine these to be a vertical
web page,
a very long table, with a center column being the solid timeline,
presumably just a background color, with links among the discrete areas reported.
Others will think of better ways to do this.
The Virtual Anti-Spin Room
Properly organized, these "facts" can
also be a resource for people watching a Presidential debate or
Fox News. A researcher could constantly "push" fact-based
web pages which the viewers could compare with what is being said.
Debates are now accompanied by "Spin Rooms" of partisans,
so we should build a virtual non-spin room. They could also be
archived as a post event video
with interleaved sound bites vs. facts.
A pressing project is to
give a voice to people who feel disconnected from each other.
We need to expose our best thinking, starting
with individual blogs. Because the campaign issues are reasonably
clear-cut,
a straightforward
taxonomy
is available to form the basis of a knowledge aggregator. That
capability could persist after the election to inject fact-based
opinion into
the American political
dialogue. Technorati has some enabling technology for this purpose.
Finally, there may be entrepreneurial
opportunities. If we are serious about building extramural governance tools,
enterprises
must be formed
using the
pool of passionate, under-employed American techies. These activities
may be as important to our democracy as voting-machine companies
but more resonant
with the Constitution and good practice.
There are better ideas
than these. Whatever we do, we must overwhelm the contrived urgency of
the war on terror with our own passion
and intensity. Many Americans
feel these are extraordinary times requiring unprecedented
actions. They are right, but the actions are not a crusade against disenfranchised
Muslims.
We
need a global convergence of knowledge and novel economic
tools, obviously Net-based, that lead the world out of its nearsightedness
toward the common
destiny we all understand but which politicians choose not
to give voice to.
"I like to believe that people in the long run are going
to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that
people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better
get out of the way and let them have it."
– Dwight
D. Eisenhower
[Escapable Logic]
