Posted by pancho (204.120.48.3) on February 03, 2002 at 10:22:06:
...I keep wondering why our grat leeders behave the way they do...why the ten zillion clubs and minutes and rules and proclamations. Then I realized that they are playing office...playing United Nations etc. We are trying to ape and emulate what we think a nation of peeepils does by watching the grown ups around us that we live among. That's why the mimicking of statemanship, the shabby knock offs of organizations and those painfull and tortured statements and "positions" and wurld conferences the rest of it.
We fail to realize that our situation in history is just about as unique as a thing can be. The closest thing to us, the Jews, aren't even close. We are scattered around the world...in some mean little way, making war through others against the remnant of our own people in our own homeland. This is unprecedented, I believe. The Jews NEVER turned their backs on Jerusalem just because it was controlled by the Arabs...hell they even made nice with the very people who almost slaughtered them, JUST so they could turn the tables on the Muslims...who never committed any genocide against them at all, but on the contrary were the only friends they ever had throughout their long history of abuse at Christian hands.
We, on that famous other hand, hate the Muslims so much we will set our own people up...kill them AND the land...just so we can hurt the Muslims, be it ever so little, compared to the damage we do to our own people and history and Heritage.
Our model, the course we set, has yet to be discovered...whatever it is, it is NOT going to be effective if it merely mirrors, in a crazy mirror at that...what we see real nations doing. We have to find our own voice...the right path for us.
People act as if our story is over...that our glory days are long gone and it remains only to nurse this old fart of a heritage into the grave. But that is hardly the case. We did "empire" back when it meant something...when it was a positive force for the development of civilization and its protection from the barbarians. And we did it marvelously well. Those days are over...today "empire" means destroying civilized behavior and peaceful aspirations...the barbarians are no longer at the gate...they are inside running these barbarous regimes...the Western Christians among the worst.
Our long march through history has not slowed at all, and just as we were first among nations, at the vanguard...so do we have the opportunity to break new ground for all Mankind and Womankind today...as we once did when the game was played to different rules. Our challenge today, and one which will increasingly face others on this shrinking, stinking, planet...is to find a way to preserve the best of us, the best in us....to help it grow and prosper WITHOUT resorting to those age old barbaric methods we see still practiced all around us.
The Jews stepped backwards...that was the price they paid for getting a country...they had to steal it from someone else...as Joshua did way back when they returned to their promised land from Egypt. They did it again...and now face the grissly prospect of being scolded and exposed by their own military officers no less, who can no longer do the very kinds of things that were done to them a few short years ago. The modern day rabid Israelis have blackened the good name of the Jews...and to their credit other Jews are speaking out.
There has to be a way of thriving without killing the opposition. You have to be able to teach the values of peace without the methods of violence. Our path lies not through emulating or copying anyone else...especially not in the infantile ways these clubs and organizations from hell are doing it. They are each and every one of them an embarassment and a joke when they step outside of the bingo social partying scene they seem to really be geared up and meant for.
There is most definitely real work to be done...but we have to find out what that is first, and not pattern ourselves on a Big Brother somewhere. We discovered a new way to do Empire once upon a time...we have to find a new way to do without one now...but without becoming caricatures of "real" Nayshuns. The essential challenge our great ancestors faced is still the same one we face today...we still have to create our own path as we did then....copying and pretending just wont do, and was never our style.
note to Lulia: I am not going anywhere.