Lives in the Balance

Today I had to drive about two and a half hours south to meet with members of an organization's board of directors to discuss the services my company could provide to them. I was able to pick up a radio station from the place I was heading after driving only half-way. I'm glad I did; the station played several songs that I really enjoyed. Much of the music was from artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, but there were pieces from artists I didn't know and some from singers/songwriters I know, but not well.

Today, there was to be (and I guess there was) a huge pep-rally for George Bush near his ranch in Crawford, Texas. I wish the folks who participated in that rally had, instead, listened to some of the music I heard:

Lives in the Balance, Jackson Browne
Jerusalem, Joan Baez
You Let Him Take Advantage of You, Guy Forsyth
Empire, Dar Williams

Anyway, I listened to the music and enjoyed it, but it made me think, again, about how many men and women have their lives in the balance at this moment because of George Bush's decision to start a war in Iraq. Still today, though, despite enormous volumes of evidence that the entire Iraq and antiterrorism agenda is based on lies, there are many, many people who think it's more patriotic to support a morally bankrupt administration than to call on our country to change its policies.

When will they finally realize that patriotism is not the same thing as blind nationalism? And when will they realize that what we sometimes mistake for patriotism frequently ignores own history?

I heard a debate, about the time of the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombs being dropped on Japan about the legitimacy of the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. One of the debaters said the decision was justified because the Japanese attacked us and it spared untold lives that would have been lost if the war had continued. The other responded by asking a question, phrased something like this: "If a country is justified in using such weapons to stop a war because it did not instigate the war, then would Iraq be justified in using such weapons against the United States?" I thought the question had real merit...and it exposed something that too often Americans do not choose to acknowledge; our political policies frequently call for other nations to live by rules we choose to ignore.

It's not just that lives are in the balance anymore. It's that our way of life is in the balance.