world affairs

I agree with you on the reason people immigrate to here, it’s not our freedom they desire, but our stuff. I suppose it is better not to have a repressive government, but I think mostly people want to be able to earn big bucks and buy big things.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if Iraq had any kind of underground movement before we invaded it. Well I’m sure that they had some fundamentalists and some commie types, but I’m guessing the Shias had their own fundamentalists and commies, and the Sunnis theirs and the Kurds their own, so there were no nationwide underground organizations.

I wonder about the Syrians. From here it looked like what happened at first was freedom loving guys took up their guns against that awful Assad, and actually it looked for a bit like they might just pull it off, but then Assad brought in Hezbollah and then the freedom loving guys found those ISIS guys fighting alongside them, and outfighting them, and more interested in establishing the caliphate than a free Syria, and now it looks like it is basically Sunni vs Shia and now everybody is involved, and probably the people of Syria would have been better off had those freedom loving guys never took up their guns.

Back to Iraq, since we didn’t really want to stick around we installed, or helped install, a variety of guys, and now we have this Malaki who we want to dump, although how we do that when we only have token forces there is beyond me. And we will be glad to see Karzai gone in Afghanistan, but we will probably not like whoever takes his place. Well that’s the problem, there are no good guys to pick. We have to pick somebody who is acceptable to their people, and mostly their people hate us because our army is there, so we end up putting in some guy who doesn’t like us either.

And then in Israel, three Jews get assassinated (strange that we still don’t know exactly who did that) and the next thing you know the Transformers are let loose on Gaza, and the idiots at Hamas are pumping their popgun missiles into Israel. And neither side wants to stop unless the other side does first, and it looks like Israel will kill a bunch of Gazans, and finally pull out once they think they have weakened Hamas enough, but all the relatives of all the people they killed will be radicalized and so maybe ten years down the road the same thing will be happening again.

Oh but Ukraine, that’s what had me going on about the UN. It looks pretty sure that pro-Russian Ukrainians were armed by Russia with this Buk missile thing, which is a terribly irresponsible thing to do, and if Putin were a decent guy he would do something to atone for it, but he’s not a decent guy so who knows, maybe nothing will happen.

I wanted the UN to be stronger because maybe we could live with a little more repression if it would keep airplanes in the sky, and whatever collateral damages these wars cause down a bit. But we can’t actually know that it will, and who knows how repressive the UN would become if we gave it actual power. Back in my hippie days I was sort of for the commies taking over other countries, but not the US because I didn’t want to live by all those rules.

Of course I move in different circles now than in my bungalow belt days at Gage Park, but I have to say that racial attitudes are much more tolerant than they were back in the day when they were throwing rocks at Martin Luther King in Marquette Park. It’s not just Chicago of course, it’s everywhere, and that’s good. When I was subbing I saw almost no friction between the races in the student body and the faculty also.

What happened with the Indians up there? You know the French comingled quite a bit with the Indians way back so that everybody hanging around the trading posts were part French and part Indian and some had French names and some had Indian names. So I imagine those Frenchmen who found out that they were Indians were also part French. This whole thing about what race you are is mostly bullshit. I think we have discussed this before.

So what’s this about how it is not our country anymore? As the old joke goes, what do you mean we Kimosabe? Who are the we you are talking about? Straight white people I assume. Although a hundred fifty years ago, you would have been off-white, and part of the they who were moving in and taking the country over. There’s maybe five or ten percent black people living in Marina City, and I am sure there are many married gay people, but I don’t feel at all taken over. And I’ll wager if the gays moved in north of you and the blacks south of you and the Mexicans in the west and some Islamic folk to the east, you would not be moving either.

So there.