A hypothetical:
You are invited to a new friend's home for the first time. As you drive up, you see a large imposing gate with a guard house & three guards armed with assault weapons. They check your car thoroughly, opening the trunk, scanning the bottom with mirrors, patting you down... the "full monty" as it were. Once through the security check, you drive up through acres of expansive gardens, tree-lined lanes and end up at a fantastic mansion. Upon entering the edifice, you are greeted with soft music played by a live trio on a balcony above the huge marble floored entryway.
Impressed right?
What if you knew that the staff that maintains the grounds lives in near servitude in a small camp just over the hill with no water or sewage facilities? What if their own children are kept on a subsistence diet and locked in the basement all day with no human interaction? What if the house staff was all illegal aliens working for almost no pay and living in the staff "wing" with no heat and exposed to lead and asbestos poisoning? What if the whole house was slowly sinking into their illegal toxic waste dump in the back yard?
Still impressed?
Or would you be more inclined to report these people to the authorities?
Wouldn't you think it was wrong for them to live like kings on the misery of their children and staff?
And when times were tough, would you accept that their choice to reduce their staff's wages and feed the kids dog food (while still getting that new Maserati they were eying) was an acceptable austerity measure?
If you are still talking to these people, your ethics are somewhere in the area of Darth Vader and nothing I can say here will help you to understand.
It often helps to oversimplify a situation to get to the true logic behind the answer to any problem. Once the logic can be viewed, you can use that to structure the final resolution. Once you have done this, the answer becomes almost self-evident.
Don’t bother trying to simplify the hypothetical situation I opened with, it is itself an oversimplification of the situation our country finds itself in today. Today... where a politician can suggest that social services should be cut, while maintaining that our current military expenditures and corporate tax breaks are necessary, and not be harangued/voted out of town/office for their inability to see simple logic.
Our infrastructure is failing, our children are being ignored, our government is being corrupted by big business and our people are suffering. The key word here is "OUR". It's "our" problem. Until we can look at our country as a whole and work toward a solution to the problems that really matter, and do it collectively, we haven't a chance.
Have you ever met someone that would happily lay down their life for "their country"? Would you be surprised if they also espoused that they had a problem with their tax dollars going to help those less fortunate citizens? Do you see the inherent dichotomy in that reasoning? Sometimes you even hear them at once, such as "I didn't risk my life for my country so my tax dollars could go to help some lazy hippies". It appears that these people put less value on their life than they do on their wallet... or am I wrong? Do they not understand that more can be gained for this country by addressing the needs of its citizens than by rattling sabers to impress foreign powers? We already have the biggest saber in the world (by a factor of 10)... rattling it just makes us look stupid.
"Speak softly and carry a big stick" – T.R.
We have the stick... and it's a biggie... but we keep waving it around like a madman. I don't know about you, but I'm not likely to try and chat with the 240lb ex-wrestler on meth that's angrily waving an axe handle around. Individuals that exhibit that dysfunctional behavior are often dealt with by coalitions of others that normally wouldn't associate with each other. Let's not continue feeding that monster or we're likely to find ourselves the recipient of one stellar beat-down by all the disaffected parties combined. And to those who think we'd win in a fight between us and the rest of the world, I ask... win what? The right to live in a post-nuclear nightmare before we slowly go extinct?