McCain: Just click the heels of your Ruby Slippers 3 times . . . .
Thu May 15, 2008 at 09:47:23 PM PDT
Before you read this, please read the well-written and well-documented diary by existenz about the "Huge McCain Blunder." That is a great and informative diary; this one is a humbler follow-up on one particular point that struck me when reading that earlier diary.
I just keep wondering, Is McCain really as clueless as he keeps appearing? How could the man have attained the longevity in office and the respect by people on both sides of the aisle that he has achieved, if he is really as far out of the "reality loop" as he seems to me to be?
The statement that caught my attention was this one, uttered as part of the entire Republican party's attempt today to paint Obama as the second coming of Adoph Hitler, or Neville Chamberlain, or some other entity representing evil personified, simply because Obama has stated that it's a good idea to talk with those with whom our nation has conflicts:
I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.
I am not going to even try to dissect the historical inaccuracies in that statement; existenz has done a much better job of that than I could do.
Rather, I want to take the statement at face value, especially the part in bold type, and explore what it tells us about the mind of the man who said it.
I was a cradle Catholic, so I can't count the number of times I've heard the Beatitudes read and preached from the pulpit. "Blessed are the peacemakers" was always one of my favorites. But it wasn't until well into my adulthood that I heard a homily ("sermon," or "message," to the non-Catholic among us) that caused me to realize what those four words really mean.
The point of the homily was that Jesus didn't say "Blessed are the peace-lovers" or "Blessed are the peace-wishers" or "Blessed are the peace-seekers" or "peace advocates." Rather, he spoke of the peace makers.
Since then, I've thought a lot about what it means to make peace.
Peace making is not a passive state of being. It is an active state of doing. Making peace is hard work. It requires not only a strong desire for peace, not only a burning desire to see peace become a reality in our lives or in our world. It also requires a willingness to take initiative, to speak truth to power or to loved ones or friends or acquaintances who don't want to hear it. It requires the willingness to be ridiculed, to be thought a silly idealist, a "dreamer" as Lennon said. It requires sometimes beating one's head against brick walls, hoping eventually to break through those walls. It requires persisting through discouragement, continuing to have faith and hope and fortitude.
And it requires something else. It requires communication. Two-way communication. It requires listening for understanding. It requires recognition that no two people, let alone two nations, see reality in quite the same way. And therefore the only way to begin the process of making peace is to take affirmative action to begin developing a mutual understanding among the two conflicting entities.
Because any outcome that does not involve this mutual understanding is not really peace. It is appeasement, or bullying, or surrender, or passive-aggressive pretension, or some other dysfunctional way that human beings relate to one another when they don't know how to make peace, or don't really want peace, or don't believe they deserve real peace, or don't believe the other person deserves real peace, or are too lazy to bother making peace.
I am so relieved, and so happy, and so proud, to be supporting a candidate for the White House who clearly understands these realities.
John McCain, OTOH, clearly doesn't agree with these thoughts I've had over the years about peace.
In John McCain's world, peace doesn't require anything difficult like talking with one's enemy, seeking understanding, risking rejection or ridicule. In John McCain's world, all Ronald Reagan had to do to achieve peace (or maybe a more desirable alternative to peace: domination?) was simply state to Iran that they were going to return our hostages, and voila! the hostages were returned.
In John McCain's world, apparently all one has to do to achieve the return of hostages by a hostile power is to click together the heels of our ruby slippers, and repeat, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home."
Or to achieve a favorable outcome to the Iraq conflict, apparently all we have to do is click those ruby slippers and state "Mission Accomplished."
And maybe we achieve mid-East peace by clicking the ruby slippers together, glaring at Hamas, and declaring that everybody will stop picking on Israel.
Or, maybe we have to Bomb Iran and obliterate everyne who disagrees with us?
What is clear is that in John McCain's world, diplomacy is useless, unnecessary, and/or evil. No wonder that in that world, there will always be war, and we can expect to spend up to a thousand years in a country once we go to war there.
I am so glad that for the next eight years, we will be living in Barack Obama's world instead.
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