DISCLAIMER:
I consider myself to be a pretty badly informed voter, over all. Everything I know, I've learned online or from television news (including The Daily Show). It ain't much. But apparently it's still vastly more than the average voter, which frightens and depresses me.
That said, I've developed some opinions in the 35 years I've been alive, and most of them still hold true for me. I'm a liberal, left wing, pro-choice, feminist, anti-death penalty Democrat. I have vague memories of the Nixon years, and have had a healthy mistrust of Republicans ever since. When Reagan was shot, I was in 6th grade and I remember, distinctly, hoping he would die. (The entire country seems to have developed sympathy Alzheimer's when it comes to Reagan, incidentally. He ruined this country for millions, and I think he's getting off way too easily with Alzheimer's.)
I have major problems with the US relationship with Israel. I have bigger problems with the US relationship with Saudi Arabia. I'm not naïve - I know it's a complicated world - but I remember Iran-Contra, I know enough about the CIA to hold them responsible for most of the US's morally reprehensible involvements in repressive, brutal regimes throughout the world. Most of the time I am resigned to the fact that the bad guys have been winning since time immermorial and likely will continue to win - as George Carlin put it, I've resigned myself to watching the world circle the drain. Unfortunately, I haven't developed Carlin's ability to detach from it and find it amusing. I find it appalling. I guess it's really hard to harden a bleeding heart.
My bleeding heart liberalism aside, however, I am very cynical. I tend to believe the worst of our government, especially when it comes to our activities overseas - Iraq, for example. It's about money, it's about power, it's about oil, it's about Bush. Not for a MOMENT do I believe it had anything to do with removing "a madman from the most dangerous region of the world." It's been said countless times before, more articulately - the world is full of madmen in dangerous regions of the world. "WE" only go after the madmen when it's in "our" financial interests to do so.
I don't really weep for the dead soldiers in Iraq the way I did for the dead in Vietnam, because this generation of military signed up for it voluntarily, while most of the dead Americans in Vietnam were drafted (unlike my father, who was a Marine and was killed in Khe Sanh on February 8, 1968 during Tet). I'm not callous, mind you - but dying in Iraq is not the same as dying in Vietnam - unless you take into account that our reasoning fo being in both places was and is equally specious. To put it bluntly, I am against any war that is not ABSOLUTELY necessary, and I believe that anyone who willingly participates in the machinery of war - including anyone who joins the military in peacetime - and participates in war... well, I don't believe they get "what they deserve," but I also don't hold them to be blameless.
As for the mercenaries, well, put it this way: I wasn't the least bit outraged at Kos's now infamous blog post. Nor was I surprised or outraged at the "desecration" of their bodies. It seemed pretty predictable to me. (I guess I must be more inured to that sort of thing than most - or perhaps I just don't hold a dead body to be a sacred thing. I'd be far more horrified by the torture of a living human being than by a dragged dead one. I understand the reaction of outrage and horror, I just don't share it.)
Taking it to another level, I was surprised by the attack on New York in 2001 - not that it occurred, but that it hadn't happened sooner. I understand how most Americans WERE surprised. We've been insulated by our power, our money and our size for so long, it's only reasonable that we came to believe ourselves invulnerable to the vagaries of world turmoil we'd so far only witnessed from the safety of our living rooms on 21 inch screens, in tiny, easily digested bites.
I'm getting into a weird moral quagmire here as I write this. What IS an ABSOLUTELY justified war, anyway? I could go either way. I could say, no war is justified unless it is a defensive one, against the actual encroachment on our country. Or I could say that we should be the world's policemen and involve ourselves in every case where tyrants, madmen and despots are killing, enslaving and repressing innocent people. See, this is the point in my thought process where I usually throw up my hands in despair and rent a romantic comedy. Because there are cases to be made for both positions. The world is nothing BUT shades of grey. I have often wished I were stupider, that I could simply join a party and a church and happily do as I was told and think as I was told - and leave the hard questions and decisions up to someone else. Shamefully, I have done that all too often - not out of ignorance, but out of laziness and selfishness. I often deride "most people" for being stupid, lazy and essentially despicable - but the reality is, I am one of those people. I am much more likely to wish away the world and exist in my little corner of it, coming out to protest ONLY when the outside world starts upsetting mine. I guess that may be human nature - but perhaps we, as humans, are supposed to fight that sort of nature. Which begs the question - who says? Is there a God? What is morality? The case can be made for the existence of some sort of universal morality, if only by dint of the heavy evidence that for all of history, mankind has adhered to a basic set of moral standards that seems to have arrived in our DNA unbidden - unnless there is a God.
Oh, man. See what happens when I start thinking? I just want a cheeseburger, a beer, a cigarette, some Demerol and a massage.