My first rant.
Why can’t I find one anti-war protestor who’s willing to engage in a frank exchange of views on the issue? This question has been nagging me for the past few weeks now. I certainly know enough people who’ve delighted in joining war protests or otherwise opposing hostilities (they’re especially plentiful in college towns near major cities, like mine.).
These people appear to be very outspoken around like-minded folk, but every time I try and broach opposing viewpoints they’re either dismissive or they fall silent altogether. This tendency is found in many people who subscribe to political extremes, but it’s particularly applicable to the young, naive liberals who can be found on most college campuses.
Before I go any further, I’ll state that I do not mean to disparage the peace movement as a whole. In fact, there are plenty of valid reasons to oppose war — ones that the Democratic party could seize on if it wasn’t so incompetent.
I do not, however, respect the college slacktivists who mobilize against the wicked and imperialist United States government for their own idiological reasons — withoutbothering to analyze the real-world circumstances that may necessitate our current position.
Again, this doesn’t encompass all liberal activists — just the specific type I’ve spoken to on many occasions, and who I can usually identify within 30 seconds of conversation. I try to engage them with reason (even if I already agree with them), but they can’t be bothered to come down from their moral high horse and discuss specifics.
There were some who said, for example, that after 9/11 the answer was to “give peace a chance.” To turn the other cheek, so to speak. This is because they oppose power — ANY power, and are against the use of force in any circumstance short of a direct attack on our own soil, their own state and their own hometowns. Those of us who support war will never convince these people; they are naive, their hands soft as a baby’s bottom, and yet they are paranoid at the same time, relentlessly spouting every conspiracy theory imaginable.
These super-liberals don’t like the specifics of their ideas questioned for one simple reason: they have none. That is, they have no alternative suggestions that are not built completely on wishful thinking.
And once they’re finally convinced to offer their own vision, one quickly realizes that every course of (in)action they would have the United States take would leave the rest of the world to its own devices against evil, and eventually leave this country encircled and impotent.
I may regard George W. Bush as a failure as president, but thank God the country isn’t being run by the intellectually lazy Naderites I went to school with.