Back when I was just a wee lad of eight or nine in the depths of the 1930s depression, I often wondered why some people had plenty while others starved. It seemed to me that everybody should share equally in earth’s bounty. Maybe I wouldn’t have had such thoughts had our family been among those with plenty.
I was quickly warned that such thoughts were communistic and un-American. In America we believed in the survival of the fittest, they said. Life was a competition and the market will determine who gets what.
In the movie, “The Grapes of Wrath,” I understood the feelings of the Oakie, Tom Joad, when he and his fellow grape pickers were called “Reds” when they walked off the job after the orchard owners cut payment for a basket of grapes to 3 cents from the promised 5 cents. “They call us Reds,” Joad said. “I don’t know no Reds. I don’t even know what Reds are but I do know we can’t get by on three cents a basket.”
A few years later I started thinking foolishly again when the United Nations was created after Europe was devastated from essentially their second civil war in 25 years. With Japan’s military crushed, the U.S. and Russia were the only two countries left standing when World War ll ended. What a good idea. The U.N. would have enough military power to enforce the decrees of a world court which would be the final judge in any dispute. The Soviets and the Americans would dismantle their forces and all countries would contribute to this new United Nations. To me this made much more sense than having conflicts resolved with a “might makes right” policy, particularly in the nuclear age.
I quickly learned that I was not thinking straight again. With nuclear weapons and relatively unharmed by the war, the U.S. was truly the world’s only super power. Some raised the idea of an all-powerful United Nations but were quickly shot down when others shouted, “What do you mean? Give up our sovereignty and be dictated to by a bunch of pipsqueak countries. No way.” So our moment of magnanimity passed. The cold war lasted forty years and regional wars popped up regularly. The United Nations has been little more than a debating society and it looked on helplessly when we backed tin horn dictators (like Saddam Hussein) not because they were right but because they sided with us and not the Soviet Union.
Bush may be correct when he calls the U.N. irrelevant. But he is wrong when he and his cabal of neo-cons try to do the U.N.’s job. With military and economic might the Bush bunch seeks to unilaterally control the world, pre-emptively striking wherever they perceive that evil exists. Sometimes this Bush doctrine may hit it right but it will always be considered arrogant and feared for its go-it-alone tactics—not only in war but environmentally, judicially, socially, and in all matters of concern to the world.
As a proud American, I hate it when our president’s name is booed and jeered around the globe and I am saddened when he visits the Queen of England and can’t appear in public or take a carriage ride with the queen for fear of angry mobs. Something is terribly wrong. George W. is likable enough but the Bush doctrine (our doctrine?) frightens friends and foes alike. We must change it.
