As an American, I am often frustrated with the politics and segmentation of our country. half the time I want to run away and half the time I stubbornly refuse to leave because if everyone who had a problem with the politics left then well, hell, we’d really all be going to hell in a hand basket, I mean just look at the last 8 years. I’d like to think it can’t get much worse than that but I don’t think running away is a good way to address the problems.

Anyway, the point of this post is to discuss the affairs of the Middle East. I was just reading the times on the way to work this morning and an op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman really made me think. I mean everything that is going on in the Middle East isn’t quite so easy to categorize as we have a tendency to do in our comfortable living rooms in our first-world nation. It’s not quite the same to sit here and pontificate about how we shouldn’t have gone to war with Iraq, we should have gone after bin laden, etc etc etc. but you know, that’s not really the problem. I think Friedman put it quite nicely when he said that drilling for oil cannot be the only reason to go to war but neither can this so called war on terrorism when we haven’t spent enough time thinking about the basics of why these “terrorists” exist. (I am not getting too detailed about his idea) I appreciated the ideas that he put out there because it actually made me sit back and think outside of party-lines. Outside of what the media has been feeding us for several years now. In fact it made me think about a lot of things that I don’t get a chance to think about quite frequently. I’d like to say this is because I don’t have time (which is partially true) but it is also because everyone is so busy being behind a party-line or some such extreme stance that no one has bothered to look at the bigger picture.

Oil is not a reason to go to war. Neither is the fact that the United States believes that Iraq should be a democracy. What about the Iraqi people, I mean yes they are stepping up and perhaps this is a bad example because they do seem ready for change but let’s look at Afghanistan, they don’t seem to be up for change right now. If the people of the country are not going to fight for equality or for change then what are we doing going to war. And beyond that why is war the solution? Aren’t there other effective political measures such as embargos etc that we could use to carry just as effective a message? Sure there is the oil factor but let’s face it. We have always known that oil is in limited supply, let’s get moving’ with the times people, we need to find more efficient ways of creating energy. The time of the oil industry is over; let’s explore solar, wind, and nuclear power sources. Let’s see what other resources we can use to revolutionize this next century instead of being dolts just following upon the path of our fathers refusing to see a revolution in the makes.