I started writing a Haggadah last year, but what's the point of writing yet another Haggadah when the Passover-like stories we recount of our era are about be written?
We're going to war. War war war war war, there's no getting out of it now. American boots will be on the ground in five more minutes, the Strait of Hormuz may reopen tomorrow, but it's likely not be open for a bunch more years, Trump will put more and more money and troops into Iran, and eventually the war's going to involve the whole earth.
Now... let's be clear. The war is not going to involve the world tomorrow, it may not involve the world for another ten, twenty years, maybe we'll get out of it in this generation, but it's coming. There was always going to be a World War III, the question has always been 'when.' The more safeties you take off a society: the less regulations there are in business, the less is spent on social programs, the less important we find multilateral cooperation, the less we pursue expanding civil rights, the more dangerous the world gets. And simultaneously, the less important we find military vigilance and policing and border patrol and the less forgiving we are of past mistakes and flatten them all into equal crimes, the more likely war grows. You have to be ready and tough for war, and you have to be just as tough on the causes of war. Just like people, the more governments negate their responsibilities, the more those responsibilities rear their ugly heads on all of us.
This causes two paradoxes.
1. There are many people who want wars very badly, whether on one side or the other. They will do whatever they can to remove the safeties precisely because they want some kind of war. There isn't much in America of that far left wing warmongering these days, but the possibility is always there, and the more provoked and threatened the left feels, the more likely that wing is to grow and counterbalance a taste on the right for unicorn blood.
2. It's precisely because we need these safeties that people want to take the safeties off. Being responsible for a society is exhausting, demoralizing, unfulfilling work for nearly anybody. The reward for fixing agonizing situations is rarely ever to be thanked and usually to be yelled at. Fixing any situation is an inefficient, laborious process of trial and error in which all kinds of mistakes are made on the path to finding what works. It is so easy to convince yourself that we need to do less, that we don't need to be as vigilant (at home and abroad), that half of the country is cheating the other half, that anybody can convince themselves that living to fight another day is easier than it actually is.
Dogma is as dogma does, and everybody who views the world in absolutes is going to get it wrong. There is not a single person on earth who sees the world entirely correctly: some piece of information is always missing, and some part of each of our perspectives is always skewed, and any point of view that doesn't make serious provisions for what happens if your point of view is wrong will almost certainly be proven wrong.
And this causes a third paradox: One of the great ironies of history is that conservatives are generally much better at creating lasting peace, and progressives are generally much better at waging war. It's precisely because they don't believe in the necessity of it that they're good at it. No one who wants that level of responsibility should ever have it, and people who believe in peace or war too greatly will grow high on their beliefs and make us lose both.
Just here in America: it was Roosevelt who won a world war and Lincoln who won the Civil War, but it was Grant who butchered reconstruction and Wilson whose peace plan made WWII necessary, and it was Obama (ducks) who looked the other way while Russia was clearly interfering in country after country, relaxed and secure that the problem would solve itself. It was Nixon who opened relations with China, it was Eisenhower who prevented the Cold War from going hot, it was Reagan who brought down the Soviet Union without a shot fired, but it was Bush who took the world after 9/11, the most united it's ever been and threw it all away for a sojourn into Iraq to prove that America was invincible, and as bad as the Vietnam War was before Nixon got there, it was Nixon who created the secret war that created full-fledged communist dictatorships in Laos and Cambodia, one of which was perhaps the most murderous state of the 20th century's last quarter. And now?...
The fact is, conservatives make better progressives, and progressives make better conservatives. Look at America's two parties right now. Democrats may talk a game these days, but who actually has the power? Which side is radically changing the country, and which side is just playing reaction now?
I've said this before, but the base state of the world is neither war nor peace, it's conflict. One person, community, or organization wants one thing, another wants the same thing, but only one can have it. Or perhaps they want opposite things and both can't get their way. They either negotiate it and come to an understanding, or they come to fight with each other over it, or they delay the fight until the point of maximum advantage when they can win the fight best. And once that problem is solved, they move on to another problem with the same state of affairs.
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