I suspect most of us have seen the yard signs saying “Not on our watch.” They’re sprinkled all over the Hudson Valley but I seem to see more of them in Rhinebeck than anywhere else. They’re usually next to the ‘Impeach Bush” lawn signs. The reference, of course, is to the horrible conflict taking place in Darfur in Western Sudan. To date more than 400,000 souls have perished in this civil war exacerbated by famine and drought. The world community has long been outraged but to date has done virtually nothing to relieve or resolve the horrors.
The bloated bureaucracy calling itself The United Nations has once again proven to be a toothless tiger incapable of breaking up a food fight never mind a genocidal conflict. The U.N. is an obscenity which should be abolished with the member nations giving their annual budgets to people who really need it.
But let’s get back to the signs and the folks who put them up. Do they really think the signs make a difference or are they just trying to generate public awareness of whatever situation or cause they espouse or oppose? Or are these signs the political equivalent of wearing a candidate’s button on your shirt?
The few times I’ve made the mistake of chatting up someone with a button, the conversation often ends with my saying “I’ll be back in a minute. I need a refill.” What I’m really thinking is “Why in the world did you think you’d enjoy talking to the woman with the Hillary button?”
In the case of the “I hate Bush” signs, many of them sprouted before the Supreme Court ruled in his favor in December 2000. I’m sure the angry liberals who planted them in their front yard felt better for it but they accomplished nothing. It’s the individual equivalent of Ohio’s Congressman Dennis Kucinich taking the House floor the other day to introduce a resolution to impeach the President.
The House voted 251-166 to send the resolution to committee where it will suffer the same fate as the wacky Congressman’s presidential campaign. The irony is all 251 votes in favor of tabling the measure came from democrats and the 166 in favor of putting it to a vote were republicans. That’s because democrats were scared to death an impeach Bush vote would hurt them in November and the republicans wanted the anti-war vote on record.
Given how awful things are in Darfur, I’m wondering if our relative lack of outrage is a by-product of our incursion into Iraq. Because here’s the rub, if you’re a liberal opposed to the Iraq War, you’ve painted yourself into a corner. You can’t say we were wrong to invade Iraq in an effort to ease the suffering under Saddam Hussein while advocating interjecting ourselves and the world community in The Sudan. Iraq was basically a civil conflict as is Darfur. At some point we end up making foreign policy based on definitions of righteousness and self interest. I think it’s fair to say we’d be in Darfur if they had anything we want like oil reserves. Color me cynical.
But I’m also cynical about lawn chair liberals feeling morally superior because they have a sign on their lawn proclaiming “Not on our watch.” Because it has and continues on our watch and it’s going to take more than a few smug slogans to change things.
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The “not on our watch” signs are usually followed with something about the issue involved. Sometimes they espouse Liberal causes and sometimes Conservative causes. Another example of these signs is the folks in Poughkeepsie that are too happy with the new roundabouts. About all these signs or any signs, for that matter, are good for is to indicate to the powers that be that there are a lot of unhappy folks and maybe they might just do something. Remember Stop the Sprawl?
There have been genocides all over the world. Recent examples that I can think of are Rwanda, Congo, Indonesia and the Balkans. My suspicion is that the reason that we chose to intervene in the Balkans and not the other places is that those folks in the Balkans are more like us. It is a natural thing to feel more empathy for people that are more like us and, being a predominately Caucasian country, those are the people that we helped. It is not a ‘racist’ thing; it is a question of what qualifies for empathy in most peoples minds.
The Iraq invasion was initially billed as stopping Weapons of Mass Destruction. Them it became rebilled as a ‘bring ‘em democracy’ mission. If Congress and the public were more alert, they should have stopped the whole thing then and there as there clearly was something else at play. Oil is a good guess and it’s not necessarily a matter of money for the oil companies. As we are beginning to realize, the world runs on oil. I’ll wager that when the time comes that alternative energy marginalizes oil, the interest in Mid-East stability will fade away.
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