I try to make it a rule not to react to headlines. But I had to say this.
AP and CNN are reporting that the balloon has been shot down off the coast of North Carolina. What are the ramifications of that happening?
Especially considering that a second balloon was allegedly spotted flying over South America. Not South America like Alabama, but instead, the landmass that is home to the only continental Caribbean nation.
I am anti-war. All wars. I think it is a horrible means to resolve disputes. Maybe it's because of the horrors I have witnessed in my own life, but this incident doesn't do anything to ease global tensions.
I wrote in an article on Medium why I am opposed to the war in Ukraine. To think this incident with the Balloon will not have ramifications for the ongoing conflict would be short-sighted.
The provocative actions of the Chinese government, in sending the balloon, are yet another in a long string of actions that have been taken over decades. China has been poking us with a stick since they intervened in Korea.
Russia has had the same mentality, save for the few years after the wall fell. Those were good times. The world actually felt safe; at least it did to the bullet-proof 20-year-old version of me.
I have always been cautious when tensions flair up in Asia. It puts an uneasy feeling in my stomach. The political and economic ties that bind those countries together are as strong, as the ties that bind us to our allies.
There is no way, we could simultaneously defend the NATO countries while fighting conflicts in the Pacific theater. You'd think that's about as bad as it would get, but imagine 80 years' worth of animosity in the Middle East, finally boiling over. Or, how does Trotsky play into all of this? We could be fighting a war on land in this very country, at both our northern and southern borders.
I know it's all very Red Dawn (the real version, not the hack of a remake) but I have spent the better part of my life studying history. To understand history, you also have to read the works of the people who influenced the things that made it into history books. I've read a lot, is what I am trying to say. China and Russia don't have to answer to the world, because, in their worldview, they are the world.
So much so that China and Japan met a few days ago, and in typical Chinese fashion, they had a long ass stick and were poking it into the ribs of Japan. Look at the vote totals of the UN Resolution condemning the Ukraine War, it passed but 5 voted no, and 35 abstained. It was not a unanimous vote. The abstentions read like a who's who of people who are just sitting back relaxing, waiting for big brothers, to get done fighting.
I don't have a solution for the global crisis. Escalating the conflict by tit-for-tat actions isn't going to solve anything. Neither is neutrality. Someone said it but neutrality favors the aggressor. I'd like to say the solution to the problem, is for the United States to treat these people as the bully and go at them with all the might and power that the American spirit holds. Even that wouldn't be a solution. Our country is as divided as the rest of the areas of the world in conflict. To accomplish something like that we would need to resurrect the spirit of American might that was World War Two.
We wouldn't have that kind of support though, we can't even decide on the definition of Truth.
These are bad times, I would say apocalyptic. A battle between good and evil is being waged. It's a battle about privacy, and choice; one of identity and one of faith. It's a battle between the extremes of not only those ideas, but so many more. It is a philosophical fight that has been waged for millennia; a fight that boils down to a liberal (in the sense of rights, not policies) vs authoritarian question. In its purest form, it is the battle between Freedom and Oppression.
If I were one of those countries that have stood in the shadow of the United States for almost a century, this time in our own history, would be the time when I would do everything I could to diminish the prestige of the United States.
We are no longer a country united, the things that divide us are far stronger than the things that unite us.
We are only as strong as our weakest member, and right now, there are about 600,000 of them on any given day that goes unhoused. We have an indigenous population that is spread across 200+ sites; sites where we forced them to move by the threat of annihilation. Some of those areas like Pine Ridge have rates of poverty over 40%.
We fight amongst ourselves, while families seeking safety from the horrors of a War on Drugs, that we created, are used as imagery for political stunts. We can number our own casualties of brothers and sisters, dying of overdose at about 200 a night. We fight over gender, sex, clothes, food, and news. We fight everything except the things we should be fighting like the eradication of homelessness. We care less for the children than we do anything else. We use them as pawns in a battle of ideologies, where both sides claim they are doing it for the children.
I have a question, and I've asked this before, in a few other articles I have written: If it's for the children why are so many slaughtered daily in this country?
If we really cared for the children, there wouldn't be 94,000 of them homeless on any given night. They are slaughtered in schools, churches, and stores across this nation by an archaic tool that has no place in a civilized world. Sometimes just in a car. Like the 16-year-old girl that was murdered the other day along with her 10-month-old child. Maybe she was 17.
If it's for the children, why is there multi-generational poverty, in the richest country in the world? That's not including the countless other children globally that deal with poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and war.
I don't know what happens next. It's too much to process really. There are too many variables, and far too many unknowns, to say which way this goes. Maybe it was a weather balloon. I don't believe that. I have my own thoughts, built out of cold-war paranoia, but I try not to listen to those. They aren't very pleasant. One thing I know for certain is the side that loses, will be portrayed as the oppressor and vilified. History tends to be written by the victors.