Wow. I spent a lot of time laughing (and thinking) on Micah Wright's website, The Propaganda Remix Project. Oh, and FYI, he's an ex-Army Ranger and combat veteran, too.

I need to ask Mom if the same thing that's happening today happened during WWII, if it was considered unAmerican to exercise one's fundamental right to draw conclusions different than the president. I'm guessing it did, considering the bulk of the artwork in Wright's project comes from WWII posters. Isn't it weird that "supporting the troops" = sending them in the direct path of danger?

I was blog-hopping today, and someone had posted some e-mail that's going around, about a little boy asking his daddy why we were at war. The daddy uses the analogy of a battered wife. "Son, what if you saw a man beating his wife in his front yard, what would you do?" And the little boy says he would call the police. "What if the police (aka the UN) took your call but did nothing? What would you do?" And the little boy says he would just close the blinds. The daddy explains that you can't do that, that you have to get involved and save that woman.

What that e-mail fails to detail is this: Okay, you've saved the woman and her children. Are you going to take them in, give them a place to live, pay all their bills until the mother can take care of her kids? Are you going to make sure the next man this woman gets involved with is emotionally stable? Or are you just going to solve the immediate problem?

There are lots of dictatorships where people live in poverty - like Cuba, menacing the state I live in, merely 90 miles away. We only took out the dictatorial Taliban after September 11, we barely did anything in Bosnia. I know that Saddam is (was?) a Bad Man, but I don't see that we can "get in and get out" quickly and easily, in a region that has known little freedom and no peace. I guess that's the problem when you can see all the shades of gray, and start thinking farther down the line than the next week or month.

Well, to quote Forrest Gump, "that's all I've got to say about that." Hopefully now that I've put my doubts and fears out there, I can get back to writing about things like belly button lint and white chocolate truffles. Oh, and I really hate those schmarmy e-mails, I bet they're all phony.