Death of Hope

It's a sad day today. It's sad to acknowledge the death of hope and our own complicity in that death.

I care about the world, and I care about my country's place in the world and I care about the poor and the oppressed. For me at least, I seem to have woken up this morning to that feeling of "acceptance" when you realize you've lost, or when you know you aren't going to get that thing you want or hoped for.

I was a soldier and I think I have some sense of what the soldier wants - he wants to protect his buddies; he wants to protect the innocent; he doesn't want to kill anybody; he wants to survive. But he also signed up to serve and is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the people he loves and things he believes in. I haven't done a survey, but I've talked to enough and I'm friends with enough to have to believe our American soldiers consider it a privilege to go fight on behalf of the poor and the oppressed around the world - not just in our own back yard. It's in our DNA and in our training.

I've never been in a war - thankfully. I was in the military on either side of the wars in Iraq. But I can't imagine how demoralizing it is to see your friends and family die in a war where there's no likely good outcome, ala Afghanistan over the last 20 years, or the second Iraq war, for examples.

We (I say "We" intentionally) started down the path of losing Ukraine when we let Putin walk into Crimea unobstructed. We lost Eastern Ukraine when we let Putin take that territory while we sat and watched and doled out a few dollars and a few weapons that were always too little and too late.

I don't know what the ratio is these days, but it used to be that when you were attacking a well-defended position, the attacker needed three times as many resources (soldiers, weapons, etc) to succeed. There is no way we would ever stomach investing the resources required to take back what has become Putin's well-defended position in Ukraine. 

That's the sad "acceptance" I woke up to this morning. It's embarrassing to me as an American and a former soldier that we've gotten to this place. And it didn't have to be this way - that's what's even worse. If our leaders cared more about people than politics, we would have dropped the 82nd Airborne Division into Crimea as soon as Putin crossed the border and we would have said, "you shall not pass!" And it would have been done right there and then. We could have done the same in Rwanda in 1994 and prevented a genocide that killed millions.

I'm a bit of a realist I suppose, at least when it comes to international relations. I don't believe in getting into or fighting or having our soldiers die for unwinnable wars. But I would fully support my son or daughter going to fight and potentially die to be part of saving the Ukrainian people from the fate they are living through now. Sadly, now we are at a place where taking back Eastern Ukraine is virtually an unwinnable scenario. So, the best we can do is try to end it and negotiate whatever structures need to be put in place to avoid it restarting in the future.

It didn't have to be this way.

Beneficiaries of Injustice

Every homeowner and every business owner (anybody with shares in a company via private or public markets), or descendant thereof, living in the developed world, has blood on his hands.

The US (and the rest of the developed world to a lesser extent) controls the global economic system. Because the value of all other currencies, whether based on fixed or floating exchange rates, are implicitly at least at a secondary or tertiary level, a function of the value of the dollar. When we "print" more or less dollars, we increase or decrease the value of the dollar and as a result, all the other currencies in the world are affected.

The value of the currency ties to inflation, unemployment, net exports, defense expenditures, etc. In other words, manipulating currencies creates poverty and wars. So, the ones who control the world's currency control the world. It's that simple.

I have a 3.625% 30-year fixed mortgage rate while friends in various places in the developing world are lucky to get a 20-year mortgage at less than 20% per annum. I have virtually unlimited opportunities to earn returns on a range of diversified investments that generate 5 to 10% real annual returns while my peers in the developing world are limited to highly speculative investments in subsistence agriculture, real estate and small family-owned start-ups. Fuel costs and other basic goods in the developing world can easily be two to five to many more times higher than in the US. This measure of disparities is endless.

Virtually everybody in the US, even the poor and oppressed in the US, are the beneficiaries of a system where the richest and most powerful people and nations simply accrue more and more power and wealth. Whether I earn my living mining rare earth minerals in Congo or trading foreign exchange or from a US defense contractor or healthcare institution or a local government agency or a mom-and-pop shop down the street, I'm a participant and beneficiary of a system built to bring greater and greater benefit to those who have more power and wealth.

Does it really matter how close I am or how many levels removed I am from the injustice? It seems pretty cut-and-dried that it's bad to be the one directly perpetrating the injustice. But if that person shops at my store and buys his food from me, then am I just as guilty? Or maybe if I supply the lumber that he uses to build his ships, that's worse because I'm enabling his bad behavior, even if I do it unknowingly.

We should understand the injustice all around us and endeavor to make it right where we can. At the same time, we shouldn't be so arrogant or ignorant as to think we aren't all beneficiaries, at some relatively meaningful level, in the injustice. I like what my pastor has said about Paul and Jesus and others in the Roman Empire, about how they were subversive in their approach to injustice - they didn't incite violent rebellion; instead, they won over their enemies with love. I'm not there yet, but hopefully moving in that direction.