[Cin]

I don’t know exactly how to articulate my feelings around this. Perhaps because it is about feelings more than it is about facts. And that’s hard because with facts you always know where you stand. Either it’s a correct fact or it’s not. But for a good deal of this I don’t have facts. There aren’t any yet. It isn’t a fact that China is looking to assert itself in South America. It isn’t a fact that they aren’t. China may say that it isn’t interested in empire-building or intervening in the affairs of other countries but I doubt that can even be helped. As China emerges as a super power, the stakes will continue to change until imperialism is almost accidental or unintentional but rather unavoidable.

But I don’t think it is true that a unification of Latin America would either mean that the people of Latin America would end up killing themselves if one nation doesn’t want to join or that China and Japan (a dynamic duo that I think is still a long ways off) would unite to isolate the U.S. and own the Western Pacific ocean. Or that Russia will arise like a phoenix from the ashes and somehow find money to buy off a unified Latin America.

I also don’t believe countries should only be allowed to make decisions that are in the best interest of the United States. That would be nice for us. But hardly very fair.

I think we could handle a united Latin America. We might have to actually be a little nicer to them. In our dealings with other countries there is just something about the way we control things even while we supposedly set them free that is troubling. But I really am not going to get into a litany of wrongs that the U.S. and its corporations have done to the people, the natural resources and the environments of a variety of other countries. I will just take a moment to say that if I was a country surrounded by weaker nations that were geographically important to me I would have done everything in my power to make sure that the things I did to these nations were always in the their best interest so I could keep them as allies. It’s just good politics. At least I would imagine it is. It’s certainly how I try to treat my friends. I don’t take advantage of them, steal their stuff, dump my crap in their yard because the repercussions for me are nil, unlike if I dump in my own back yard nor do I interfere in their personal affairs.

This isn’t about South America but just our militaristic way of being in general. There is a choice. One can choose a militaristic stance right from the get go so as not to appear weak or whatever. Or one can choose to lay back a bit and watch which way the wind is blowing. I just think we need to start thinking economically rather than militaristically if we even want anything left to worry about defending. If we keep spending so much of our money on offense disguised as defense there may be little left to concern ourselves with. I wish we would stop sniffing around Iran. And China really has all it can handle right now worrying about its own people. They are certainly an economic power, and with that comes a certain degree of imperialism however, history so far has shown that China is not an imperialistic country.

And scare tactics just suck. Maybe it’s just realism to others but to me it’s scare tactics to talk about China and Japan uniting and owning the Western Pacific and Russia controlling the North Atlantic. It’s scare tactics to say the United States would end up isolated, cut off and unable to move anywhere but within territorial waters. It’s scare tactics to me because it opens people up to all sorts of possibilities that they are willing to do just to try and feel safe and secure. We have to protect ourselves from some threat or other to our freedom. And every time we start talking about threats to our freedom other people in other countries start to die. I’m not saying not to be aware of the possibilities but for too long now the rich have used our fears and fed them to the war machine and we have been at the mercy of a litany of fear that is transformed into violence, blood and death. And they make more and more money.

It also makes little sense to me that simply the unification of Latin America would cause China, Russia and Japan to make moves that would most likely cause world war. If they were interested in a war of that magnitude I can’t imagine that they need a united South America to do it. I don’t think it is a lack of unification that stops China from inching its way toward the Americas. And those little piss wars where poor countries are destroyed for fun and profit seem to always happen.

It’s like our policy is always shoot first and don’t bother asking questions later.

It reminds me of a story my grandmother used to tell me when i was little. I think it is a kind of Portuguese proverb or some such. But I don’t think it loses much in the translation. There was this farmer whose plow broke and he needed to borrow one. So he started the 5 mile walk to his neighbor’s farm to ask to borrow his. All the way there the farmer kept remembering all the things he had done for his neighbor over the years. And he would think what if his neighbor refused to lend him the plow. He would say “But I gave you that axe when you needed it” and then he would remember “I lent you my wheel barrel more than once over the years” And on and on it went. When he finally reached his neighbors farm he knocked on the door. When his neighbor answered the farmer had worked himself into such a state that he screamed “keep your fucking plow you asshole”.

I don’t know I’m kind of all over the place. I have a hard time thinking in militaristic terms. It’s upsetting. I feel a bit sick. It doesn’t feel like justice and fairness we can do better than we are to me at all.