War, the United States, and the Media

Syrian rebels march in as show of strength during a demonstration in Idlib, Egypt.

Today, I got up and saw a picture much like this one on the front page of the newspaper my dad was reading.  I remember from what I had heard and seen before that Syria's leader was corrupt and did some pretty bad stuff.  This picture was strangely, how can I put it, moving to me.  These people are willing to lose their lives (and likely will) for freedom and equality.  I know this a popular theme these days, what with the "Arab Spring" last year but my first thought was 'We (the U.S.) have started a revolution once before and so have other countries many, many times; some with success and some are still at it.'

Anyway, I also realized that now the United States, unlike most countries in the middle east, has no jurisdiction in those regions. Unless you consider oil a jurisdiction, which the United States has plenty of interest in. And China and India.

What we do is invade somewhere or help someone, then leave which will just get them mad at us.  There are three reasons I find this system of doing things to not be correct:

1. We have no business there
2. We leave the country in ruins with them billions of dollars in debt
3. (Super Christians skip this one) Darwin's theory of natural selection says that the weak pass on and the strong survive so and unlike a camera crew on a wild safari documentary, our government intervenes when it shouldn't.  

Another thing, the U.S. government is kind of hypocritical because it is involved in everyone's garbage and then when someone gets in our stuff we either A) can't stand it and complain to the newspapers, or  B) we decide to attack that country. That, is not correct.  A couple examples of the U.S. government's hypocrisy would be the WikiLeaks prosecution and our invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq.

Now here is where the media comes in.  The U.S.'s foreign relationships influence newspaper articles and comic strips like this one ("Pearls Before Swine" by Stephan Pastis) below:

I like this comic but I think this specific strip went too far because I feel it was mocking the rebels.  This strip was in the paper on February fourth and obviously represents Iran because of the oil can, but it gets my point across.  The media is over influencing and seems to have its own rules and its own corrupt government.


Chaise Moi