by William Skink
Some Missoulians held a rally Saturday morning calling for peace and unity. Some of the signs were donated by the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center. How nice. From the link:
McCloyd, a mother of three young children, watched again the following day as protests and spiteful social media arguments broke out, and she wondered what kind of country the United States might be as her children grow-up. Watching wasn’t enough, she said.
So she threw together the Missoula Peace Rally, marching with about 40 other people down Higgins Avenue on Saturday morning holding signs, waving flags and singing classic protest tunes.
“I’m in no way an activist,” McCloyd said with a laugh as she walked with her mother and daughter down Higgins. “This is way out of my comfort zone. But I wanted to come out with something peaceful because I want a peaceful world for my kids to live in.”
Of course you want a peaceful world for your kids. Guess what? So do moms in Yemen and Somalia and Honduras.
Where were these people for the last eight years? The Obama regime has significantly continued and expanded wars across the globe, making the world a much more violent, dangerous place.
The sad reality is these people weren’t paying attention because it was a smooth talking black man doing the imperial killing, and they didn’t feel directly threatened by coups in Honduras and Ukraine, mass-famine in Yemen, and the destruction of Libya and Syria.
Now that Trump has won, they feel threatened and they are rallying for peace and unity.
The irony here is Trump exploited the anti-war sentiment and again outflanked the Queen of Chaos by bashing the neoliberal/neocon interventionism that has literally taken this country to the brink of a military confrontation with Russia.
While it remains to be seen what Trump will actually do, I think the prospect of deflating NATO and warming relations with Russia is a net positive. An added benefit is the now galvanized opposition to Trump if he does try to do something insane, like start a war with Iran.
Obama’s foreign policy has been an unmitigated disaster. Terrorism has metastasized thanks to our “allies” in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and the sectarian wars we are enabling them to fight.
So go ahead and rally for peace, that’s fantastic. After eight years of Obama’s neoliberal interventionism, Trump may actually be positioned to do some good by reversing the violent trend toward WWIII.
JC
I need to apologize to you for my previous stance against your analyses. I only stopped accepting the neo-liberal line about 6 months ago. I see now that neoliberalism brought us Trump.
no need to apologize, Turner. I’ve appreciated seeing your comments at places that have long since banned and marginalized critics like me for trying to raise the alarm at the coming blowback, which has now arrived with Brexit and Trump.
This strange knee-jerk, post-election denial could be simply a continuation of a long history of “the West’s” denial of its “shadow”/unconscious and resulting moral/spiritual bankruptcy. Two wings — mirror-images — projecting the same irrational belief in American exceptionalism.
“Authentic spirituality requires consciously accepting and relating properly to the shadow as opposed to repressing, projecting, acting out and remaining naively unconscious of its repudiated, denied, disavowed contents, a sort of precarious pseudospirituality.” – Stephen A. Diamond Ph.D. https://www.psychologytoday.com/experts/stephen-diamond-phd
I watched during the last eight years as you sought refuge in the evanescent qualities of skin color and smooth speechmaking so as to not to confront the fact that your “liberal” president was almost totally lacking in actionable convictions regarding the values you claim to be about.
Thomas S. Harrington
https://off-guardian.org/2016/11/13/open-letter-to-american-liberals/