[Vision2020] Does anyone else see a problem here?

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

Coop et. al.

I have a question or two or three about your statement that "the innocent 
need complete protection."  

I don't know your political/ideological beliefs, but many who are adamant 
about protecting children in families that put them at risk, or the innocent life 
of the unborn, shrug their shoulders as they insist that killing tens of 
thousands of innocent thinking feeling perceiving already born human beings, many 
of them children, and even pregnant women, is the unfortunate cost of pursuing 
the goals of US military action in, for example, Afghanistan and Iraq.

I'm taking this question out of the exclusive context of domestic violence, I 
know.  But there is no doubt that the mindset of people who will justify 
killing children in war spills over into the domestic situation of families here 
in the USA, leading to domestic violence.  This is one of the domestic costs of 
war: the demands placed upon troops, and even civilians who face the horror, 
to harden and desensitize themselves to the killing of innocents, even 
children, or pregnant women.  To think we can keep this necessary (to wage war) 
hardened and desensitized psychology from being applied in our homes in the USA is 
just plain wishful thinking!

I propose there is direct link between the militarization of our society, and 
the psychology this militarization creates in a large segment of our culture, 
in both civilian and military people, with our high (compared to most other 
industrialized democracies) rates of domestic violence, that when taken as a 
whole over time has been more of a source of terror for our citizens than the 
terrorists we are now fighting have yet inflicted upon us.

The contradictions of people who, to expand my point, support the death 
penalty for minors, and also justify killing thousands of innocents, many children, 
to pursue war, who then become morally outraged at the hard choices women 
must face regarding abortion, and furthermore reject taxation to provide 
assistance for children who are in families that place children at great risk, are 
apparent enough, though there are often clever moral arguments trotted out to 
attempt to avoid the seeming blatant contradictions.

I propose that we cannot as a society with pretensions to high moral 
standards regarding protection of innocent children let these apparent contradictions 
(protect children in the USA, as long as your taxes are lowered and protecting 
children doesn't preclude buying that new SUV, then kill them in foreign 
countries as we wage war or via the death penalty for minors in the USA) go 
unexamined.

What do you think?

Guess what we have in common with Iran?  We are more like them than many 
think!  From the Amnesty International web site:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/abolish/juveniles.html


Death Penalty Gives Up On Juvenile Offenders 

An almost universal prohibition exists on the execution of persons who were 
under the age of 18 at the time of the crime.  Since 2000, only five countries 
in the world are known to have executed juvenile offenders: China, Democratic 
Republic of Congo (DRC), Iran, Pakistan, and the United States. Pakistan and 
China have abolished the juvenile death penalty, but there have been problems 
in nationwide compliance with the law.

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V2020 Post by Ted Moffett



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