How To REALLY Support Our Troops

And it doesn't end with the selection of the next best President, or the members of Congress. Bush Jr. will be gone come next January. And our troops will eventually be withdrawn from Iraq. Someday.

But there's still Afghanistan. And Syria may be tomorrow's Iraq, for all we know (if the U.S. launched attack there yesterday is any indication). And the underlying roots of the problem, for which the American people have to accept their 50% share of the responsibility, will still remain. Regardless of who occupies the Oval Office.

Here are two things you can do:

1) Don't let 9/11 continue to be this country's "Groundhog Day." I've blogged on that point before. But let me punt here to someone far more qualified to state the case--Andrew Bacevich, the author of The Limits of Power:

"[A] state of perpetual national security emergency aggravates the disorders afflicting our political system, allowing the executive branch to accrue ever more authority at the expense of the Congress and disfiguring the Constitution."

We as citizens can't declare war, or withdraw our troops. But we can refuse to allow ourselves to be consumed by a false sense of a perpetual national security emergency. The threats are real, sadly. But a "State" of Emergency is not a sustainable, habitable place for us all to live. We know that, don't we.

2) Set thine house in order. Again, I punt here to Mr. Bacevich:

"U.S. troops in battle dress and body armor, whom Americans profess to admire and support, pay the price for the nation's collective refusal to confront our domestic dysfunction." (emphasis added, and of my doing).

We all know about the dysfunction in Washington and on Wall Street. But we need to start thinking about our own dysfunction. There's a "disparity between how much we want and what we can afford to pay." "As individuals, Americans never cease to expect more. As members of a community, especially as members of a national community, they choose to contribute less."

I don't want to be preachy--I really don't. I've been no better, really, for most of my self-absorbed life. But there are all these truly important ideas already out there... and have been for quite some time now. I just want to share them with you, in case you haven't already discovered them for yourself. (But take heart, the "preachy" factor should largely disappear after November 4th).

And I'll leave it to the presidential historians to render their final verdict on Bush. But I do wonder about how History will judge us, the American people. And so, I'll leave you with this one last passage from The Limits of Power:

"History will not judge kindly a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of endless armed conflict so long as they themselves are spared the effects. Nor will it view with favor an electorate that delivers political power into the hands of leaders unable to envision any alternative to perpetual war."

One last note of backstory, though, on the book and author. His son was a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, and died in Iraq last year. The book is dedicated to him.

Never Forget 9/11... But Start Living Like It's 9/12

When the wind changes direction, there are those who build walls and those who build windmills--an old Chinese proverb

I have very vivid and first-hand memories of 9/11... most of the New Yorkers I once knew did too. I remember that I was working on a film shoot deep in the heart of Brooklyn... and I remember the surreal snowfall of ashes that floated down on our crew as we tried, for a few hours anyway, to continue on with our day. I remember walking towards Manhattan, and my home, like the sole salmon swimming upstream against an apocalyptic current of the masses fleeing that history-changing scene. And I watched, from my bedroom window, the ruins burn and smoulder for days on end... and won't easily forget the smell that lingered in the air for too many months thereafter...

But see, I moved past 9/11 long long ago... and I believe most New Yorkers did too. Which is why it so puzzles, and deeply troubles me, this unwillingness (or inability) of others in our nation, who weren't even there, to do the same. You can hear it in the cries of "Terrorist!" at our campaign rallies... and smell it, that stench of Fear, in the rise of a new form of McCarthyism in our country, this "Us" vs. "Them", "Pro-America" vs. "Anti-America" talk that frankly, shames us all... and keeps us in a lock-step march headed straight towards ruin, on every front that truly matters, and far far away from the Middle East.

There's this mind-altering book I'm currently reading called Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--And How It Can Renew America. I will be blogging about it. A lot. This post is just a teaser, really, for what's to come.

Because the book is 412 pages long... and as much as I love blogging and sharing this stuff with y'all, I do have a life. Well... in theory, anyway.

And so do you. Which is why I'll share these thoughts piecemeal, on a need-to-know basis. Given the crucial election we face in just 8 days, I do want y'all to think, though, on this one passage:

"The other disturbing trend has been building slowly since the 1980s. It is a "dumb as we wanna be" mood that has overtaken our political elite, a mood that says we can indulge in petty red state-blue state catfights for as long as we want and can postpone shoring up our health care system and our crumbling infrastructure, postpone addressing immigration reform, postpone fixing Social Security and Medicare, and postpone dealing comprehensively with our energy excesses and insecurity--indefinitely. The prevailing attitude on so many key issues in Washington today is "We'll get to it when we feel like getting to it and it will never catch up to us, because we're America."

But, as the author himself puts it, "We have been living for far too long on borrowed time and borrowed dimes."

The Urgency of Now... we've heard that phrase before in Election 2008. So enough with all these "walls"... right? Let's all start thinking, instead, upon how to build some "windmills"...

Otherwise, we as a nation are going to feel like Bill Murray, reliving Groundhog Day... But for the rest of our lives...