Breaking down your own beliefs
I was listening to a journalist talking about covering Iraq and going there with preconceived notions of what their collective beliefs and attitude towards America are, but he said, after he had interviewed ten people, he realized the story was zigging and zagging and basically the truths were only half truths and beneath them lay alternative stories and perspectives. In the end, he realized that having spent time in Iraq he came to revisit his own beliefs about America.
He was speaking nine months after Obama had been elected president and he argued that Bush’s war on terrorism brought darkness into the world whereby Obama simply by talking about a more inclusive world had delivered us. And more to a hawkish point, would do more to combat and foil terrorism than the Imperial America that Bush was advocating.
Later, Moyers was interviewing a doctor from Venezuela who had moved to the U.S. and had started a movement in her poor, Latino community to bring diabetes awareness and care to a wider audience. She did this by developing an army, armed with information and experts with diabetes who had learned to control their disease, she began to infiltrate and promote an awareness campaign that was so grassroots in its origins, they spoke at laundromats, grocery stores, parking lots, and little by little the message started spreading and sticking till nearby hospitals and clinics began to take notice.
The wars we fight resonate beyond the front lines, which war do we want to be involved in, which are the ones worth dying for, isn’t it time that we as a country made that decision, rather than the likes of Dick Cheney or George Bush. There is a time when the followers began to hate themselves for following stupid leaders, and right now I wonder how we as a people spent eight crippling years under the reign of a petty thug.