breakfast politics

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Okay, so I´m not much into politics. And it´s hard to keep in touch with them when you´re in a foreign country.

I will say that I have become slightly more republican since being abroad from the good ol´USofA. And a helluva lot more patriotic and defensive about my country, tis of thee.

Okay, maybe not more repuuuublican... maybe just less of a liberal democrat. Or fiscally republican and socially democrat? Quien sabe.

Anyway, the point is that I honestly don´t keep up with politics. But that doesn´t stop me from having an opinion.

This morning at breakfast the older volunteer couple - they´re in their 60´s and live in a site without electricity - and I and another young volunteer were eating breakfast....

And they brought up the apparent event that Obama released the memos of the Bush administration condoning torture. And asked what our opinion was.

Here is my opinion. While I think that transparency is important in our American society, I also think that move is going to come back to bite Obama. Torture happens. Whether it is sanctioned by the President or not. Happens all over the world in times of war, or times of so-called wars on terrorism or whatever. That said, even if Obama doesn´t sanction torture under his administration, I´m gonna bet that Americans will inflict torture. And someday, some opposer of Obama is going to bring that to the table and call him a hypocrite. So. I think that yes, we need transparancy. But it was not a prudent move on his part because there is no way to guarantee that torture won´t happen during his administration.

So then we got into a discussion about basic good and evil and nuclear arms. And, frankly, not knowing much about it, I think it is very hypocritical of us to say that other nations, like North Korea or Iran, cannot produce nuclear weapons.... when clearly we have ours... and we´re the greatest arms dealer in the world.

Also, capital punishment. Yeah, our justice system has its problems. And people are sometimes convicted when they´re innocent. But no justice system in the world is perfect. Life imprisonment is a joke. Why should the American people pay for someone to spend their life in prison? Why make them grow old, incarcerated, not contributing to society. They should either bring back hard manual labor chain gangs so they could be producing something, or they should just inject them and be done with it.

And those are my breakfast politics.

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Comments

[mom]

hear hear!
Yep, Ms. Baade, If you run, you've got MY vote!

[vicki]

politics
You go girl!!