Ian Welsh explains how the right thing morally is usually also the best thing practically

This is so true, and the fact that it's commonly ignored is so sad...

The right thing to do

2010 August 25

by Ian Welsh

What makes me saddest of all things in the world is this: the vast majority of the time the right thing to do morally is the right thing to do in terms of broad self-interest, and yet we don’t believe that and we do the wrong thing, thinking we must, thinking that we’re making the “hard decisions”.

This spans the spectrum of issues. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about foreign affairs, where the money used on Iraq and Afghanistan could have rebuilt America and made it more prosperous. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about health care, where everyone knew that the right thing to do was single payer or some other form of comprehensive healthcare, which would have reduced bankruptcies massively, saved 6% of GDP and massive numbers of lives. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the financial crisis, where criminally prosecuting those who engaged in fraud (the entire executive class of virtually ever major financial firm) and nationalizing the major banks, wiping out the shareholders and making the bondholders eat their losses was the right thing to do, and didn’t happen. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about drug policy, where the “war on drugs” has accomplished nothing except destabilizing multiple countries and giving the US the largest prison population proportional to population in the entire world and where legalizing marijuana, soft opiates and coca leaves would save billions of dollars, reduce violence, help stabilize Mexico and would help tax receipts. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about food, where we subsidize the most unhealthy foods possible and engage in practices which have reduced the nutritional content of food by 40% in the last half century. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about environmental pollutants, which have contributed to a massive rise in chronic diseases so great it amounts to an epidemic.

And on, and on, and on.

Now the fact is that there is no free lunch. When you spend money on war, you can’t spend it on education or health or crumbling infrasture or civilian technology. When you allow oligopolies to control the marketplace and buy up politicians, the cost of that is a decreased standard of living. When you refuse to deal effective with externalized health pollution, whether from soda pop or carcinogens, you pay for that with the death of people you care for from heart disease, cancer and other illnesses.

The response is “we have to do this to protect ourselves/to make a profit”.

No, you don’t. America would be more prosperous and just as safe if you didn’t waste trillions on wars and a bloated military whose purpose isn’t to protect you but to beat on foreigners (who is going to invade the US? No one. Next.) You would be happier if you did not allow health pollution because you and your loved ones would be healthier and it’s damn hard to be happy when you or your loved ones get cancer, or diabetes, or asthma and so on. Cheap consumer goods do not make up for it and the costs are so high that it’s questionable that the consumer goods ARE cheap—you’re just paying for them in illness and health care bills.

All of these things are moral wrongs. We know it’s wrong to invade other countries that haven’t attacked us. We know that it’s wrong to put illness inducing substances into the air or food. We know that we shouldn’t subsidize high fructose corn syrup and that if we’re going to subsidize food we should subsidize healthy food. We know that’s immoral, yet we do it anyway.

One of the great ironies of human society is that we create it ourselves, but as individuals and even groups we feel powerless to control what we created. We forged our own chains, and can’t get out of them.

But the first step to freeing ourselves from our chains is to stop telling ourselves that the moral thing to do isn’t the right thing to do in practical terms. The right thing to do… is the right thing to do. When we refuse to do the right thing, instead we impoverish ourselves and our loved ones, we make ourselves sick and we kill ourselves. When we do horrible things to other people, we make them hate us, and then they try and do horrible things to us.

Doing the wrong thing, the immoral thing, is almost never the practical thing if you care about the well-being of yourself, your children, your friends and your family. It always blows back. If you’re lucky, you may die before the cost comes to bear, but that’s only if you’re lucky, and in the American context, if you aren’t dead yet, you probably aren’t going to get lucky.

So do the right thing. Not just because it is the right thing morally, but because it’s the right thing to do for you and your loved ones in a very practical way.

Jonathan Schwarz explains why bullies are reviled, most everywhere

When you invade a country on bogus pretexts and then proceed to slaughter their people, sometimes seemingly for sport, it is not looked upon kindly by others. Imagine that.

I cannot fathom is why this is not blatantly obvious to everyone.

a Tiny Revolution.com:

Unfair

Here's my prediction for the final outcome of the Wikileaks video: the U.S. military will continue to claim some of the people killed were armed insurgents. This will satisfy all U.S. conservatives and most U.S. "liberals." Meanwhile, everyone else on this planet will continue to gape at us in slack-jawed horror.

Why the sharp difference between us and the rest of humanity?

1. I have no idea whether any of the people shot were armed, or insurgents, or armed insurgents. There will inevitably be long dreary arguments about this between U.S. liberals and conservatives, complete with 5,000-word blog posts analyzing the video frame by frame.

But here's the thing: even if everyone but the journalist and children were armed insurgents, no one else on earth cares. That's because, when another country invades yours, you're allowed to fight back. And if you invade another country and start slaughtering people, you don't somehow make yourself the good guy by proving that they were trying to fight back.

2. The technological mismatch between the U.S. and everyone else is so gigantic that it violates normal humans' sense of justice. This is something almost no Americans give a second thought to, but it's widely appreciated in those countries (ie, all of them) that don't have noiseless death-machine drones flown by joystick from 10,000 miles away.

In other words, even if everyone shot in the video had been fighting the U.S., and even if it had somehow been on some neutral third ground, the rest of the world would still be horrified at the unfairness. For instance, here's Colin Powell writing in his autobiography about the shelling of Beirut in 1983, and how that led to the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks there:

McFarlane, now in Beirut, persuaded the President to have the battleship U.S.S. New Jersey start hurling 16-inch shells into the mountains above Beirut, in World War II style, as if we were softening up the beaches on some Pacific atoll prior to an invasion. What we tend to overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we would... And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target, the exposed Marines at the airport.

I think we can count on the fact that, since no one could reach the Apache attack helicopters shooting from far overhard, someone will try to find a more vulnerable target. And Americans will find this terribly unfair, while to the rest of the world it will seem like the essence of fairness.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Cindy's Report from Amman

I've "bolded" what I think is a key but little-recognized bit of information in the letter below:

Cindy Sheehan from Amman - August 18, 2007

“Inshallah”

"The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception. - "Chronicle of Young Satan" Mark Twain"

The above quote from Mark Twain is how things have always been throughout the ages and throughout our American experience. These sentiments allowed an entire native population to be virtually wiped out and for black Africans to be enslaved for generations. Who cares if 600,000 Filipinos were wiped out during the Spanish-American War to “liberate” them from Spain, but to really have a coaling station for our Navy, or hundreds of thousands of Japanese slaughtered by the evil h-bomb when those people weren’t even white, Christian Americans? Now this slimy rationale is allowing for the decimation of the Iraqi people and we have killed a million during this war to plant permanent bases there as we have permanent military facilities in Japan and the Philippines to this day.

Our small peace delegation that traveled here to Amman, Jordan to meet with refugees and other prominent Iraqis, like physicians and parliamentarians, have been humbled that these oppressed people would turn to us, their oppressors, for help. That they would trust us enough to know that we will help them says a lot about the Iraqi character and just how desperate they are!

Everyone that we have met stabs me in the heart again. We listen to their stories and we apologize on behalf of our country and they all, without fail, look at us with weary smiles filled with resignation of their fate and say: “inshallah” or “If God wills it.” I wish I had that simple faith, but I can’t believe that any God, except George’s God of hatred, destruction, greed, and murder would “will” what is going on here in the Middle East.

I have already written about Bethena whose body and life were torn apart by an American mortar. When we promised to help her, her response was, “Inshallah.”

I met a woman at a hospital yesterday who was kidnapped, tortured and held for a three hundred thousand dollar ransom. When I told her we were trying to help get a hospital for Iraqi people, run by Iraqis, here in Amman, she quietly said: “inshallah,” through her tears.

We have spent a lot of time with an Iraqi parliamentarian whose 10 cousins were slaughtered after “Hamad” had exposed a secret Shi’a prison that imprisoned, tortured, and killed Sunni. His story is on a documentary called “Death Squads.” When I saw the footage of the carnage where his cousins were killed I looked over at him in shock, and you guessed it, he whispered: “inshallah,” to me.

Our group had a meeting in a Jordanian hospital that is allowing Iraqi doctors to work and help the refugees. The doctors explained to us how, if they had their own 50-bed hospital, they could treat the Iraqi refugees here in Amman at about 40% of the cost of what the Jordanian hospital charges the refugees. The doctors all had horror stories of family members being killed, raped, dismembered, displaced and terrorized. We listened to them vent and explained to them that we were truly sorry and that’s why we are here, to help. “Inshallah.”

The most touching meeting at the hospital was by a prominent Iraqi sheikh who had brought another sheikh of an opposite sect to the hospital after he had survived an assassination attempt. The wounded sheikh lie on the hospital bed while the other sheikh stood guard over him. The doctors brought us into the room to dispel the myth of any prior sectarian strife. The Iraqis wanted to assure us that the violence between Iraqis is caused and encouraged by the Americans who want Iraqis fighting each other to create this chaos that allows America to steal their oil and otherwise destroy their country. The sheikh told me that he was sorry about Casey, but he has lost 8 family members and many more dozens of members of his tribe. He encouraged us Americans to rise up against our country and force our government to end the occupation. I told him that we have been trying very hard, but we will try harder. He looked skeptical, because he knows the will of the American public is not to rise up against our government, and he had that same hopeless look on his face that we have encountered repeatedly, but he bit his tongue and said: “Inshallah.”

As we were leaving the hospital, one of the doctors grabbed my hand and also told me that he was sorry about Casey. In a quiet voice, he told me that even though it is sad for me to have lost a son that it was so that I could lead America towards peace and use my sorrow to help the people of Iraq, “inshallah.” I lost my faith after Casey was killed and it is so profound to witness the faith of the Iraqi people when their country has been decimated for no reason, their national treasures and antiquities destroyed or defiled by barbaric acts, one million people dead, six million people displaced, and so many wounded and ill that can’t access medical care. This trip has been so difficult for us as people with hearts, but it has also reminded me how fortunate we are to live in a country that has been almost virtually free from war on our soil for about 150 years, but also so angry that we allow it to happen to other peoples on their land on an almost continuing basis. Also, to think that anything is going to change if a Democrat gets into office is naïve. Bill Clinton is a Democrat who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis more than George. Throughout US History political parties have interchanged the White House and NOTHING has ever changed. The fascist power elite will always use their puppet in the White House to kill other people for their benefit and profit.

The American military has not been victorious in Iraq and we won’t be as long as we are occupying foreign lands. That is a given. If we allow the occupation to continue for a decade, our way of life, as we know it, will die as the Soviet Union did after their decade long farce in Afghanistan. What we are allowing our government to do in the Middle East dishonors and endangers us all. Like the parliamentarian from the city that was totally shattered by the Marines, Falluja, told me: “You Americans are also being held hostage by your government,” and he is right.

As the sheikh told me: We must rise up. We must assert our need for peace with justice, not only to save our troops who are in harm’s way for Halliburton, et al, but for the dear people of Iraq who never asked for the US to “liberate” them. Our governments don’t care about them, or us, so we must care about each other.

Since this is a piece about faith, I would like to close with a prayer, also from Mark Twain:

"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale form of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow
with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."

—The War Prayer.

Please, God, may it never be this way again.

"Inshallah."