Compromise

A disturbing trend is developing in America, and maybe throughout the whole world. I see it every day in the news reports and over the Internet and in the e-mails I receive. I try not to participate in the trend, but sometimes I am as guilty as anyone. There is a time coming when it will be irreversible, and that is going to be a shame on all of us. The trend I’m referring to is our lack of compromise.

The most glaring example that comes to mind is the e-mail that has been circulating for several years, and which I receive at least once a week, concerning public displays of religion. It always ends with the phrase, “Since 86 percent of us agree that there is a place for religion in our lives, let’s tell the other 14 percent to leave the country and go somewhere else.”

Well, I don’t agree that 86 percent of any population or a survey group of any size could agree on anything, but that’s beside the point. The sentiment expressed in this and other spoken or published opinions is the bigger problem, and that is we all seem to take the attitude that, “it’s my way or the highway.”

The problem with failure to reach a medium ground is that it gives anyone on either side of the issues a picture that is unrealistic. There are many nostalgic memories out there that paint a rosy picture of the past. If you revisit the “good old days”—most of the scenes recall the period immediately following World War II up to the middle of the 1960s—you sometimes wish that we could go back to those halçyon times. But were they really all that good? I posit that they were as bad or worse in many ways than today. Some people even believe that “…if we did so-and-so, we could return to so-and-so…”

I’ll use as my example our current illegal immigration woes. The thinking I see expressed in letters, columns, articles and petitions is that if we seal the borders and kick out all the illegal aliens currently residing in the United States, we can return to higher wages and full employment for our legal citizens, reduce the cost of entitlement programs, improve our failing public education system, reduce our deficits, save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and on-and-on-and-on. I know they don’t all say that, but they certainly imply it.

Trouble is, it isn’t going to happen. It’s the old law of physics, “for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.” Nothing is that cut-and-dried. If you are opposed to the current wiretapping without warrant in the Homeland Security Act, think about the abuses that could take place when the government tries to round up and deport up to ten percent of our populace. And that assumes (wrongly) that all those wonderful improvements enumerated above could be realized by reversing the course of a whole generation of illegal aliens streaming across our borders.

We only need look back to two conquests to see how tunnel vision changed the outcome of three wars. Both Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolph Hitler attempted to speed their dreams of victory by invading Russia, sending hordes of troops toward Moscow. Both attempts failed, and both were largely responsible for the eventual defeat and loss of the war. (A historical note: We may castigate the French today for their failure to support us, but had it not been for the “Little General” at the turn of the Nineteenth Century there might not have been a United States of America today. England’s obsession with fighting Napoleon distracted them from returning to our shores until 1812, when we had gained enough strength to again defeat King George’s weakened military. That was the second war that was affected by Napoleon’s conquest, and hence, the third war that was decided by tunnel vision.)

Going back to those e-mail messages that infuriate me, there are two others that I keep getting that are either forwarded or deleted by those who receive them. I refer to one message dealing with the infrastructure that has been restored in Iraq since 2003, and another one that gives statistics on mortality rates for the United States’ military troops since 1980. Both are pro-war messages.

Face it folks, if you support the war you believe the message; if you don’t support the war, you think it is all propaganda and lies. I doubt that any anti-war person out there in cyberspace reads those e-mail messages and thinks, “Wow! That’s amazing! Maybe I should change my attitude and get behind this effort.”

I guess you know that I always delete those incendiary messages. True or not, they only incite civil unrest, and that is something we don’t need. How much more devastating would a contemporary civil war be than the disastrous one we fought 148 years ago?