When Exceptions Become The Rule

Republican Party leaders in Government and media almost uniformly align behind tea bagging parties to debunk the phantom of socialism and lobby for tax cuts to make the countries’ wealthiest wealthier. As they continues to solidify their “Party of No” reputation, I can’t help but wonder what they might be fighting for… They must stand for something more than just tax cuts extended to a minority of perfectly comfortable wealthy Americans, right?

If we go by the last eight years, it really looks like the Republicans may currently be fighting for unemployment, ,poor education, poor health care, and perhaps even World War III. You can call me crazy all you want. (Just don’t call me Rush Limbaugh.)

They are like a Party that has become irrationally ruled by exceptions instead of rules. They don’t just plan for contingencies and worst cases. They Govern and thereby create and expand the worst case.

Take terrorism, for example. According to Dictionary.com, terrorism is defined as:

1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.

And terror is defined as:

1. Intense, overpowering fear. See Synonyms at fear.
2. One that instills intense fear: a rabid dog that became the terror of the neighborhood.
3. The ability to instill intense fear: the terror of jackboots pounding down the street.
4. Violence committed or threatened by a group to intimidate or coerce a population, as for military or political purposes.
5. Informal An annoying or intolerable pest: that little terror of a child.

Terrorism has always existed. Terror is predicated on one’s inability to predict the usually violent actions of another. After the unpredictable use of violence on 9/11/2001, for example, we emerged as a nation begot by terror. We were horrified and saddened by what we knew, but we were scared of what we didn’t know. (If President Bush deserves positive credit for one thing in his Presidency, it was with his firm, bipartisan response in the aftermath of these attacks.

Things went downhill fast.

The Bush doctrine of pre-emptive warfare is fundamentally terrorism. It formally tells the rest of the world that the United States reserves the right to engage in violence with another country without provocation. Internally this is pre-emptive; but externally this is terrorism. This does not necessitate or even imply that President Bush was, is, or ever will be evil. Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, for one, supports pre-emptive warfare in part because of her childhood exposure to terrorism and violence waged against her family and close friends by the Ku Klux Klan. Who can blame her, really? Alas, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

Moms everywhere preach to their children the old cliche that two wrongs don’t make a right. I think maybe we should take this cliche a bit further to assert two wrongs don't just not make rights. They create larger, harder to contain wrongs. As far as terrorism is concerned, fighting it with more terror just creates an environment for expanding terror. The good intentions of terrorists occasionally help us understand and empathize with them, but they do not exempt or justify their actions.

Using exceptions as rules is a sad commentary on our times. I myself may have fallen victim to that certain cynicism that creates the environment for exceptions to become rules; there’s an obvious double standard apparent to me as I write. But I still believe most people are good even if they’ve done bad, that people are innocent until they’ve been proven guilty, and that exceptions and polemics have not become the rules. As long our culture continues to judge people by their worst game, the likelier we are to fall victims to exceptions like Al Queda or Sadaam Huessein, and miss out on rules like Ghandi or Kennedy and perhaps one day Obama.