Quote:Okay, I'll bite.
It wasn't baiting. If you read my entire post, you'll realize there's no troll hiding under this bridge.
Quote:What do we do about that? The border is ~3x larger than your border with mexico, and we all know how succesful efforts to make that border secure have been.
Politics in contemporary America is enraptured in the public's emotions. More often than not the most commonly used emotion is fear. If you look at the link Archon_Wing posted, you'll see a bunch of candidates for president who have built a lot of their platform on America's fear of terrorism. Rather than calming those fears, they continue to use them as tools to get elected. Spouting the need for torture, threats of other invasions, doubling capacities of terrorist detention camps.
Now, with that said the threat of terrorism shouldn't be marginalized. It is something that Americans need to think about, and should have a small degree of rational fear about. Accordingly, issues like our health care system, a saturated market of unpayable variable interest rate mortgages, international trade woes, and violence at home (like this thread is about), should also garner a small amount of rational fear. The problem is that politics has become about preying on that emotion, on one or two topics, and amplifying the threat to the nth degree (kind of like the media and the 'bird flu pandemic' a few years ago. Sure its a risk, but where's that doomsday we were all in fear of?).
As a result the American people get caught up in the fear mongering, and vote for candidates(whether they be a democrat or a republican) with resolute solutions to the day's hot topic. Currently that hot topic is terrorism. Everyone is hyped into a fear of the 'Radical Islamic Threat', and are willing to vote people who have a solution. The funny thing is, there isn't one simple solution.
Building detention centers, starting a new war abroad, making peaceful negotiations with other nations, withdrawing from Iraq, all fall short. Because any terrorist with half a brain knows they can enter the US through its borders with little trouble. See, I bring up the border issue because its a paradigm example of 'no matter how hard you try, there's always going to be a way for bad people to do bad things'. You could build a 50 foot wall with armed guards across the border and still the US would be subject to terrorist attacks. So the border issue is a euphemism (does that make better sense now?).
To reiterate the bigger point, the problem with fear mongering politics is certain issues get amplified while other ones get pushed to the wayside. Accordingly, people react and become concerned and look for the correct solution. In the end the fear mongering gets people elected, makes it almost impossible to quell the fear, and in turn leaves the fear to the next round of elections. It's all in all a rather disheartening political strategy. Especially when the option exists for a political system to subdue people's irrational fears, and with honesty promise the best solutions they can, without pretending it will be a cure all.
Too bad a political system with a moral compass will never happen. That's the curse of being human, of being not much more than a bunch of monkey's;)
Cheers,
Munk