Written by Don Washington   

Syria is teaching us that our country is not broke and that it will find money to pursue militarism in pursuit of capitalism but will not dedicate an additional dime to mitigate the consequences of unchecked capitalism in ways that cannot help to be racist. Syria, Nietzsche said that he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes into you.

In the investigative world you can often discern more about what’s wrong and/or what’s not going on by the questions that are not asked or the issues not raised when a piece of public policy is being discussed or acted on.

At home a Democratic President has opened a Pandora’s Box of bottomless suffering by proposing the Chained Consumer Price Index. This idea on its own is social poison to the concept of a society built on collective responsibility and effort but it is just a gateway to the eventual unraveling of our already inadequate and shrinking of our social safety net.

It is a sacrifice to capital, which caused the crisis that draining/constraining Social Security Insurance will not address. At home we are suffering Sequestration; across the board cuts to services combined with a payroll tax hike that has the mass of society, you, I and the poorest of the poor paying for an economic crisis we did not cause and were not saved from… while those responsible receive both bailouts and immunity from criminal prosecution of any sort.

What does this have to do with Syria? To address issues of poverty, economic inequality, corporate malfeasance our government claims that there is no money. In fact it demands that we spend less money on government services for the neediest and least powerful members of society, while reducing taxes and even criminal liability on the wealthiest and most powerful members of our society because we claim that there is not enough money.

But when it comes to Syria we have a bottomless purse of death to finance rebels, provide limited relief to refugees and pour arms and possibly airstrikes into a country half a world away. We have money what we do not have is a moral compass capable of finding, sharing and deploying our wealth for something other than death, destruction and profiteering. The wants of the few clearly take precedent over the needs of the many. That is what Syria is telling us.

It comes back to the Abyss and history. The Abyss of the value-set of American political and financial elites that can only organize its money and people to kill other people abroad, expand their power, protect their wealth and strip people of their rights at home. The history of rationalizations to “aid” Syrian rebels rhymes with the fiasco and debacle known as Afghanistan.

We must arm the rebels against a dictatorship and at least half of those rebels carry a political/religious ideology that thirsts for vengeance for every dead body in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Tunisia and Guantanamo Bay that we have killed. We must intervene in Syria if they use “weapons of mass destruction” because those weapons could fall into the hands of factions of the very rebels we’ve been arming.

It is an abyss of militarism in support of capitalism that is tinged with racism. It is an abyss where the forces of organize money, organizes ordinary people to protect and expand interests that will only further impoverish them. It is a history composed of lies, deceptions and contradictions to cover up the reality that in Syria there are no good options.

There are no good options because the reasons for taking action in Syria do not come from a set of beliefs that value life. We are not going to Syria to protect anyone. We may be going to Syria confront and further surround Iran and we could be going to Syria to upset the global plans of Russia and/or China. All in all we are contemplating going to Syria to create a client state. A state that will probably be another authoritarian dictatorship because those are the people we work best with and are even shaping our domestic laws here at home to mirror as the Abyss gazes back into us.

Syria is telling that our entire country has been fighting the imaginary monster of terrorism for so long it is a justification for the most odious, perilous and rash policies both here and abroad. Syria tells us that the abyss of unchecked capitalism, imperial militarism and the shadow of racism has not only gazed into us… it is corrupting our reason to the point of insanity.

America has the wealth to transform itself and the world into Obama’s rhetoric of fairness, justice and fair play. Instead, just like the Obama Administration’s actual public policies we’re contemplating invading yet another country in one way or another; to kill, steal and control its people.

We are doing so for the gain of a military industrial complex that is the only thing we can find the money to fund. We are going to pay for it by shredding what remains of our fragile social safety net and draining the life out of our capacity to protect our society from harm.

What did King say… “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” We’ve arrived Dr. King… that is what Syria tells us.

Don Washington is an AP-Award winning writer, political expediter and problem-solver, proprietor of the agitational, informational, interactive website and show the Mayoraltutorial.com. You can follow him as drobsidian on Twitter and he is the keeper of two large and mischievous cats.