http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/09/03/MNGGU8JAC01.DTL&type=printable

I think that this article provides an appropriate segue into what I found most distressing about the rhetoric of the RNC - the overwhelming focus on issues of "national security".

One of the co-founders of the Code Pink, the activist group with which the women who infiltrated Bush's speech were affiliated is quoted in the article as saying, "This is the third day in a row that Code Pink has penetrated the convention... My question to President Bush is, if he can't secure his own convention, how can they bring security to their own nation?''

The purpose of her comment is well intended, I'm sure, but I think it shows how conservatives have forced even more radical activists to focus on the issue of national security.

I think this sucks. I kept hearing on the news about how national security was one of the key focuses of the RNC agenda and it made me really sad. There are so many real issues that Americans and people all over the world face - economic difficulties to utter poverty, environmental collapse, the reality of the consequences of war, and "national security" just comes off as contrived fear-mongering based more on prejudice and America's general out-of-touch-ness with the rest of the world.

Taking lives for political leverage is deplorable, whether it's toppling buildings in Oklahoma City or Manhattan or slaughtering school-children in Russia. I shouldn't even have to make that disclaimer. It's obvious. Still, I find it hard to believe that the American media, and presumably, many Americans, find this to be the single biggest political issue right now. At the very worst, if we make no changes to our security policy, we are only dealing with a sad reality that most of the rest of the world has had to deal with for ages.

And if making Americans safe from violence is so important, can anyone, upon distancing themselves from the fright-inducing hysteria of the media and political rhetoric, say that we're any safer than we were 4 years ago? To me obtaining "security" involves looking at the realities of political conflicts, about how the world perceives us. "Security" requires that governments be honest about their intentions and sorry for their mistakes. "Security" means that policy makers must be willing to make concessions and compromises when they are for the best. Certainly, "security" is not the policies of the Bush administration that can best be describe as "kicking some ass." This isn't high school football, you fucks, these attitudes and the people who share them around the world endanger the lives of everyone, everywhere.

In times like this, people like to throw around a quotation by some American fore-father or another warning of the dangers of sacrificing liberty for security. In these times, it is not only freedom that has been sacrificed, but reason and compassion, and if there are any qualities that dignify humanity more than freedom, it must be those two. If we are people who are a little more concerned than the average American, as I'd like to think many people on this message board are, it is so important that we redefine "national security" not by how many civil liberties we can trample or prisoners we can torture to gain intelligence to bomb another village, but whether or not we can live beyond our legacy of prejudice and ignorance to the realities of the rest of the world, whether or not we can live without fearing the conflicting perspectives of our neighbors, whether or not we can raise our heads over the economic and social turbulence that we all face.

We have to forget notions of "national security" as they have been presented to us by the media and politicians not just for ourselves but for our families, our neighbors, our friends, our classmates, and our co-workers. I can't think of any other non-issue that I feel holds so much ridiculous weight in the minds of the people I see around me. It is this issue, I think that makes the secretaries in the office where I work nod politely and say, "yes ...", "uh huh ..." when my terrifying cubicle neighbor makes some proclamation about how Kerry is unfit to serve. It is this issue that stifles the outrage of otherwise reasonable people at all of the ignorance and psychosis of the last four years. I think that we must find a way to overcome "national security" if we are to have any hope of wresting any security at all from the Bush or Kerry administrations.

xo,
Geoff