Sunday, Jan. 7, 2024 | 2 a.m.
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It’s a new year. How about some old thoughts? As in millions of years old!
There are tectonic plates that have shaped our planet since the beginning of time.
If ever there were a description of being between a rock and a hard place, nature manifests that phenomenon with the ever-shifting and grinding of Earth’s tectonic plates, causing minor earthquakes that crack walls in buildings as well as geologic upheavals that reshape continents and everything in between.
There is a helpless feeling that accompanies the news of an earthquake. It’s not that we can’t do something to mitigate the damage, but that we don’t know how to do anything to stop the shaking, rattling and rolling of this planet of ours in the first place. It is just nature’s way of letting off steam and some pent-up fury from way down below — somewhere.
There are also man-made earthquakes of a much more recent vintage that aren’t centered below and along Earth’s crust but, rather, do their damage along the surface of this planet.
You don’t have to go too far back in the history of man — compared with the millions of years of earthquakes this planet has experienced — to understand the destructive force of man’s inability to reason his way through crises and confrontations.
In fact, let’s just start with the 20th century. It matters not the reasons for world wars and other major conflicts — there is always something to legitimize man’s constant desire for more, or more of what someone else has — it matters only that conflicts do happen. And, unlike the earthquakes that are nature’s response to the Earth letting off a bit of steam, if you will, it seems to me that man should be able to control his darker impulses.
History is replete with what we should call pre-shocks — those events in the affairs of man that portend something worse — that, if we had reacted differently, might have prevented the world going to war.
During the 20th century and, now, the 21st, the United States has played an important role in the world’s decisions about whether to go to war. And in each of those times, it has been America’s isolationists who have set the stage for confrontation and conflagration. It’s not that we did anything to start the hostilities, it is more that we didn’t do enough to stop them in the first place.
Of course, it was the United States entering World Wars I and II that made the victorious difference, but history teaches us that our country may have prevented the conflicts in the first place had we chosen to get involved earlier.
At this beginning of 2024, we have the opportunity to look out at this big, old world of ours with fresh eyes and a hopeful attitude. And yet, what we see practically boiling over from 2023 are hot spots all over the planet.
People and countries are not only letting off steam by threatening and attacking one another for various and sundry reasons but, once again, an attitudinally isolationist America watches. Without U.S. leadership — political and moral — it is easy to see the mistakes of the past repeating themselves and America in yet another war.
The mistake, of course, is believing that the United States need not concern itself with what Putin is trying to accomplish in Ukraine, or what Iran is focused on in the Middle East through its proxies in Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis, or what Turkey is contemplating, China is considering and North Korea is dreaming about.
We cannot stop the tectonic plates from rubbing against and over each other and changing Earth’s crust, but we can try to stop those who live on Earth’s surface from creating warlike earthquakes that could affect America’s dream for itself and our planet.
We cannot isolate ourselves from what is going on all around us and will necessarily include us before the fighting is over. History has taught us that much.
The future is crying out — screaming, if you will — for U.S. involvement and leadership to avoid the mistakes of the past.
The question for all Americans is whether we will succumb to the dangerous isolationist fantasies of the past — the ones that have always involved us in world wars — or choose to do what the United States of America used to do best?
And that is to lead the world.
To do that, of course, means we have to reject those who would have us turn inward and embrace those who wish to lead from that shining city on the hill.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun
