Decisions

I’ve always had trouble making decisions. Oh, not the little ones, not the “Decaf or Regular?”,“Shall I Supersize That For You?” Vanilla or Chocolate kind of decisions….those I’ve got down cold. I can handle those in a heartbeat.

No, the decisions that I have trouble with are some of the bigger ones…some that aren’t even mine to make. Like the death penalty, for instance. Nobody likes the idea of a bunch of bad guys hanging out, on our tax dollar, watching TV, pumping iron and making music videos. Those guys are having a regular party in there, right? Seems like it should be easy to know how I feel about that…who could possibly like those guys in that situation? 

Well, it’s not so simple. First of all, why does it cost so much to keep some bad guy in jail in the first place? It’s supposed to be punishment right? But if you have the time and inclination to find out what the per diem cost of keeping a skell in jail is, you’ll find that it’s more than you spent per day on your last vacation to Club Med. You remember, the one where you had one too many “Crazy Parrots” and tried to convince Kim the Aerobic Instructor that you were pretty much ALL muscle…  Oh, that wasn’t you? Excuse me, but you get my drift. 

It would be cheaper to keep all these guys in a Ritz-Carlton with room service than it is to keep them in jail. In fact, why don’t we do that?  Then I wouldn’t have trouble making the decision about them. OK, I know, you are probably thinking “Moriarity, That’s Ridiculous! We can’t put criminals in the Ritz-Carlton!” All right then, consider really bad rooms with mold problems in Super 8 motels and only two McDonald Value Meals per day. No Supersizing. How about that? Then we wouldn’t have to kill them all, and that’s good because that’s the part that I really have trouble with. Killing them, I mean. The majority of them may well deserve it, but I couldn’t personally be the one to push the button, or syringe or whatever and if I can’t do it then how do I feel OK with asking someone else to do it? Isn’t it pretty much the same thing? Besides, God wouldn’t like it. He said so in his book.

So I just can’t decide what I think about the Death Penalty, but I’ve learned to live with that.  Right now, however, there is a much bigger and more immediate item on the agenda that I can’t decide about, and that’s what’s got me worried. 

It seems that there is this guy called Saddam Hussein in this country called Iraq. Our President says that he’s a REALLY bad guy and he has to go. Of course, we all know about this because it’s been on the news every day for months now. In fact the only guy I’ve run into lately who doesn’t  know about Saddam Hussein and Iraq, is a guy who doesn’t know about much of anything because he sleeps in the doorway of an abandoned gas station and his only concern is the rapidly falling level in his bottle of Mad Dog 20-20. 

So we all know that Hussein is a bad guy…the worst. We know this because our President says so and it’s his job to know. That’s what we elected him for. 

Well, we didn’t actually elect  him,  since most of the people in the United States voted for Al Gore to be President, but a bunch of people that are known as the “Electoral College” said that George Bush should be President instead. They must know what they are doing, I mean it’s a College, right? They should know. 

Anyway, George Bush is our President and he knows who’s been bad and who’s been good. Sort of like Santa Claus, but not quite as benevolent. One of the things that President Bush knows is that Saddam Hussein has been hiding all kinds of things in his country, and won’t tell us where they are. As if that’s not bad enough, he has killed lots of his own people, thousands of them, maybe more. So we really need to bomb Iraq and make sure that he never hurts anyone again. 

Besides that, what about all the terrorists? What about 9/11? How many of those terrorists were Iraq guys anyway!!??  Oh? None of them were? Well, forget about that part, then. But we still have to bomb them. 

No reason why I shouldn’t be able to make a decision here is there? Our President says so and that ought to be enough. But if George Bush saying that we ought to bomb them isn’t going to convince me, all by itself, then how about what other people think? Rush Limbaugh says that we have to bomb them now because we’ve gone to all the trouble and expense to move the troops over there…we can’t just leave without killing someone. Rush says that the only people who don’t agree with him are those “Wacko Peaceniks”. Just imagine that! Anybody who doesn’t want to kill Iraqis is a “Wacko Peacenik”. 

With such firm and strong opinions from some of the world’s greatest leaders, you’d think I could make my decision in a second. I mean after all, Iran doesn’t like Iraq either and you know how much we respect their opinion and besides they helped us when….no, wait a minute… IRAQ helped us when we didn’t like IRAN, yeah that’s right. We liked IRAQ then. I wonder who ran the country when we liked  them? Couldn’t have been Saddam Hussein, no way, we wouldn’t like him then and not like him now, would we? I mean, we’re Americans

So we’re always right, aren’t we? 

Maybe, that’s why I can’t make a decision. Maybe America isn’t always automatically right. I really believe we try to be, but sometimes we do tend to get a little bit nasty. Particularly when things don’t go our way, or our economy isn’t doing so well. Nothing like firing off a few hundred multi-million dollar Cruise Tomahawk Space Invader Viper rockets to stimulate the spending and create a few jobs. But a few Iraquis are gonna have to die. President Bush says so, Rush too. Even O’Reilly says so, and we all know that the spin stops with him.

But then there’s God. I must have missed the asterisk after the “Thou shalt not kill” part of his book. Surely it’s OK sometimes…we’re America, right? After all they did start it didn’t they?  There aren’t any kids over there anyway, at least not the kind that we care about. They dress funny , they talk funny and don’t like us either. 

But what about our  kids? I’m at the age where I have the right to consider someone in their teens  as a kid. There are soldiers who are teenagers and some of them will die too. Those who do die might have kids of their own. For sure they have parents and people who love them. What about them? It’ll probably be OK though. For one thing we have really smart bombs. Yep, they just kill bad guys. Not only that, we have these model planes that can kill somebody in Iraq while the guy that runs it just sits in his chair in Miami and eats Cheez Doodles and picks the bad guys off like so many video game villains.  Still, some of our kids are gonna get hurt. Some of theirs, too. No matter how smart our bombs are.

I just had a random and kind of weird thought! How about if we had SMART KIDS and less bombs instead of Smart Bombs  and less kids? No, forget it, sorry I even mentioned it. That wouldn’t work, we’d have to spend way too much money on schools and teachers and stuff and wouldn’t have anything left over with which to move troops around, or for their guns. Even those deadly model airplanes go for a few mill apiece!

I’m not the only guy who has trouble making decisions. Most of us probably have some doubts about lots of things, but it’s too hard to know what to think. There’s so much information out there and we only have so much time and capacity to process it all. It’s not like Stevie’s cool new Dell Computer where you can just slam another 60 Gig Hard drive into and a few more sticks of RAM and you’re good to go , Dude.  You can process it all! If only it were so.  I’d put at least two or three memory cards in that Mad Dog 20-20 guy in the abandoned gas station doorway and get him up and running. 

But it doesn’t work that way, we’re humans with only a little bit of capacity to think, remember and choose. That’s why so many of us tend to agree with the last thing we heard….and we tend to listen to the same people all the time because that’s the guy our friends listen to, or because we like the way they talk or because we agreed with them in the past or maybe just because we like the way they look!  We might agree with somebody just because they are a Democrat or they are a Republican. This is a very, very, bad idea. 

I’m proud to be an American, most of us are pretty good, well-meaning folks. I’m also proud to be an Independent. I’ve got a voter’s card that says I am. (Independent, that is….I added the “proud” part) Maybe not being able to make a decision isn’t such a bad thing, maybe it means I’m listening. Maybe it means that committing ourselves to a war is something that needs a LOT of thought and soul-searching. Is there no other way to handle a monster than to become one? Aren’t we smarter than that?

I don’t know, as I said in the beginning, I’ve always had trouble making decisions. 

Jan. 28,2003

P.H. Moriarity