In a message dated 4/26/00 9:34:07 AM Central Daylight Time,
charlie@antipope.org writes:
> There seems to be a cultural assumption ingrained in a lot of Americans
> that in any conflict, there must be a bunch of goodies and a bunch of
> baddies, and all that is necessary is to identify the good guys and side
> with them. This is one struggle where the bad guys are distributed
> evenly on all sides -- if you want to root for someone, root for the peace
> process and the politicians sitting around the negotiating table and
> _talking_ to each other about how to get _all_ the guns and bombs off the
> street.
Poking my nose in quickly . . . but I think Charlie's dead right. I've spent
a lot of time in the UK (but none in Ireland) and am a pretty energetic
proponent of the "anglosphere" concept as proposed by Jim Bennett of
Foresight in his upcoming book "The Network Commonwealth". I see Ireland and
England as both part of a common cultural sphere with more in common with
each other than they have with most other cultures. I also think there's
plenty of "badness" to go around on both sides. Hanging on to historical
grudges is damned foolish when all sides have so much to gain by reaching a
lasting peace. The whole process needs to be disarmed and pacified,
regardless of who may have some kind of historical upper hand.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:09:51 MDT