Maybe I'm wrong

Maybe I'm wrong.

A speech was being given to the Congress of these United States.
I heard it on the news today listening to NPR (national public radio)
while trying to get my 4 year old son to take a nap. Some 'English'
sounding individual was going on and on about the responsibility of the
United States to 'stand to the fore and take the responsibility to
bring liberty to all those poor countries in the Middle East, Africa,
and the Far East.'
And throughout his entire speech only one thought kept running through
my simple mind. "What if I'm wrong?"
What if all my thoughts about peace and love being more important that
a few individuals in these United States making profits are wrong? What
if the values I was taught, that allowing people to be themselves and
not forcing my personal beliefs upon them was incorrect? Maybe I'm
mistaken. Maybe liberty at the price of love is the way this world is
meant to be. Maybe freedom for all, at the price of abusing the
position of power (and some say responsibility) this nation assumes as
it's right, really is the way in which this world was always meant to
be?
After all, I'm not an expert. Just because I have experienced what it
is like to destroy dreams, create chaos, and shatter the illusions of
hope for peace for the lives of others, doesn't give me any special
ability to recognize that same behavior in a nation's political powers.
And my 'rehabilitation' that allowed me to see for myself that those
behaviors never resolved any of the conflicts I was experiencing
throughout my entire lifetime doesn't really qualify me to make
judgements on even my own questionable observations, does it?
Maybe I am mistaken when I witness one nation press to control another
people, for the sake of controlling the resources that lay beneath the
land that other nation's people reside upon, and feel compelled to cry,
"Foul!" Perhaps it's my misguided mind that sees foulness and
corruption in profiting from the deaths of the children of other human
beings. And that foulness includes the sons and daughters of those from
this country who go to 'war' for the idea of democracy, never knowing
that the dream has become an illusion, lost to those who have the
finances to control what they are taught to believe.
I listened to that speech, being given before the Congress of these
United States, and heard the neatly timed applause of the Congress's
members. Was I mistaken to be frightened by the similarity to the
'canned laughter' of early radio and television shows, that the
applause I heard brought to mind? I have to admit, for one terror
filled moment I experienced a flash back to my childhood days of
reading Ray Bradbury, and the thought passed through my mind that
'there is no Congress'.
I hope, at least, that I am mistaken in that thought.
Rudyard Kipling wrote in his stories 'The Jungle Books" of a tribe of
apes, so convinced of their own superiority and rightness that when
they kidnapped young Mowgli and took him to the ruined city they
presented him with two constant and repetitive arguments.
The first was, "You must envy us, we are so great and wise and
wonderful. All the peoples of the jungle wish they could be as we are."
And of course the second, "We're right, we must be right, for we all
say so!"
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe that doesn't apply to human beings after all.
Maybe human beings don't have to fear or respect the danger of self
delusion and the conceit of believing that the sheer volume of noise a
people can raise with one voice makes them correct. Maybe I'm afraid
for no reason?

But I am afraid all the same. I fear a people that speak without
feeling. A nation lead by profit margins and religion based on control
of financial materials. I fear a people that shout to the heavens when
they receive back one thousandth of the atrocities that have been done
in their names, even unwittingly, and never regret even a moment of
their own part in such actions.
Maybe I'm wrong to be afraid. I could be mistaken in where I see these
things leading the world, not just this nation. Maybe it won't lead to
the rise of one power in the world that controls all, deciding what is
and isn't okay for people to embrace culturally, politically or even
spiritually. Maybe all this hubbub will pass and the world will start
working toward the utopian society and brotherhood of love it was meant
to be from the beginning?
Maybe I'm wrong.