Can't Trust 'Em

I was just responsible for the death of a squirrel. I was driving my housemate's car, and as I rounded onto Ash street, I saw one of the little guys doing that Indecision Dance in the middle of the street. I tried to go nice and slow, give him the chance to either be wilier than my wheels, or simply sit still and await further instructions.
But, it should be remembered that the little guy had a brain the size of a Reese's Piece, and chose instead to dash in exactly the wrong direction. I felt the minor bump under the rear tire, and with some trepidation, checked the mirror.
Laying there in a spray of fallen autumn leaves, his squashed ass was on his back, tail grotesquely waving good bye. I'm gonna have a dream involving that image here, sometime soon.
"Oh dude...Sorry...Even though it was at least partially your fault." I said these words out loud, and then thought, You my friend, haven't a chance of ever becoming an assassin.
I keep on meditating on how people are like nations, and how seemingly simple it would be to jump from there to how nations need to act more often like individuals. But the exact opposite is true, I feel.
What do I feel are some of my better assets? Well, one has to be the fact that I just won't quit. When you don't have the resources or the brawn, you can at very least be unstoppable. Mind you, being smarter than your opponent isn't bad, either. So-never giving up: Great in a human, disastrous in a nation.
When a nation embarks on a course that just isn't working, and it causes them to lose money, people and the esteem of the world around them, it would be good reasoning to be able to say, 'You're right. This's stupid. Never mind.' Almost none of them ever do it.
They almost never do it because of silly nationalistic pride, and something that may even be worse: the whole 'we're in this thing, no matter how ill-timed or badly planned, and if we leave now, it'll be worse, this shit situation of our own making.'
I had a bunch of British soldiers in my taxi one time, and took them all over town. I went out of my way to not bring up Northern Ireland, of course, but one of them did it for me. Turns out that he was just back from there.
"Well, okay," I said, "why are you guys still there?"
"Because if we pulled out now, it'd be a bloodbath," he said.
"You know that's the reasoning that kept us in Vietnam for twenty-plus years, right?"
But what's twenty years to an Empire with bills to pay and people to distract? Especially since the Brits had been there pretty much since they created that entity, on September Eleventh 1905.
So let's see: If I create a stupid situation, ineptly try to foster a solution, and then when that fails, stick around even longer, fucking things up even worse, making speeches the entire time about how it would be dishonorable of me not to be there, being a nuisance and a menace...I'd be a fool, right? But if I was a nation, that'd be Standard Operating Procedure, since in theory it makes money, or something.

But all sorts of poisonous bullshit is believed and cherished by many the world over, and this has always been the case. Whenever I hear any of the Evangelicals in the society I live in on one hand whining that they just want to worship and be left alone, I narrow my eyes. This is because (often a sentence or two later) they also will say that they are called by a higher power to go out and spread their word to the rest of us, who may very well already have a perfectly serviceable belief system, and just want to be left alone.
And Faith is a great thing in a person, but poison to a nation. Faith, pretty much by definition, is blind adherence and unquestioning belief, both things that should not be present in entities that have nuclear weapons. Nations need to be open to the idea that they are wrong.
If my faith causes me to go out and bomb abortion clinics and assassinate doctors who work there, that is publicly deplored by churches, but you can hear the underlying relief: they're glad somebody did it.
On the other hand, if Roe v. Wade were overturned by these spooky nonentities currently being railroaded into the federal judiciary, and I said that I was called by a higher power to commence bombing churches and killing ministers, pretty much everybody would be against me since, apes that we are, we consider abstractions like Faith to be more important than the here and now. It's just bad manners to question folks' views on The Almighty, no matter how murderously childish.
Well all right then. I am called by a higher power to spread the word against the Bullshit Engine. Just try and stop me; I have all the might of angels and demons both by my side, and the winds of history at my back. If I am alone in my crusade, that is further proof of my righteousness, as oftentide the right answer is the unpopular one, as I have learned from my encyclopedic perusal of Western movies. I am, like Thomas Jefferson (note the Appeal to Authority), the enemy of all religion and tyrrany over the minds of men, and I'm sorry if nice people get killed by it. Wave your tail poignantly as you go, brother. It's more important that we destroy the thing that has made us hate and kill each other, all these years.
See? I'm nuts, and unfortunately, I think I'm Right. Just imagine how ultimately destructive I'd be if I were a nation.
(Confidential aside to all who know me [hi Mom!]: how many people do you think will take that screed above seriously, do ya' think?)