Isolation vs. Insulation
By James T. Moore (10/04/07)
This piece should have been written a millennium ago, but since I wasn't around at the time, today's version will have to do. I believe it was some great Prophet who said that we should be in this world, but not of it. I can't think of any sounder advice than this in determining America's place and purpose on Earth.
This stunning truth was dramatized in a recent TV documentary on World War II in which our globe was split into two hemispheres: Western, called the “Free” side, and Eastern, called the “Dark” side. Given the history of our hemispheres, these appellations make sense. Europe is replete with the ruinous legacies of such tyrannical ruling systems as lords, kings, emperors, and dictators.
Same thing goes for Eastern Europe and Asia, with its potentates, sultans, chiefs, mullahs, and warlords.Our founding fathers turned their backs on all these systems when they gave us the Constitution, which makes individuals accountable to nothing but their conscience, the rule if law, and ultimately, their God.
This state of existence, in case there is any doubt, is called Freedom. And it is this freedom we most protect when we mind our own business and decline to get involved in somebody else’s.
Some have a name for non-involvement in other’s affairs: “isolationism”. So called, I suppose, because if we are reluctant to join in the pain, poverty and genocide of the “dark” hemisphere, we are not part of the “global” family. Nonsense. This view confuses “isolation”--burying your head in the sand, with “insulation”—-a conscious decision to remain uninvolved in foreign disputes.
America is a nation of giving and forgiving people. But we are not fools. We all know the hate and animosity that festers in the other hemisphere. Embracing the “light”, while keeping our minds insulated from the “dark” is the only way humankind can progress, and which has been largely responsible for America’s incredible progress.
This is why, except for humanitarian aid and equitable trade policies, it behooves us to avoid the pits of darkness that lie beyond our borders.
In short, instead of trying to save hemispheres gone insane, we should keep our politics, money, military, and mediatory advice at home—where the light still shines.
I will never believe that our founders had an “isolation” mindset. I think, rather, that in warning us about the entrapment and danger of foreign entanglements they meant that we should strive to “insulate” ourselves from the tyranny which they knew existed on the dark side.
They did, after all, have first-hand experience with tyranny and terror, thus they knew in no uncertain terms, all the pain and misery associated with it. Sadly, though, we seem to have settled the argument for good. We are neither isolationists nor insulationists. We have become interventionists.
Have we learned nothing in 200 years?
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