My good friend Kerri has often asked me to debate more often – that I’m too unwilling to not argue – and she’s right. I am tired of arguing with those who simply won’t see the illogic beliefs that they hold.
I am exceptionally passionate about gun control – I refuse to back down from this issue and belief that I’ve held for nearly twenty years – and I still won’t change my position. And I’m also just as sick and tired of arguing about it.
But an article in yesterday’s National Review Online, although written on another subject, by Victor Davis Hanson made me rethink my position:
More challenging still, our own military — as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan — is so skillful, so adept in accomplishing its mission that it can defeat the enemy abroad with the appearance — I emphasize again the appearance — of so far not incurring costs of the magnitude we saw in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. But it would be a terrible mistake, in this age of our greatest affluence and leisure, to trust in such a misconception, to turn our attention inward precisely when the best citizens of our nation are fighting so well and so long and hard in such difficult places in Afghanistan and Iraq.
We must support them with all the material and spiritual aid we can muster. We must think of them daily, hourly and hold them in our prayers. We must make the needed sacrifices here at home to ensure that the unpleasant and often deadly task we have entrusted to them can be accomplished with every full measure of our love and support.
What would such sacrifice and responsibilities entail? All Americans with pride and confidence must confront in spirit and speech those who would caricature and misrepresent our struggle — that it is unnecessary, that it is wrong, that it is against Islam rather than the distorters of Islam. Yes, Americans must take on this new apparent phenomenon of anti-Americanism, learn about it, and then refute it with all their being, explaining that it is the United States who preserves the peace, whether that be in the Persian Gulf, the Korean Sea, or on the Mediterranean.
We seek no tribute, no colonies, no blackmail for ensuring that the seas are open and nations are free to pursue their own destinies without fear of attack by their neighbors. Whether it is stationing troops in the Balkans or in Japan, or providing billions of dollars in help for the victims of AIDS, or being a loyal and militarily powerful ally to Europe and a friend to large nations like Russia and India or protectors of the smaller like South Korea, the United States is a proven force for good in this world. And so the world depends on us to defeat those who would bring it back from the present horizons of modernism, global prosperity, and new friendships to the rule of the jungle of the Dark Ages.
I’ve grown tired of debating the anti-war forces – here and abroad – in the blogosphere – and in the real world. I was about ready to stop arguing about it.
But I’m not going to.. there’s too much at stake in the marketplace of ideas on this issue. I won’t back down – I can’t.
Not when there are men and women prepared to do violence on my behalf so that I can sleep safe and secure in my bed at night.
