Modernizing America

As Fareed Zakaria points out in a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, America has been in the business of invading foreign countries and changing their DNA for more than 50 years now. He makes a good case how difficult, if not impossible, this is. Ten years after our invasion the cost to maintain the Afghan security forces is estimated to be $12 billion a year, while the annual budget of Afghanistan is no more $2 billion. According to the CIA Fact Book, Afghanistan's budget is actually 1.58 billion: http://tinyurl.com/4zzn5lr, while its security budget is almost $13 billion: http://tinyurl.com/7dunv3n. So much for the facts.

Fareed illustrates that Newt Gingrich still believes that if we had built super highways in Afghanistan and had given each citizen a cell phone the country would now be well on its way to become a modern state. To illustrate just how crazy that belief is, imagine where things are in America today and compare them to the early 1960s. During that time banning access to contraception was defeated in the courts and ultimately the Supreme Court of the land. It seemed to be an issue that had been dealt with once and for all. Here we are fifty years later and we are talking about that same issue again, this time covered up as an assault on religious freedom. Is the government impinging on religious freedom when it mandates free access to contraception in company sponsored health care benefits when such a company is funded or supported by a religious institution, say a catholic hospital or a Methodist university? Seeing a potential wedge issue (some would call it class warfare) the GOP takes it one step further and would like all employers be able to pick and choose what parts of the health care plan a company wants to provide. Does your employer have a moral problem with lifestyle diseases, herpes infection, HIV? Better go work somewhere else because if you get sick you are on your own. What's next? I would have preferred not to pay taxes for the education of Rick Santorum's children. It doesn't take a college education to figure out that our tax money was clearly wasted on them.

Having come this far, do you still believe that we can invade a country and quickly change how it is organized and what its citizens do and think? While we ourselves can't even get together on how to fix our outdated infrastructure?  

Global warming anyone?