I really don’t like waking up one morning to see money confiscated from me being used to “kill people and break things,” as Rush Limbaugh memorably described the military.
I am 100 percent certain I would have put my dollars to a more productive use than to breach the defenses of a bad man, killing enough people and breaking enough things to ensure his capture.
On a scale of bad to worst, it beats laying waste to and occupying an entire countryside, and it even beats using drones to assassinate as many of my perceived enemies that one can manage, as previous presidents have done.
But I abhor the use of violence in any form, and I especially abhor killing people and breaking things with money that was removed from my possession under threat of violence.
“We live in a violent world. He is a violent man who needed to be removed from power. He was given a chance to flee and he refused,” you might say. All well and good, but I don’t have to like or condone removing him this way.
Many of the people who are now condemning the forcible removal of Maduro also mocked or condemned the 1980s campaign to “just say no” to illegally trafficked drugs. But if the U.S. of A. was not an ardent consumer of said drugs, then illegal trafficking would not be such a lucrative business.
Most of the violent deaths that occur around the world are sanctioned by one government or another. For the most part only governments wage war; the rest of us spend our lives trying to live at peace with our neighbors. That is why it’s best to limit the power of government, but that notion rarely gains much traction.
If only there was a Prince of Peace who would encourage us to love one another — oh, wait, there is.
