Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Bumpers for Peace
Don Quixote on Feb 03 2010 at 6:29 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
As regular readers know, I like bumper stickers and talk about them regularly. But every now and then one will bring me up short. Like today in the parking lot — “Senior for Peace” For the life of me I couldn’t imagine the thought process behind spending good money to buy this sticker and put it on your car. “Gee, if every senior would just put a Senior for Peace sticker on their bumper . . . “ What? The terrorists would get confused because they wouldn’t know who to target first?
Have we really learned nothing from the 60s when we all were young and stupid and believed that if we only imagined hard enough, and maybe stuck a flower in a policeman’s gun barrel, we’d bring peace and love to the whole world? How does one get to be old enough to claim to be a senior without learning better than that?
Anyway, I’d conservatively estimate that 99% of all American seniors (excepting only the odd aging nut job or arms merchant) are for peace. Who wants a bumper sticker that says, in effect, I agree with 99% of people my age? The key, of course, is what price we are willing to pay for peace? Our freedoms, our nation, our way of life, our very lives? Conversely, what price are we willing to pay in war? Young lives ended, bodies broken, potential for nuclear disaster?
These are serious questions. We ought to be giving them our serious consideration and discussion, not trivializing them with sound bites and truly meaningless, trivial bumper stickers.
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12 Responses to “Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Bumpers for Peace”
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I think bumper stickers are the western equivalent to Buddhist prayer wheels. Just by sticking them on your car you get 10,000 Good Karma points.
They’re also what I and others call “cheap grace,” which is a socialist/secularist schtick the world over. It goes like this: I do something entirely symbolic, like put on a bumpersticker or march around the quad with angry feminists shouting “Take back the night!,” and I have done my service to mankind.
On a more sophisticated level, I attain a position of political power where I can reach into people’s purses and wallets, take fistfuls of money to redistribute to “the poor, the underrepresented and the marginalized” [not to mention some of my enlightened friends], while muttering about “compassion and diversity.” The beauty of it is that not a single dollar of my own ever leaves my pocket.
Thus, “cheap grace.”
I have long been partial to the “Visualize Whirled Peas” bumpersticker. Unfortunately, while we may not be interested in war, others are interested in war with us- or with our surrender.
Gringo, I thought of the same bumper sticker! It’s the only one, off the top of my head, I’d put on my car if I were into that. A perfect expression of my complete disdain, both for the concept of “world peace”, and the apparently exalted state of “visualizing” it.
When the power-mad (Chavez, Kim Jong-Il) and the insane (Achmadinejad) scheme and assume control of countries, and the fraudulent scheme to steal the worth of hard-working people (global warming advocates who wanted to seize tax dollars to fund themselves via outright fraud and deceit), world peace is far, far away. Now I’m all for world peace. But you don’t get there by standing in a field of daffodils, gazing dreamily up into the cumulus clouds, thinking of people of all colors linking hands in a billions-wide Circle Of Life singing Kum-Ba-Yah.
The bumpers that just sum it all up, I think, are the ones that sport side-by-side “No Iraq War” and “Free Tibet” stickers. I truly don’t get this. Although a free and independent Tibet would be a wonderful thing, the Chinese are really quite attached to it. Sweet talk won’t work. Buying them off isn’t really an option, especially since we would be doing so with money we borrowed from… them. And they’re not easily intimidated. Which brings us down to the last resort of military force. To liberate a landlocked country which has been annexed by its next-door neighbor with a population of 1.3 billion. And nuclear weapons that are pointed at us. Yeah. Sure. And the people advocating this are the same ones who were steadfastly against the Iraq war even before the first casualty.
I’m arriving at the conclusion that liberals don’t really do cost-benefit analysis — just benefit analysis.
I saw one the other day that said
ART NOT WAR
I wonder if this person is aware of the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas?
Too many in Western Society are like the young Siddhartha, living a life of unparalleled comfort and luxury walled off from the harsh realities of life. They don’t realize that those walls were built with the blood, sweat and tears of our very forebears that they disparage. Unfortunately, those walls will crumble and, unlike Siddhartha, I have deep doubts whether these people have the capability for self-enlightenment.
Charles, I once marched with angry feminists to “take back the night” although even then I thought that regular patrols of armed women would do more good. The thing about taking part in demonstrations like that is you get lifetime karmic points in arguments with liberals.
I also have unlimited karmic points against environmentalists, because I once had two children in cloth diapers. At the same time. With no diaper service. And no dryer in the summer. No prissy young thing with bumper stickers can stand against *my* environmental points. Admittedly, I did it out of thriftiness, but I don’t tell them that . . .
One of the popular bumper stickers around here is “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” It almost always is found on large SUVs and other expensive cars.
I’m not a Christian myself, but find this one especially irritating on multiple levels. Would Jesus have been opposed to bombing, say, Hitler and his inner circle? If “yes,” then how do you explain whipping the money-changers out of the Temple? If “no,” then we are in the realm of practical analysis rather than absolutist statements, and the bumper sticker is meaningless.
Bumper stickers are a protestation or a declamation against or for something.
Like the ‘echo chamber’ statement as if it were fact, not interpretation, is not a question nor does it have an answer.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0210/He_hates_us_he_really_hates_us.html
<B>
President Obama’s back is against the wall, so he’s getting in touch with his inner Agnew, hitting the neo-nattering nabobs of cable and the Net.
“If we could just — excuse the press — turn off the cameras,” he told Democratic senators at their annual retreat. “Turn off your CNN, your Fox, your MSNBC, your blogs, turn off this echo chamber … where the topic is politics. … We’ve got to get out of the echo chamber. That was a mistake I made last year — not getting out of here [Washington].”</b>
Bumper Sticker: We have got to get out of the echo chamber.
It’s not cause he has answers. It’s cause he doesn’t have answers. A banner isn’t an answer but a call to arms, the continual resistance rather than the satisfactory conclusion of a war well fought.
Seniors For Peace = Grandparents who want to see the grandkids only on holidays?
I’m still giggling over my favorite bumper sticker ever, one that I saw about three years ago: “Don’t worry, America. Israel will protect you.” And that was before Obama’s bumbling dealings with Iran.
DQ isn’t familiar with a Marin phenomenon, which is the senior protesters at the Redwoods Retirement Home. For years, these septo- and octogenarians were out daily on a main road into Mill Valley protesting the Iraq War. They then got imaginative and branched out into Israel bashing. I can assure you that these seniors, who would happily call a Leftist or Muslim theocratic desert “peace,” would be first in line to buy and display precisely the bumper sticker you describe.
I believe “Nuke the Whales” is still the all time classic.
This cartoon gave me a chuckle:
http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2FkNDUwNDMxOGRiOTVmYzM2MzMxMTJhODJkM2JmOGE=