My cousins in South Africa came of age at a time when apartheid threatened to tear the country apart. Thanks to the monumental efforts of Nelson Mandela, they and their children know a country at peace. Much work remains to be done before South Africa can be called a truly equitable nation, but Mandela assured that work could begin.
I’ll preface this by saying that that plenty of other blogs can provide much more intelligent commentary on the events unfolding in regards to Syria. But what exactly would we accomplish with military intervention? I understand that chemical weapons are horrible, but is it any more acceptable for civilians to be slaughtered with bullets and mortars? This distinction between conventional and nonconventional arms may have made sense fifty years ago, but it seems archaic when modern conventional weapons are perfectly capable of killing thousands in seconds. If we only sit up and take notice of civilian deaths when chemical weapons are used, we’re hardly the defenders of justice that we claim to be as a nation. We’re like cynical cops who only venture into a bad neighborhood after someone sprays gunfire into a playground.