By now, you've had a good long while to consider what it means that we tossed a few cruise missiles at Syria. The problem, as I see it, is that you can't start throwing missiles around every time you hear from your cousin's, uncle's best friend's former roommate that somebody used chemical weapons. Chemical weapons, or "WMD" -- WMDs? WsMsDs? WMD's? I give up -- are the monster under the bed where modern government is concerned.
It's gotten so that every time some obscure third-world dictator trips over his cat, the western spy network is ready to tell the president that there are MEOWWWWW -- excuse me, Weapons of Mass Destruction -- being used. And, hey, what with all the conventional warfare that goes on everywhere around the world, somehow it's different when we're gassing people instead of shooting them. Like if we were personally on the scene, we'd step over some guy with a machete in his skull or a bullet in his face to point at the guy choking on poison and say, "Okay, THAT is too far, buddy!"
Our media love to show us tragic imagery of children suffering. They love to point to the moral high ground -- a landscape that the average politician couldn't reach with a stepladder and a room full of hookers on stilts to cheer him on. If that imagery sounds weird, well yeah, it is. But the only thing weirder is pretending that there's something moral or noble about chucking rocket-propelled warheads at people we can't see, to make them pay for stuff we're not sure they did, in order to teach them that indiscriminately killing people is wrong.
Worse, most of us know only what we're told by mass media. It's a great, big video game and, at the end of the day, nobody's really sure what's going on. All I know is that it wasn't too long ago that our president was using flying robots to kill people and, honestly, I'm not sure cruise missiles are an improvement when our motives are muddy at best. It's times like these that a guy just needs a t-shirt to tell the world he's not down with raining death from the sky. Or at least, that he'd rather we rain down death from the sky a whole lot less.