Jack (Layton) is cool! As leader of the New Democratic Party (a political party), he is quite charismatic. How can you not like this guy? He wants to help the poor, he doesn't mind meeting you in your kitchen and having a cup of coffee talking about the matters that concern the working class.... which if I do think is the majority social class in Canada. Jack's political ad on TV has Jack look at you in your eyes and he says his name and that he is with the "NEW democrats!".... wow, what presence!
His heart is in the right place and he wishes to improve our world with more social programs. My problem is that sometimes his willingness to sacrifice important issues to fund his equally important social programs makes me wonder just what he is hoping to accomplish in a long term planning. Jack wants to cut funding on the military. Jack wants to bring the soldiers serving in a mission in Afghanistan back to Canada immediately. Jack uses the reasoning that this will allow us to send in workers to build a much needed infrastructure within Afghanistan instead of using soldiers to attack people. The implication is that the socialist who makes this statement is saying two things simultaneously: the first-->War is bad and Peace is good.... lucky for humanity that we have figured this out and are telling this to the population at large; and the second-->If you use soldiers for any reason, you must love War and hate Peace.
Lets look at cutting the funds for the military. Imagine that you see a fire station and every time you visit the station you happen to see the firefighters playing cards. You hear the occasional joke that one of them should go and start a fire somewhere so that they can get busy. You remember one story where a firefighter in the past had actually created fires so that they could go out and fight the fire.... Seeing all of this would make you wonder about the usefulness of this department.... You have never seen a fire in your neighborhood in the past 100 years, so why spend all that money on this department.... Of course, there may be a potential fire in the future so you don't want to completely eliminate the entire department..... but you have 20 firefighters now in this fictional department and 5 trucks.... Well as far as Jack is concerned, you could cut it down to 5 firefighters and have 1 truck.... and if ever there is a fire, we can have the immediate neighbors help out under the supervision of the firefighters. This decision is not based upon the realities of fighting fires but on the perception of wasting public money for a fire that may not even happen. Now we can all understand how this would be disastrous under the context of fighting fires and we would be shocked if this budget cut actually happened, but guess what? This is the very cuts that Jack would wish for.
A military budget is based upon very long term projections, it may take an entire generation for today's budget cuts can be felt in the realities of the battlefield.... This not only includes equipment use but also public acceptance of military operations. There have been cuts made about a generation ago onto the military and when Canada is asked to perform UN peacekeeping operations, they are under-equipped and under-appreciated.... yet we expect them to perform top-notch. (Remember my previous blogs about cutting corners and expecting the remaining employees of a corporation to not only cover the production of the fired employees but they must also surpass the production.... and we all know how unsuccessful they are in that).
Lets look at Jack's desire to bring back the soldiers back home immediately.... again using a firefighter metaphor, we have sent a group of firefighters to fight some forest fire in some obscure region of the world.... Do you really think that this is an appropriate action? People are relying upon your group and right in the middle of a major forest fire.... we pull them out? Ouch, so much for our reputation of helping. Why does Jack want to do this?
Finally, lets look at Jack's argument: where he says that we must send aid workers instead of soldiers and this is why he would pull back the military. Imagine now that you are a social worker and you have been tasked to keep an eye on a family that has alcohol problems and that the parents neglect their children. You have come to the conclusion that the children must be taken out of the house while the parents are encouraged to take some kind of therapy to stop drinking and become responsible.... Jack would applaud you for your heart and willingness to help society (in this case, the parents and the children).... you arrive at the house to bring the children over to their temporary foster homes.... For some funny reason, the currently drunk parents don't want you to enter their property and they are ready to use the family shotgun.... well you know this because your partner just received a shotgun blast a few seconds ago.... Gee don't you wish you had brought the police over to provide security on this issue? Gee don't you wish that the police who escort you would have the tools to deal with this specific situation? Ready to use diplomacy to disarm the parents but willing to use force if necessary. Why do we have the perception that our military somehow are thugs and that they can not use decent judgment to deal with situations?
So one guy used the military in the past for his own personal economic benefit.... and this means that this happens all the time? You had corrupt judges and corrupt cops during the Al Capone time-period.... does that mean we must never trust the institution of law enforcement or the judicial department forever?
Jack as decent as he is, with his great passion to help the common man, makes use of rhetoric. People have negative perceptions about the military, about war, etc which is normal, but rational thinking allows you to see that the military itself is not the evil... it is to be used in an imperfect world.... the goal is to avoid as many mistakes as possible. Jack does not encourage us to think the issues, he uses the natural aversion we have for war and encourages actions that if carried out would create more war or chaos. Using the above metaphors, how successful would the reduced firefighting team be at fighting a new fire? How much resentment would we create if we break a commitment of helping others in their hour of need? How many metaphorical children do you think could be helped if you ignored the police and attempted to bring these children to foster care?
Now it does not matter if Jack believes the rhetoric or not, he uses it to acquire sympathy by using emotions to overrule rationality. Since we all know war is bad, the obvious thing to do is to make a law to make war illegal. This reminds me of the Simpsons episode where the mayor promises a bunch of inconsistent items to his electorate which included ice cream for some.
Perceptions are used to gather votes or sympathy, but when you scrutinize the perceptions, you see that they are never the reality... yet in this illustration, Jack uses the perception that War is bad and the military provokes War. This would be a lie and discoverable if you use a bit of Socratic questioning. Naturally, if you look at any political leader, you could see that they have used such white lies or perceptions of truth to get ahead.... I have used this illustration to show how Jack's desire to sabotage Canada's reputation or military capability has disastrous consequences. If he really believes that we live in such a peaceful world where his views should be seriously considered as bringing about peace then I would suggest to him that he can always make a copy of his house keys and pass them along to me so that I can visit him and make us some coffee when I happen to be in the neighborhood for a chat. Now if he actually does this, the first thing I would chat about is that he is lucky that I am not some nut who would take advantage of his key because there are some who would..... and he would wake up to find most of his possessions are poof-gone. Of course.... if he really does this and provides a rational argument even if it sounds crazy as to why he could trust "me" with his house keys.... I might actually re-look my own presumptions that human beings are generally selfish....
But I suspect that Jack lives in a Bubble World.... As Churchill once said that if you are 20 and not a socialist then you have no heart. Jack is definitely a noble fighter for the poor.... unsure about him becoming a nation's leader though, but hey.... he's definitely someone that should be given charge of domestic issues in politics (education, health, social issues, etc)
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