Addicted to Force, Addicted to Failure

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A Falcon of Peace

Who Wants to Be a Dove? (They Always Lose.)

By Tom Engelhardt

HOW come they get to be the hawks? And we get to be the doves? A hawk is a noble bird. A dove. Well, basically it's a pigeon. The sort of bird that, in New York City anyway, messes your building's window sills, is always underfoot, and, along with the city's rats, makes a hearty lunch for the red-tailed hawks which now populate our parks.

Even a turkey would be less of a turkey than a dove. We get to carry that olive twig—okay, they call it a "branch"—around in our beaks, but you can bet your bippy that they get the olives, or, more likely, the opportunity to trample the olive groves into oil.

They get to swoop and prey. We get to pace the sidelines, cooing our complaints. Their ideas—it never matters how visibly dumb they are—get tried. Ours never do. And when theirs fail miserably, they get to recalibrate and try again. We never get to try once.

That's because it's well accepted that they are "realists" and we are "dreamers," or "utopians," or maybe, like most doves, vegans. If you're not addicted to force (and so failure), you're simply not a part of the grand scheme of things, of the world as it is.

They get hundreds of billions of dollars to play with. We don't get bus fare to Washington . . .


more: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/addicted-force-addicted-failure