Life in 21st Century Politics Sure Is Complicated

Given all the political entities in the Middle East associated with Syria: The al-Assad government, the rebels, the Russians, the Kurds, the Shia, the Sunnis, Iran, al-Qaeda, and the Turks, it’s a virtual certainty that if you pick an enemy to fight, there will be some significant way in which you’re actually, at the same time, fighting against an ally.

The same can be said about some of the boycotts going on in the United States. Decent people have been boycotting Coca Cola forever, based on their use of plastics and the poison they put in them, and sell to people who don’t know any better.  Then along comes Coke’s CEO James Quincey loudly condemning Georgia voter suppression measures, saying, “This legislation is unacceptable….It is a step backward and it does not promote principles that we have stood for here in Georgia.”

We’ve all had similar “what the hell?” moments, being forced to support the FBI’s Robert Mueller and ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson over the last few years.

We’ve come to see that complexity is all around us. When our fathers were fighting WW2, Nazis were uniformly bad.  Just 70 years later, the President of the United States proclaimed, “there were good people on both sides,” referring to people with swastikas getting rough with anti-fascist protesters.

Perhaps we need to accept the fact that life is no longer as simple as it was in the old days.