Prevention

Aggressors understand aggression. Bullies will continue to be bullies until the kid they keep giving wedgies and swirlies to finally has enough and stands up to them. Whenever someone being bullied turns the tables and pushes back, it is so surprising that more often than not, it throws the bully off-kilter and causes them to stop. Sure, they’ll bluster, shake their first, threaten the beating of a lifetime after school, behind the bleachers, or in the parking lot, but everyone knows that the bully just got got, and the illusion of unflappability is shattered.

People who seethe, and foam, and make threats they could never reasonably carry out, do so out of impotence. They are angry, but also frustrated at the level of their own inability to do anything more meaningful than scream and yank their hair out by the root, and so they have to lash out, to make dire threats about how they will lay waste to the entirety of a continent because a monster and a merchant of death was dealt with swiftly, and with finality.

 I’m not one to toe the line with anyone or anything other than the Word of God. That, to me, is the only absolute, the only plumb line. Truth is the only hill I’m willing to die on, and so for those just itching to write a snippy response as to how I’m just seeing the situation from one side, allow me to assure you that I’m a looking at it as objectively as a father of two can. Yes, I know, those pesky kids again, but yes, they matter, at least to me, and I have to look at something even as complex as geopolitical machinations through that prism.

Back in the day, the English had a saying that prevention was better than the cure. In so many words, do all you can not to get sick, rather than try and remedy the illness itself. It is better to prevent something, even if in the short term, it might be frustrating or difficult than to have to deal with the disease and attempt to find the subsequent cure somewhere down the line.

The disease, in this case, would be an all-out war. It is not something any of us want to see, and if taking out a mass murderer in such a way that it makes all the other mass murderers hesitate, then you’ve succeeded in preventing something far worse.

The thing about bullies, political or otherwise, is that they talk a good game until they realize that they are not safe from the aftereffects of what they are attempting to gin up. If someone like Soleimani could be taken out by a kid with a joystick and a screen a thousand miles away, they realize that their grasp on power is tenuous at best, and their safety is illusory.

The actions undertaken recently may be the best means of preventing an otherwise protracted, bloody, and uncertain cure. One makes themselves best understood by speaking the language the other party is fluent in. When a barbarian realizes that you not only understand, but speak barbarism as fluently as they, it is an impacting realization, and one that just might make them take their foot off the throttle of all-out war. It’s not that we don’t speak their language; it’s that we choose not to for the most part!

Yes, I know, unbecoming, uncouth, beneath us, but power struggles, kingdoms, monarchies, governments, turf wars, tribes, and tribalism have been bloody business since there were enough of us roaming the earth to coalesce into a group and try to take what the other group had by force. It will be this way until the Prince of Peace returns, and His kingdom is established.

If we wanted to pick a fight, we’ve had ample reason throughout the years since the unpleasantness with Iran all started back in the 1970s. Even as recently as this past couple of years, we’ve had everything from embassy attacks, to drones being shot down, to soldiers maimed by IED’s funded by the Iranian regime.

I’m not naïve enough to believe in utopia, global peace, bloodless wars, or whatever other nonsense is being bandied about. Even in knitting, there is sometimes bloodshed, never mind in war; I just don’t think it’s a war we are after in this particular situation. If they escalate, it will be another story altogether. Time will tell. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.