jimmoyer, the reason I'm focused on the US as opposed to Colombia, Uzbekistan, China, Israel, Turkey, Syria, Indonesia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe or any of the other hundred-plus nations committing some sort of human rights abuse, is that alone among almost all of them, the US claims to support freedom, democracy and human rights.
They are supposedly our allies, and the albeit small voice that civil society can have in changing the government's actions, sometimes does speak for protesters.
Canada's economic ties to the US and the dependence of our neighbours on our energy exports and our market for their manufactured goods, means that we have the vanishinglu small, but still nonzero probability of swaying our government to apply pressure on them.
Since the US is the largest arms dealer on the planet, as well as the strongest anti-democratic force in the world, they are also for these reasons a more natural target of our concern than, say Iran or North Korea, who have neither the power to wreak on the world what the US can, nor any concern at all for our protest of their actions or regimes.
Personally, I expect countering the lies, omissions and errors of the media is futile in the short term, and I'm sure that our "democratic" system is so well-tailored to maintaining the status quo that no real change will take place within the system. I doubt any real changes will take place during my lifetime, but obviously I have no idea if there are "tipping points" in place, global upheavals or revolutions around the corner.
Still, my reading of history is that a slender, often all-but-invisible thread of morality and social justice has pervaded our political institutions and has seen larger and larger fractions of humanity freed from oppression and misery. It has piggy-backed on technological advances as well as a gradual increase in the level of education of the world's population.
Progressive people like those on this board, if they can mellow the rigid ideology of even one other person and get them to question authority and dogma have, I believe, recruited another drop of water to wear away at the stone fortress of greed and exploitation.
Maybe we're just whistling past the graveyard but at least we're making music. At least that's my take on it.
