I'm getting damned sick of all of you people out in "the rest of the world". Supposedly you're all grownups, certainly most of you seem to think you are, and yet you've all proven incapable of acting like grownups.

Time and again Americans get patronized and criticized by the "intelligencia" (self-appointed, by the way) of other nations for "not having perspective" on a crisis or "not understanding the historical roots" of a people enough to make a judgment.

I think the situation is on its head right now. I want someone to please explain to me why the only way to get groups of "old world" peoples to get along and not gleefully kill each other is to sit on them 24x7 for decades at a time, using our tax dollars and risking our children's lives? Europe bled itself white twice and had to be divided and sat on by the two most powerful nations the world had ever seen for fifty freaking years before they stopped.

Of course, they didn't really stop, not completely. The Balkans are still filled with adults... grownups, not teenagers or school kids with a grudge, but grownups with jobs and houses and kids of their own, that have to have someone else's tanks pointed at them before they stop sneaking into each other's houses with guns and knives to kill babies. There are huge groups of Irishmen that think it's their god-given right to march down streets they know they're not welcome in because of some damned three hundred year old battle. And there are still places in northern Spain that you don't hang around in because a small group of bloody-minded people have been throwing bombs trying to get themselves a country for, what, a thousand years?

And this is supposed to be the civilized part of the old world. The rich part, with what you'd think would be the most to lose. The rest of you are just hopeless. Ask any half of you why you hate the other half and you don't get an explanation, you get a goddamned history lesson.

I used to really try to educate myself about the situations behind these conflicts. I really do want to understand why the world has turned out this way, because I think figuring that out leads you to solutions.

But after digging through a hundred history books about dozens of different subjects and making untold forays to libraries and web sites, I've pretty much found that all of these conflicts have one, and only one, common thread: a set of people too greedy, stupid, infantile, and stubborn to get along with anyone but their own mothers (and only then if they happen not to be hung over that morning). Yeah world, I'm calling you all a bunch of stupid gits, because you are.

I really have stopped caring if the world thinks we're taking over. You see, we can't win playing their game. If we stay out of these stupid never ending four-hundred-years-ago-he-stuck-a-stick-in-my-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandad's-eye things what do we get? Bosnia, Rwanda, Palestine, Somalia. If we try to help? Bosnia, Rwanda, Palestine, Somalia. It never changes and it never stops. For at least the past twelve years America has tried to understand you and get along with you and figure it out with you. No more.

Because the rules changed after 9-11. Before, we could with a clear conscience and a smile on our face let you bleed yourselves dry and kill each other's children and blow each other's houses up and gather each other up into death camps and gas yourselves to hell over your stupid little grudge matches. Oh, there were parts of America (mostly left-wing boomers that didn't have a domestic cause to push that particular day) that would get horrified and start rattling politicians' cages until we hosed down one area or another with food and troops. Usually all that accomplished was to give all of you a great warm-n'-fuzzy feeling of unity while you were shooting at our children until we left. Whereupon you'd promptly go back to your regularly scheduled fragfest.

But we have a big hole in the middle of Manhattan now to show us the consequences of ignoring all you violent little bastards. That's what we got for trying to understand you all and let you figure it out amongst yourselves and only come running with band-aids and iodine when you'd let it get completely out of control. So yeah World, it does, thanks to your actions, and (EUROPE!) inactions, mostly boil down to "with us" or "against us".

This should scare the bejeezus out of you. Remember how incomprehensible and inconsistent we were in the cold war? Nobody'd bombed us then. But you all should take this as an opportunity, not an obstacle.

And some of you are. China, Russia, North Korea, and Libya, countries that used to be on the short list, are learning quickly that "with us" leads to potentially immense rewards. Not just in monies or weapons, but in that oh-so-valuable area of getting the US to mind its own damned business about their internal affairs, hell, even help out with them. Do they trust us? What, are you stupid? Of course not. But they are "with us".

And anyone "against us" is in for a bumpy ride. Nope, it's not fair. But you've all been so bloody stupid and stubborn and bloodthirsty that you've forced us to become you're damned parents, and like my Mom always said, "of course it's not fair, life isn't fair."