The birth of a bully

So one day you are having a snowball fight in your yard with your brother. It wasn’t really a friendly snowball fight, and it got less friendly when your neighbor from the yard behind you started supplying you with snowballs.

Your brother couldn’t really keep up, so a friend who was visiting neighbors from across the street got involved.

Not only did this neighbor help make snowballs, they started throwing them too. If that wasn’t bad enough, they started making ice balls!

The neighbor that had been supplying you with snowballs kicked up their game and hooked you up with some ice balls too. They even upped the ante with some rocks in the middle of the snow and ice balls.

You fought hard, but your neighbor still wasn’t officially having people throw snowballs at your brother and his friends, and you were having a hard time keeping up.

You and your brother decided it would be best for both sides to take a break. You planned on stocking up and waiting for the visitors from across the street to leave. Problem is, they never left and decided to move right on it.

This made you unhappy! You were pretty sure they planned on taking your whole yard for themselves. I mean they had already done pretty much done the same thing with the neighbors across the street!

You tell them to go back to their own yard and leave you alone. You threaten to dump a ton of snow on them. You amass a huge pile of snowballs, iceballs, and rocks hoping to scare them off.

All this does is make the visiting kids bring in other stuff to throw: rocks, horse chestnuts, burdocks, hunks of tar. They load them onto milk crates on their bikes and ride around in the street by your yard taunting you. They dare you to try and throw stuff at your brother and see what they will do.

You curse, scream, threaten and swear at them, but still, they stay in the neighborhood, and they bring in sling shots, cross bows.

You start building catapults and trebuchets. You now realize you can hurl rocks into the yard of the people across the street! THAT will get them out of your hair! The neighbors will never put up with THAT!

Sadly, not only do the neighbors put up with it, but they start in with their bikes, joining your brother, and his visiting friends riding past your house with their boxes of rocks and other things to throw at you.

This goes on and on…The teasing, the taunts, poking sticks into your fences, setting catapults up along the property line.

Now pretend you are North Korea, and your little brother is South Korea.

Now I am not a military strategist, and I am not an historian. I know very little of politics. I just try to look at things from a logical standpoint.

To me, this makes perfect sense. WHY? Well, the neighbor to the back is China, and behind that is the former Soviet Union. The neighbor across the street is Japan. Obviously, the visitors are the United States.

If the United States had access to both North, and South Korea we would have access to at least half the Yellow Sea, and almost all of the Sea Of Japan. That is not a good thing for China or Russia.

So why do we care? Russia isn’t a world player anymore, are they? And China…Aren’t we friends with them?

All you have to do to figure out if Russia is still a world player is look at a map. You see that huge space called Siberia? What’s so great about Siberia? The same thing that is so great about Alaska…Oil, minerals, and precious metals.

China is obvious. Most of our national debt is owed to them, and a huge portion of our farmed, and fished foods are coming from them, not to mention all the manufacturing that is done for us over there.

The economy of the United States is NOT recovering. There is no way it can when the number 1 employer in the US is Wal-Mart, and the number 6 employer is McDonald’s.

It is not because the people working these jobs are not smart enough to get better jobs like many people believe. People work these jobs because THAT IS WHAT IS AVAILABLE TO THEM.

President Trump has promised to bring jobs home. I believe that is going to be a tough promise for him to keep, because let’s face it…People who are making lots of money don’t want to STOP making lots of money. If anything they want more.

United States manufacturing jobs can’t come home and still make the rich company owners richer. Bringing those jobs home will cost them a lot of money in higher wages, taxes, environmental fees, and much more than my public school education will ever understand.

Many people believe that North Korea has been making threats for far too long and that they crossed the line when they threatened Guam…But those people apparently missed the part where President Trump said that threats would be met with “fire and fury”, and threatening Guam was North Korea’s response.

Mr. Trump is a business man, and as a business man he knows as well as anybody who has taken the time to look at the US economy both before, and after World War Two, that war is profitable and can bring the United States back to its former glory once again.

Think about how much money American workers could have when they are at the defense plants building trucks, tanks, planes, and ships.

Think of the food the farmers could produce on land that was doomed to become a housing development.

Think of the advances that could be made in modern medicine treating the wounded warriors.

Think of the jobs that would need to be filled when men and women between the ages of 18 and 50 are serving their nation in battle. Many of those working age Americans will be killed in battle, and be permanently removed from the work force.

Yes, ladies and gentleman, a long and sustained battle with multiple enemies could be just the thing for cities like Detroit.

A war at sea would keep the American fishing fleet close to home and would close our waters to vessels under the flag of other countries.

We can’t just pick a fight with China, that would make us look bad to the rest of the world.

Russia is too much of a wild card, and a fight with them alone wouldn’t necessarily involve China. To me, picking a fight with North Korea is the safest bet. It involves the key players, just not directly.

If America looks like the victim…As it did when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor without provocation…You know…’cause blocking all shipping to an island nation would never be considered provocation would it??? the rest of the world will allow us to use our military might, and the American people will demand it.

War can be a huge profit making machine. I’m not saying that is why we have always provoked North Korea…But I was taught that if it walks, quacks, and swims like a duck, it is probably a duck!

Doug Alley

About Doug Alley

I grew up in Bath, Maine in an upper lower class family with 3 step sisters, a step brother, and a little sister. After high school I spent 3 years serving in the USAF at Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage AK. I've competed in, and won, demolition derbies. I've competed in, and never won, stock car races. I am the 47-year-old father of an 11-year-old boy who is pretty sure he is smarter than I ever was. We live on a little less than an acre of land in a 1973 mobile home in Stetson with my wife Jen, some cats, a few chickens, and rabbits, and a couple of goats. I hunt, fish, camp out, dabble in photography, gardening, and I cook in variable degrees of near success.