Reflection 10—

So let me see if I can somehow relate this to security. Last night I was on the phone with my girlfriend (as usual) and she had just seen the movie “Food Inc.” Now, I haven’t seen the film, but it sounds like the basic premise of it is to say that if there isn’t reform to the food industry, bad things are going to happen. In Obama’s NSS 2010 he relates the security of America to essentially the stability and prosperity of its citizens. In “Food Inc.” one statistic says (don’t quote me on this) that in the near future, over 50% of American minorities will have contracted diabetes. Isn’t this the kind of epidemic that Obama is striving to prevent? The problem with such a sophisticated and modernized world is that there are insufficient funds and insufficient time to properly address all of the threats to our society. I’d say the prospect of millions of Americans having a potentially fatal disease is a pretty substantial threat to our way of life. Any kind of universal healthcare will be crushed if funds are consumed with just an individual problem. The domino affect of something like this is massive. Why am I not terrified…or why will I not care tomorrow? Is it because there are bigger threats to our security? Not really. It is because I can’t do anything about it. Yes the idea of “oh if one person addresses it and then another and another until everyone has changed” is quite a beautiful fantasy, that logic discounts reason. As a singular citizen I have no power beyond filling in a bubble on a scantron. Our security as a nation depends on the effectiveness of our leaders in a system designed to render them ineffective. Senator Kaufman told Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” Tuesday night that the system is fundamentally structured to crush legislation…Well that sucks. Unless some serious reorientation of the political and economic systems occur then all of these issues we are facing will become malignant and effectively screw us over, whatever that means.