Don't make me come back there...

I was in the dentist's office this morning, waiting to have a couple fillings done, my kids had missed the bus because of passive aggressive moping, and did I mention I was at the dentist?
Anyway I was not having a spectacular start to my week.  The news was on the TV.  These days I generally prefer to gather my own news from the many and varied outlets of the interwebs, it just seems like a more responsible way to process the horrors of modern life.  I can determine the source more readily, I can usually find intelligent commentary, and I don't have to sit through commercials (all the advertising is neatly posted along the margins, so I can attempt to ignore it while I read).  The news, CNN I believe it was, quickly validated my world awareness strategy, as they covered the ongoing Syria kerfluffle.  They had a 30 second segment with someone in khakis and a desert-looking shirt talking about the hundreds of thousands of refugees, both internally and externally displaced by the conflicts in Syria, then they quickly cut away to a distance shot of the White House parking lot where they had just seen the House majority leader, John Boehner depart from a "fancy" car (the fanciness of the car was apparently important enough to be included in the description Mr. Boehner's arrival to discuss the Syria situation with President Obama and Minority leader Nancy Pelosi).  The news gave people getting out of a car almost equal time with the plight of the refugees.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Now Syria is not an easy thing to understand, some very intelligent people who are familiar with the dynamics of the region are kind of throwing up their hands in exasperation at the complexity and spaghetti-like entanglements of the whole mess.  But it troubles me that most of the American people, who will shortly be forming opinions about whether or not we ought or ought not to get involved in Syria in any way, and may get a major case of angry if we do or don't do what they think is the right thing, are being informed as much about the fancy car that an unnaturally tan politician has disembarked from, as they are about the staggering number of women and children that have been chased from their homes and are living in crowded camps in the desert.
I can't really begin to wrap my mind around what the right thing to do with regard to Bashar al-Assad really is.  My gut tells me he probably deserves a tomahawk missile with his morning tea, but as we have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya, power vacuums should not be taken lightly.  The whole military angle is just way outside my field of expertise, and I'm really upset that so many innocent people have died and are dying, whether they were killed by bullets or Sarin gas is really not much of a thing I worry about, they're just as dead, and they're just as innocent.
I get the conventions of warfare and why they're important, but as seems to be the case with pretty much every armed conflict since Korea, this doesn't exactly fit the definition of war (see Friday's post), but it's still a violent conflict, and people are still dying, and soldiers are still going to be put in harm's way, and it at least seems war-like.
What really made me wish that the dentist had some novocaine for my brain this morning, was the all too brief snippet about the refugees.  There were kids about the same age as my kids, going to school, just like my kids, except in a dusty tent instead of a nice safe building.  There were people who have to worry about things like getting enough food and clean water, instead of missing the bus and a couple of bad fillings in their teeth.
I had been having a bad morning, but I got a rude slap of perspective.
I noticed some things though, like the blue lettering on the side of the tent: it said United Nations.  Like the same United Nations that just said, "No," to armed intervention, basically because Russia and China will block any vote in the security council.  A bunch of people on the TV were talking about that, how Russia has a vested interest in Syria, how they've got they're only naval base outside of the former Soviet Union in Syria, how they've been best buds with Assad for a long time.  Russia is saying that they don't think armed intervention will help, because of complicated stuff like power vacuums and geopolitical instability, but they're really just looking out for number one right?
Then it occurred to me that Russia, our old enemy from the cold war days, with a James Bond villain for a president, that Russia, might actually be right about a lot of stuff.  If they really do have such a vested interest in Syria, they might actually know a thing or two about the joint.  It occurred to me that they learned some of the same lessons about the pitfalls of the whole empire thing a few decades before us.  I seem to recall them being Afghanistan fighting some of the same dudes we are fighting, and having a bit of trouble getting out.
I know, it's hard to take advice from someone you don't like, but they just might actually be right.
Which brings me back to the United Nations.  Everyone likes to give the UN a hard time for being irrelevant and not being the global military peace-keeping force that we think we actually need.  It's true, the political reality of trying to get Russia, China, the US and various European nations to agree on what we ought to do about a mess like Syria is rather bleak, but while the UN really is not big on breaking down the door and getting the bad guys, they are actually pretty good at running cities of refugees in the desert.  They've had a lot of practice, in many different deserts.
I don't know whether we ought to start flinging cruise missiles upside Assad's tyrannical melon, but I do know that we ought to be doing what we can to help all those women and kids who are left out in the dust and the heat and the cold, while the boys fight over the darn sandbox.  The UN, apparently, does that.  So while Obama confabs with people who arrive in fancy cars about whether or not we should break out the whuppin stick, someone is bringing a drink to those who are thirsty, and clothing those who are naked, and giving shelter to those who are homeless.  I think I know what it more important, even if the "news" does not.