Crossing Lines

Did you all have a lovely Easter weekend? You did? Fab. Mine was great too. Now I promised my lovely cousin Amy a funny post about her wedding which we went to on Saturday. I'm still working on it so she (and you) will have to wait, but that's ok because she is on her honeymoon until Thursday anyway. So while you eagerly anticipate that I will share with you something that has been troubling me since... well yesterday.

An 'associate' of mine told me that because Obama won the US election last year, I will see many of the luxuries I enjoy disappear. I was confused, mainly because we don't live in America. No, she counter-argued, this doesn't matter because we are still defending our borders by carrying on in the Middle East, and that if the troops are pulled out and brought home, the war will come with them.

(She also said that no one in their right mind would want a man with the middle name Hussein to be president, which constituted a deal-breaker of stupidity for me and which, consequently, sent me to the sound-proof room in my head to scream.)

After the screaming had subsided and I was thinking fairly rationally again, I became fascinated with what she said about the borders. Regardless of whether that's true - that we are waging war in the Middle East to keep the bad guys from coming here - the concept fascinated me. It reminded me of the whole, 'if someone breaks into your house, can you lawfully kill them?' debate. S and I had debated this previously:

"S, if there was a baddie across the road, and I knew he was going to come in here and get me, could I shoot him?"

"Liv, we don't have a gun..."

"But if we did."

"You really want to talk about this...? Fine. You mean while he is across the road? Not on our property?"

"Yeah . . . if I knew he was just waiting for his chance to come in here and get me, could I execute a pre-emptive strike and just shoot him out there?"

"No. You can only shoot people who are threatening you in your house and I wouldn't advise that as you would probably go to prison."

"Damn it." (I didn't really say damn it, well I did but I didn't really mean it. It's not like I actually want to shoot people, but I did think it sucked that I had to sit there like a sitting duck, waiting for him to come and get me.)

So . . . I want to know what you all think. Is it justifiable to attack someone off of your property - on THEIR property, even - in self-defense? Is keeping war out of your own country a good enough reason to wage it elsewhere?

I think not. But it appears that there are people who disagree.

Your thoughts?