Payson Roundup

Editor:

Here’s an opinion from a total nobody.

Idealistically, it is easy to firmly and assuredly decide critical issues in the abstract: abortion is wrong or it is right; talking is better than fighting or not; and, of course, “torture” is surely un-American. Yet, with the accumulation of years, military experience, life’s cornucopia of awesome ups, spiraling downs and the more common drumbeat of daily routine, many of us become more malleable on these type of issues.

In short, I respectfully submit that when critical issues materialize much more individually with perhaps severe and personal consequences, our earlier abstractions may not fit well. Faced with a handicapped teenaged daughter’s pregnancy from rape may well ameliorate one’s view dead set against abortion. Surely reality, if not history, suggests making happy talk to the likes of Hitler or Ahmadinejad would be a bit dicey especially without a really big stick already in mid-swing.

Likewise, in the abstract, decent persons, a younger me, President Obama, even right-leaning Fox’s Shepard Smith, found it so very easy to pontificate without exception: no way, “torture” is unacceptable, un-American, end of story!

Yet, I suspect that in the hopefully, never to ever happen event that any of these persons’ wife or daughter were abducted by terrorists with beheading in mind and we have in custody one who knows their whereabouts, the surely uplifting ACLU view of how to urge terrorist cooperation might not be so, well, functional for even these idealists.

Most confusing of all, however, is the reality that many of these kind of idealists who loathe even the idea of very limited and in only life-saving incidents use of “torture,” support the almost totally unlimited killing of absolutely innocent human pre-borns, read: “fetuses” as a matter of inherent legal and moral right. That is, he who supports virtually unconditional aborting millions of innocents is hailed as a most moral leader. But, any who seek to prevent death of innocent Americans by a bit more unkindly urging of a terrorist to chitchat is a no-good-nik to perhaps be prosecuted.

Lou Zuccaro

Scottsdale and Christopher Creek