Either my neighbor is a person I might meet in the street, or every person on Earth is my neighbor.
Is there any superstition worse than the notion that the joy or suffering of a total stranger in Ciudad Juarez matters less to me than that of a total stranger in El Paso? Only a river separates these individuals.
Yet patriots, if "the USA" goes to war with "Mexico", will rejoice at the suffering of one, and lament the suffering of the other. This will be so even if the war starts because the enemy is not democratic, i.e. the common citizen had no say in the matter! Citizens of the USA should be proud of its Constitution, its Bill of Rights, and its tradition of loyalty to the ideals therein. A person who betrays these is a traitor, no matter how loyal he might be to his commanding officers, or how many "enemy" foreigners he might kill. There are places in our history where we behaved like any other old Empire, beating up and exploiting smaller, poorer, or stupider nations. We have nothing to be proud of there.
