Caution: Blind Spots at Work
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Putin re-lights Stalin's pipe with his "plan" for Russia (Source: Ellustrator)
A young boy and his father are riding in their car on a twisty mountain road late at night. A hare darts across the road, the father swerves and crashes into a telephone pole. An ambulance arrives and transports the pair to the nearest hospital, but the father is DOA. The boy is rushed into the emergency room. The surgeon, upon seeing the patient's face, sadly announces: "I can't operate on this boy! He's my son!"
How is this possible?
If you're not a chauvinist pig (or have heard this one before), then you know it's because the surgeon is the boy's mother. Some people can't conceive the possibility that a surgeon (or a president?) could be a woman. We've got our blind spots, you see. Maybe the same thing would work in reverse, with a nurse.
And we sure seem to have shown them on Russia. Why did we think that Russia simply admitted it was wrong when it "lost" the cold war, and stopped hating and wishing to destroy us? Would we have done that in their place, just given up our values to the victorious Soviets? Wouldn't we have just waited for a chance to start the whole thing all over again, as soon as we got the chance?
We saw some statues of Lenin being pulled down. So what? Khrushchev pulled down some Stalins. You can cut your fingernails and you're not dangerous for a while. But they grow back. Did we forget about that?
Did we let down our guard too soon? Did we make the safe, comfortable assumption that all our problems had been oh-so-conveniently solved, and let Russia back into the game in the fourth quarter with plenty of time still left on the clock?
We're still the hare and they're still the turtle. But you know what happened in that story, right?
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