Fighting a Battle

The saying goes pick your battles carefully and ask yourself if this battle is the hill you want to die on. Very wise because we tend to lose ourselves in the argument not realizing that it's best to live for another day because we tend to prefer survival over death and there will be more battles to fight. It is good to preserve ones strength for another battle and another hill and it's good to enjoy our freedom to chose such.

There is another saying also which states not to buck the trend and it's best to go with the flow; again, admirable if you are able to recognize trends and flows and if you can live with yourself running with the crowd.

We in the USA decided not to die on the Vietnam "hill", nae, we decided not to die on the hill which would have required us to chase Stalin back to the USSR immediately when WWII was "over". We now seem to have chosen another hill or two for the moment, one in Iraq and the second in Afghanistan.

So we chose freely to put off what is an obvious prolonging of the misery for many because I ask you, if Stalin would have been immediately defeated in his pursuits of occupying central Europe, how many lives would have been saved? Would there have been a Mao, a Castro, a Saddam, and (what I fear next) a Chavez? All emulators and admirers of Stalin and therefore would there have been a Korea, a Cold War, a Cuban missile crisis, a Vietnam, a Bosnia, a Kuwait, Gulf War and Iraq? All hills we could have died on I suppose but they are also battles mostly left unresolved for Cuba is still there with the same regime, Vietnam too, Bosnia we still monitor with troops, Kuwait is freed but are we from Kuwait, and of course now there's Afghanistan, and Iraq. I also believe that the USSR would still exist were it not for President Reagan, who had the guts to call them out to the horrified fear of Congress and many whom were sure Reagan would put us in a world war during which we would all die. (remember the nuclear threat?)

Sometimes one needs to be the only voice in the wilderness; sometimes one needs to be the first one bucking the trend.

In trading too, it happens. We have to ask if the trade we got into is worth our demise when it turns against us. We have to act on that decisively and determine how long are we willing to battle on the hill, remembering that our goal is survival for another day, so we tend to go with the flow and not buck the trend. But there are days when it just doesn't seem right. I'm not one to say that corrections are bad for in fact I welcome them; yet today was a day where I just felt that this whole sell off is panic and bordering on dangerous, mainly because I think perhaps it's enabling the the very thing we don't want happen. CRASH! (the nuclear threat) and maybe it's just what our enemies want.

The question is are we worthy of our freedom to chose and do we believe in our system well enough to win this battle for it's a battle of economies worldwide and perhaps the end of ours as we know it unless we are willing to defend it for our future. ( to be continued)