Dire Thoughts

On the way in to work, I was thinking about strange things. Like, lions and hyenas, and crystal meth.

The lions and hyenas comes from an analogy I've heard before, and saw again last night in the Executive Orders novel, the idea being that as powerful as a lion is, it cannot, alone, defend itself, let alone its kill, against a swarm of hyenas. If it moves to attack one hyena in one direction, one or two attack it from the rear. The message is that raw power can be negated by small, coordinated attacks. That images really distresses me. Its just not right -- and of course, I'm not thinking about the fate of animals in the jungle, but the idea that powerful countries can be hamstrung by much smaller, much less powerful ones. I found myself first thinking Damn, thats awful., and then wondering: if you assume that there is a defense against that sort of thing, what is it? Which led me to thinking about what Donald Rumsfeld said about asymmetrical power.

And the crystal meth was from an NPR article about the heavy flow of that drug into the United States from Mexico, partially encouraged by the success of the US in shutting down domestic production. Apparently, the imported stuff is much more deadly, and the people doing it are much more deadly, too. They had a sequence of a forty-five year old grandmother getting busted with crystal meth and rolls of money in her purse. She was crying, wailing that she didn't know it was there, and what would this mean to her grandchild, and her 17 year old daughter, the child's mother. All I could think of was how horrible this whole thing was.

In some way, I'm not sure how, the thoughts are connected -- power doesn't always work against small, sneaky, agile, unscrupulous opponents. So what does? How do you combat the hyenas?

Dire, huh?