Every Sunday morning I try to keep the same routine. Roll out of bed, crawl to the shower, clean myself up and drive to church. After it’s all finished I always drive home, step in the doorway, and hear the faint sound of my 83 year-old grandmother trying to tell me about the service she watched on the television.

Usually the conversation always starts off with “Braeton the mass on television today had such a good message,”  which she then proceeds to tell me about, along with just about everything else that’s on her mind (for those who don’t have the pleasure of knowing my grandmother she likes a good conversation). One particular day, what she told me sparked my interest (not that I’m not usually interested but I have been known to zone out). She said that the entire gospel today talked about the situation in Syria and the use of chemical weapons. This of course led to a long discussion about America’s role in the whole situation.

Up to that point I hadn’t really given the Syria thing a whole lot of thought. To be fair, I mean come on, what did Syria have to do with my situation at home? The only dent it made to my life was oil companies using it as an excuse to raise gas prices (that’s right I’m talking to you Exxon, Chevron, Schlumberger, and Marathon). But I started to look into it a little bit, and the more I read about America threatening to get involved, the more perturbed I became. Why would a nation who has a tremendous chemical stockpile of its own, threaten to make strikes against a nation who actually used them? Don’t get me wrong I am avidly against the use of chemical weapons on a civilian population but to me, it just smelled a little funny.

I started to read up on the past use of these kinds of weapons. It turns out, we have been quite the naughty country when it comes our own “standards.” The first thing that comes to my mind is, during the Vietnam conflict, the U.S. dumped 20 million gallons of chemicals, including the defoliant “Agent Orange” which is now thought to be a carcinogen and the cause of hundreds of thousands of birth defects. Oh and do you remember that guy Saddam Hussein? (No, not the guy from “Zero Dark Thirty”, that’s Osama bin Laden, please go pick up a history book.) During the Iran-Iraq war the CIA gave away Iranian troop positions so that they could more easily strike them with chemical weapons. So not only did America just thirty years ago support other countries use of chemical weapons, but we helped aim them too.

As for how to fix the problem, I have to be honest I’m no expert. I know a little information to which I make up my opinion. It’s not a one size fits all kind of deal. What I do know is we are nation who holds justice as a core value, and to consider a preemptive strike in the name of “’cause I said so diplomacy” doesn’t sit well. Those who say we look weak for taking a second look at the situation, to be honest, are stuck in the past. News flash, the Cold War ended in 1991, the era of “shoot first, ask questions later” should have ended with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Let’s just say if I got to make the choice, I’d try to work with the rest of the world to solve the planet’s problems, rather than police it and expect everyone to still like us. Maybe then, if we stopped trying to solve other people’s problems, we’d be able to solve our own, like our nation’s crippling debt, or the 16 percent of our fellow citizens who live below the poverty line, or maybe even giving a little more monetary help to college students. The list goes on but the message stays the same, if the United States plans on continuing to be a world leader, we’d better start following our own red lines.