Sunday, April 26, 2009
Moral ground and sand castles in the tide
Of course, what I'm still thinking about is the moral question: Are we going to let Cheney, Yoo, Gonzales, Rummy, etc., get away with torturing people? Is the country actually going to take a moral stance and prosecute those shitheads?
It does echo the Dreyfuss case in France: will we protect the guilty because it's "best for the country," "move forward instead of dwell on the past," and other head-in-the-sand excuses, or will we, the United States, actually say enough is enough and these bastards aren't going to get away with it. I would bet we let them get away with their crimes and that the country will do it's absolutely most to keep any other country from prosecuting them.
And, maybe, this would be the historically consistent action. There's an awful lot of karma out there already, and it's going to fall on us sooner or later. It has to. The theft of land and genocide against the original inhabitants. Slavery. Jim Crow. The rape of the land we stole. Butte, Cripple Creek, Ludlow, Bisbee, the Couer d'Alenes, Pullman, Haymarket, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War...America has got away with a lot in not many years. I realize other countries have done the same damn thing. But that doesn't make it OK. "But, mom, everybody's doing it!" It didn't work for us when we were children, and it doesn't work for us as a nation. We grabbed the moral high ground when we tried German and Japanese after World War II. The reasons, the justifications, for that, have washed away like sand castles at high tide. When we become another has-been empire, subject to forces and powers utterly beyond our control, things will be better. Maybe even more just.
It does echo the Dreyfuss case in France: will we protect the guilty because it's "best for the country," "move forward instead of dwell on the past," and other head-in-the-sand excuses, or will we, the United States, actually say enough is enough and these bastards aren't going to get away with it. I would bet we let them get away with their crimes and that the country will do it's absolutely most to keep any other country from prosecuting them.
And, maybe, this would be the historically consistent action. There's an awful lot of karma out there already, and it's going to fall on us sooner or later. It has to. The theft of land and genocide against the original inhabitants. Slavery. Jim Crow. The rape of the land we stole. Butte, Cripple Creek, Ludlow, Bisbee, the Couer d'Alenes, Pullman, Haymarket, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War...America has got away with a lot in not many years. I realize other countries have done the same damn thing. But that doesn't make it OK. "But, mom, everybody's doing it!" It didn't work for us when we were children, and it doesn't work for us as a nation. We grabbed the moral high ground when we tried German and Japanese after World War II. The reasons, the justifications, for that, have washed away like sand castles at high tide. When we become another has-been empire, subject to forces and powers utterly beyond our control, things will be better. Maybe even more just.
