Aren't we all by now? We've suffered eight years of force-fed terror while we starved because the hungry hippos of America's real elite ate all our profits. Shit, I'm not only tired of terror and scared of my own financial exhaustion; I'm angry! I'm bitter! And I'm clinging to some of my own less than desirable thoughts and practices because I don't know what else to do.
Like this: I keep thinking we-- meaning all of us as citizens, whether from the rural reaches or the concrete canyons of some dank downtown-- have been tortured. And I mean, not by individual acts against us, though I'm open for discussion on the point, but through our shared experience since Inauguration Day 2001.
Remember I said this was an unpleasant consideration. I'm not meaning to draw a comparison between our comfortable lives as Americans and those who truly have been ravaged by grievous and inhumane acts long outlawed by international laws and even longer prohibited by decency. But, let me tell you about my recent unattractive thinking...
Did you read the article in May's Vanity Fair that chronicles the actual process by which the U.S. tossed the Geneva Convention into the shredder by interpreting it against all precedent and then utilizing it in its haggard form to make certain that the military would go along with illegal forms of torture? You should read it. The article steps through many doors of higher-ups, elites if you will, who worked quickly, quietly and on tip-toes, to make sure that all options for physical and mental abuse were on the table for use against anyone picked up in this endless war. It didn't really matter that the military didn't want to engage in new forms of torture. Despite all the legal trickery the higher-ups later used to assert that new torture techniques sort of bubbled up from the ranks struggling to deal with detainees, the magic didn't make it real. The torture came from above, kind of like our financial crisis, health care crisis, housing crisis and war crisis. Wow.
So, I'm bitter too. And it's okay to be bitter, and to tell the truth about being bitter, I think. I would rather we told the truth about the realities we see, than try to paint false realities that allow ongoing torture and abuse to occur, whether against all of us, or against individuals who may or may not be guilty of any wrongdoing.
I'll admit, I don't like feeling bitter. But recognizing that we all have instincts to cling to less than palatable abstractions when we don't feel quite right about our system of government is not something we should deplore. What we should deplore is the system of distractions, illusions and lies that have brought us this far: to the point where I feel like we've been tortured, and can't do anything about it.
Except, now, we can. We can vote for Obama for President. Yes we can.
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