Em and I had a disturbing conversation the other night. We hadn't talked to each other in a couple of weeks and we were having one of those "did you hear . . ." exchanges about current events. We traded tidbits for around 20 minutes when Em pointed out that neither of us had heard the stories the other person was pointing out and they were all equally appalling: civil rights violations, increased surveillance, creepy actions by creepy government people, more and more about Abu Ghraib and unlawful incarcerations and torture coming out, all pretty sickening. We're both resigned to not being able to keep up with it.
A while back, just after the election, in fact, when it became clear that we were in for four more years of atrocious governmental behavior, I started another blog called The Perfidy Report. I blog there frequently, sometimes even more frequently than I do here, but lately I feel like I'm just pissing in the wind. For one thing, there are other blogs that do this so much better than I do: Orcinus, Warblogging, Back to Iraq 3.0, and then there's Salon and Alternet. I'm just a little voice crying in the wilderness, even with Roger & Jen contributing. There's just so much out there to be outraged about, and it's a full-time job keeping up with it all, let alone writing about it with any kind of depth—time I don't have. I'm not a journalist and have no ambitions to be one. All I really have time to do is post in clearing-house fashion the things that make my head start to pound, things that make me sick to my stomach, and hope someone who hadn't seen them before will.
And what then?
For most of my life, I've been a largely disinterested observer of current politics, watching it from the distance one acquires in studying history as a serious discipline. It was interesting watching the patterns emerge and repeat themselves, the same mistakes being made over and over arising from the same human frailties: war, imperial ambitions, power hunger, hubris, lack of care for the poor, disregard for the environment. I remember being disgusted with the war in Vietnam when I was younger, but I think that was mostly youthful idealism and innate rebellion. Most of my peers were army brats and it was a cool, outsider kinda thing to be against the war in that atmosphere. The Cold War, by contrast, was boring and seemed like a stupid pissing contest to me, one we kept going until the Soviets pissed away their economy, which I finally realized was the object of the exercise. I was fascinated by Nixon's fall, and the crackerjack reporting behind it, but not in any political way. I admired Woodward and Bernstein for their tenacity and dedication to getting the story out, but I wondered whether it was as much the excitement of a big, exclusive story as the dedication to principles driving them. Being part of a religion that had more than once had to go to court to reaffirm our rights to free speech, freedom of religion and rights to assemble, I watched the civil rights struggles with a sense of kinship and outrage that anyone should be treated as something less than fully human with equal rights. Like most young people, I went through a period of fascination with the Holocaust and Native American genocide, though I've lost the stomach for it now. They and their contemporary examples in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Sudan just sicken me now, though I'm still amazed at how often the patterns and the reasoning for such atrocities repeat themselves.
I like to think of myself as a principled person. My morals are Biblically based, and that on a pretty literal and what some would call fundamentalist interpretation, with a major difference from most fundamentalism: my political loyalty, I was taught (and still believe) belongs to God's kingdom, not to any human government. Christ said his kingdom was not of this world for a reason. Hence my detachment from politics and my reason for not participating. This did not, however, keep me from being outraged at human shenanigans. When I was younger, I admired the protesters and activists, the SDS and the Weathermen, and especially the Freedom Riders in the South and the students who put flowers in the gun barrels of the National Guardsmen sent out against them. I went with a press pass from my college paper to a No Nukes rally in Washington during my freshman year and found it exhilarating. I often said that if I were not a Witness, I would have been a radical activist myself.
I seem to be turning into one despite myself. Or at least a vocal complainer.
Many historians of the 20th Century like to say that Americans turned a corner with the impeachment of Nixon. They stopped believing in their government as fundamentally honest and a force for good. That may have been true for my generation, but I'm not seeing that in the current one that voted Bush into office (or helped his coup succeed, or whatever, exactly, did happen) for a second time. This bloc of voters seems impervious to the facts that they were lied to about going to war in Iraq, that their government is fighting a war of aggression there, that they're being bankrupted by the people who are supposed to be serving them, and that their Constitutional rights are being crushed out of existence in the name of security. And in perspective, what's a little burglary against the Democrats vs. unlawful imprisonment and torture?
My problem is that I've never considered any government as a force for good. Like Lord Acton, I subscribe to the idea that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," so I never had any faith to lose. What's happened in the past four years has not changed my mind, only reinforced the belief that humans aren't very good at running their own lives, let alone those of others (Jer. 10:23). And I have no faith whatsoever that anything I say will change anything about this regime. They are too soulless, too corrupt, too greedy, too power-hungry, and too evil to pay any attention to my little blog or the pointed comments I make there.
So why bother? Why bother . . .
Good question. I think this regime will probably be brought down sooner or later under its own iniquity or its own weight. In the meanwhile, what they are doing to people they classify in the meaningless category of "enemy combatants" is morally reprehensible, separated from genocide only in the small numbers of people (most of Arabic descent) involved. I personally cannot condone what's being done, so I'm speaking out, because this is so blatant, and so flagrantly immoral and my conscience can't let it pass without comment. Every government has its dark and dirty little secrets, but this is no secret.
My question is why isn't anyone in a position to really oppose what's being done paying attention? Hello? Anybody out there? Or am I really pissing in the wind?
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