I'm angrier than I can say

Before I begin let me state unequivocally: I do not in any way support terrorism in any form. I am a huge fan of order in society and in giving up some liberty for the insurance of greater freedoms. But I am also a huge fan of biological equality and for being responsible for what we do alone. Our justifications for our deeds can never, never be based on what someone else has done; that is a coward’s gambit. I am also a big believer in enforcing an idea, not just stating it as fact. (edit) OK mom, I'll take out the naughty language.

Whenever I am in the car I listen to NPR. I listen to it every morning on the way to work and every afternoon on the way home. It has been informative and interesting all these years and I usually come away from the brief NPR sessions with more than I had before I listened to it. This morning was no different but the thing I came away with was outrage. And the thing I can’t believe is that I wasn’t outraged before and there are few people who are outraged still.

We live in a country that no longer holds itself accountable to the Geneva Conventions. I never thought I would write or say or think such a thing, but the truth is inescapable. For those of you who are not familiar with the Geneva Conventions, they are a set of treaties written and ratified on how enemy captives are to be treated by their capturers, among other things. In other words, the Geneva Conventions are there to insure that anyone captured by an enemy in the time of war is entitled to a basic standard of treatment that prohibits things like torture and abuse. The Bush administration is trying to claim that the detainees at Guantanamo are “unlawful enemy combatants” but that notion has been soundly put to rest by the International Court: "There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can be outside the law." This is in addition to the 4^th Geneva Convention which deals with civilians.

Here we are, in the 21^st century, and we’re torturing people we have captured and are holding them without due process of law. I can get around the habeas corpus objection if they are prisoners of war, but we cannot get beyond basic standards of care. When we allow, endorse and practice torture on people who are in our care, no matter who they are, we are endorsing the very idea that those things are acceptable for everyone. We don’t have the luxury of saying, do as I say, not as I do as a country. We are the country we choose to be and if we choose to ignore that most basic standard of right conduct, we have chosen tyranny. How did this happen?

I’ll tell you how it happened: We are so busy being angry about men sleeping with men and women sleeping with women that we have forgotten that there are some basic issues we have yet to resolve, some basic tenets of the principle of harm that are being violated every minute of every day. We have chosen to care about how people have sex rather than the way we treat other people, as if we can be responsible for the way other people live and not responsible for our own endorsements and lives. If you support the torture of prisoners through your lack of outrage over the fact of its existence and yet you are outraged over people having sex… honestly, I don’t even know what to say to that. What is wrong with you? How do you lay your head on your downy pillow at night knowing that there are people being tortured in your name? Do you honestly care more about other peoples’ sex lives? Where is your sense of perspective?

While you are happily debating whether or not people have the right to love whomever they wish, the world has gone to hell. Have you noticed that the Taliban are making a strong showing in Afghanistan? Did you notice the dire figures being released by a vast majority of scientists that show a crisis in environmental issues? How about the fact that our prisons are overflowing but our education system is underfunded by hundreds of percentage points? Any of those things bother you? Maybe just a teensy bit? Or is it really all about penises and vaginas for you?

Gay men and women marrying and having sex has nothing to do with me and will never affect me. Torture? That affects me as long as I am a citizen of this country. As a citizen, I am subject to the laws of the land as much as anyone else, and if the law states that it is ok to torture people, I could be that person one day. Gay? Nope, not going to happen in this lifetime. Tortured? Could happen tomorrow. Yes, that goes for you, too. Comfy, now?

Even if you believe that every person being held at Guantanamo is guilty, is rightly there, you still have the obligation of outrage on behalf of the ideal your country is supposed to uphold. You still are responsible for the idea that our country is allowed to torture human beings in the name of the citizens of this country. You get to own that. You. Those of you who rail against the terrible things the terrorists have done to their own captives as an excuse to torture them don’t get to have all of that moral indignation. Sorry! You lost that right when you said it was ok for us to do it, but not them. You lost that right when you decided that people who are like you are better and deserve better treatment than people who are like them. We’re not talking about people who have demonstrably harmed people in every instance, here; there are people being held who have done nothing. Yet, that makes little difference when we are trying to find moral justification for our own acts. We are not responsible for what they did; we are only responsible for what we do. That is the fundamental reason we should be taking to the streets and protesting the idea that torturing people under our guard is both vile and utterly anathema to everything we profess to believe in this country. Remember this? “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Where in that brief quote does it say, but only the Americans? Where does it say, but only the ones who think like us?

I am sick to outrage of the idea that people think they believe in equality when all they do shows that belief is unthinkingly empty. We are not asked to coddle murderers or dictators or terrorists; we are asked to treat them as if they are human as they have not themselves done. How can you condemn a person for doing something you are doing to them? Do you not see the problem inherent in that action? As vile as they are and as horrific as their crimes remain, we did not do those things. The proper response to vile acts is not the endorsement of those acts by doing them ourselves!

I received an email today entitled, “The Axis of Idiots.” I won’t go into much detail because I don’t want to make you all sick, but the email states that Edward Kennedy was wrong for showing the pictures of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and asking for an end to that kind of treatment. Who thinks that way? What kind of a person thinks we should measure our actions on the actions of terrorists? Make no mistake, when you justify the continued abuse of prisoners of war based on the principle that what they are doing is worse, or they started it, you are stating that you think the idea of torture and annihilation are super keen, okey dokey for everyone. If you state that they are doing it so you can too, you are saying that what they are doing is right! How is that not evident? How? Can you imagine the outrage in our country if the Abu Ghraib actions had happened to one of our own? Let me guess: it would be ok as long as the person being tortured had already done very bad things; things like torturing another human being. Oh, wait…

You and I and everyone else who lives in this country have a responsibility to make sure our interests as citizens are protected. If you think torturing human beings protects your interests, then I suggest a quick move to Sudan; they are all about one side being right and the other side being disposable. Have a blast. I choose to live in a country that stands for equality, no matter who you are; a country where, no matter how vile your actions, you are still entitled to fundamental rights because the rest of us carry the moral majority for your sorry ass. I choose to live in a country where torture is condemned because it is wrong, not because we didn’t think of it first.

I don’t want to live in a country whose citizens think as the Nazis thought. I don’t want to live in a country whose citizens think as the terrorists think. I don’t want to live among people who believe their biological and ideological rights are more important than those of others. Anyone who would endorse that view is low, vile and acting in a way that endorses tyranny and injustice. Stop it. Stop it now. Stand up for the idea of equality in all things, not just in the easy ones. Stand up for the idea that people, no matter who they are or what they’ve done, are still people. Stand up for the idea that in matching a person’s crime with an equal or worse crime you are endorsing the very idea of the rightness of the crime itself. Stand up, now, before the person being tortured is you and your only redress to law is the empty promise of a once great nation. Stand up before we lose the soul of our most treasured, fundamental belief: equality, responsibility, and the condemnation of any act that infringes upon those ideals. Stand up against the tyranny inherent in terrorist thinking and torture. You never know when the tide will turn from tyranny over them to tyranny over you.

"You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

"I'm as mad as hell,

and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Oh, by the way, the soldier in that picture recently overdosed. The consequences of tyranny reach into the depths of our despair.