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Showing Original Post only (View all)Waking From My Moral Coma [View all]
President Barack Obama salutes members of the U.S. military after meeting with Afghan President
Hamid Karzai, at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, Afghanistan, May 2, 2012.
(Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)
Waking From My Moral Coma
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Wednesday 13 March 2013
I've been having trouble with mirrors lately. When I look these days, I see a bastard staring back, a stranger, a guy who should be ashamed of himself.
He is.
A long, long time ago, I wrote this: "America is an idea, a dream. You can take away our cities, our roads, our crops, our armies, you can take all of that away, and the idea that is America will still be there, as pure and great as anything conceived by the human mind."
I still believe that, and therein lies the problem. I am a sucker for that dream, that idea, and for the last few years I allowed it to seduce me.
Hunter S. Thompson had Richard Nixon as his white whale, and while I would never in Hell think to compare myself to The Doctor, we share a similar experience, insofar as George W. Bush was my white whale. Deep in the heart of those Nixon years, Thompson lamented about "what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon." So it was, for me, with Bush.
(snip)
I am finished with the moral geometry that says this is better than that, which makes this good. This is not good; this is, in fact, intolerable. Allowing the perpetrators of war crimes - widely televised ones at that - to retain their good name and go on Sunday talk shows as if they had anything to offer besides their ideology of murder and carnage is intolerable. Entertaining the idea that the billions we spend preparing for war cannot be touched, and so the elderly and the infirm and the young and the weak and the voiceless must pay the freight instead, is intolerable.
The pornography of America's global killing spree is intolerable, and, by the by, I am sick of hearing about drones. A child killed by a Hellfire missile that was fired from a drone is exactly, precisely as dead as a child killed by a Hellfire missile fired from an Apache attack helicopter, precisely as dead as a child killed by a smart bomb, precisely as dead as a child killed by a sniper, precisely as dead as a child killed by a land mine, or by a cruise missile, or by any of the myriad other ways instant death is dealt by this hyper-weaponized nation of ours.
Exactly, precisely as God damned dead, and the blood is on our hands regardless of the means used to do the killing. The issue is not the drones. The issue is our hard, black hearts, and the grim fact that the debate in this country right now is not about whether the killing is wrong, but about the most morally acceptable way of going about that killing. Drones are bad, but snipers are better, because you don't hear the buzzing sound in the sky before your lights go out forever. Or something.
It is the killing, it is the permanent war, it is our deranged national priorities. It is the system we live under which requires the serial deaths of all those innocents to maintain our economic health that should appall us. We sup upon the blood and bonemeal that is the byproduct of the idea that is America, and we sleep. And we sleep.
The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/15088-waking-from-my-moral-coma
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So when he was a candidate in 2008 and said he'd end the Iraq war, and increase
JoePhilly
Mar 2013
#7
May 1st. Meet me in front of the Colorado state capital on the steps 9:00am sharp.
Hotler
Mar 2013
#46
Can't make it ... its about 1500 miles from here and my daughter has softball practice that night.
JoePhilly
Mar 2013
#48
I didn't think you would show up. Most Americans don't have it in them. But we can get....
Hotler
Mar 2013
#51
When he was a candidate in '08 he said he would escalate the war in Afghanistan and lost my vote.
Tierra_y_Libertad
Mar 2013
#12
Even then, he didn't tell us how much he would escalate the war in Afghanistan.
AnotherMcIntosh
Mar 2013
#55
Get back to me when Obama puts 100,000+ troops on the ground in a 10 year war
JoePhilly
Mar 2013
#43
“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” Albert Einstein
Tierra_y_Libertad
Mar 2013
#13
"to maintain our economic health" -- For most of us, now it doesn't even do that.
AnotherMcIntosh
Mar 2013
#57
I figured those who dropped their opposition to the war were endorsing it.
Bluenorthwest
Mar 2013
#19
this particular site was not a constructive or welcoming place for us who oppose war after obama
xiamiam
Mar 2013
#23
Good article, but I do not agree that it is not about who sits in the WH. It is very
sabrina 1
Mar 2013
#31
Before the 2008 election, I too believed that who was in the WH WOULD make a difference.
AnotherMcIntosh
Mar 2013
#58