Enter Torquemada
I am torn. This is the country I recognize as "mine". I've lived here forever, love it passionately (except for the cheeze whiz stuff) and never thought I'd settle outside of it. Now it is committing insanity on an international scale. This is no longer the country I thought it was. I doubt this is the country it thought it was.
How does a christian nation forget to turn the other cheek? Where is the concept of justice & nobility for it's own sake? Have we been too long secured except from our own fears? We've crafted a culture where paranoia is entertainment and mistrust is a gameshow component. Our news are the most sensationalized topics we can get, elevated to pornography without any actual glorious nudity. Yet for the most, nothing major will ever happen in the lives of the average citizen. Most will never feel hunger for days, contract diseases from poor sanitation or ever face institutionalized persecution for gender, sexuality, race or religion. With a lack of true struggle, do we find it easier to believe that overwhelming evil attacks us at every turn, necessitating ending moral structure that has significantly elevated our standing in the world?
To say we face an enemy that is horrifying and amorphous is to say the simplest fact of the situation. With that in mind, we owe ourselves, our nation and the world the retention of the kind of honourable behaviour signified by the Geneva Coventions. The world is sliding towards madness. We do not follow the example of those who would lead us there all the faster, we must follow those who recognize the madness and would lead us out. Torture is not a proven method of information gathering, it is a horrowshow designed to cow a populace. It is psychological pressure to contain dissenters at home & abroad. "If you do not obey, this is what we will do to you, too", is what the nation that tortures says to all around them. Never has it functioned as those who advocate it says, as a proven method that guarantees safety.
America is worth the effort of keeping it's ideals and policing it's borders and I say the failures we have had recently are not because we are an open & free society but due to a sleeping electorate and mute 3rd estate.
How does a christian nation forget to turn the other cheek? Where is the concept of justice & nobility for it's own sake? Have we been too long secured except from our own fears? We've crafted a culture where paranoia is entertainment and mistrust is a gameshow component. Our news are the most sensationalized topics we can get, elevated to pornography without any actual glorious nudity. Yet for the most, nothing major will ever happen in the lives of the average citizen. Most will never feel hunger for days, contract diseases from poor sanitation or ever face institutionalized persecution for gender, sexuality, race or religion. With a lack of true struggle, do we find it easier to believe that overwhelming evil attacks us at every turn, necessitating ending moral structure that has significantly elevated our standing in the world?
To say we face an enemy that is horrifying and amorphous is to say the simplest fact of the situation. With that in mind, we owe ourselves, our nation and the world the retention of the kind of honourable behaviour signified by the Geneva Coventions. The world is sliding towards madness. We do not follow the example of those who would lead us there all the faster, we must follow those who recognize the madness and would lead us out. Torture is not a proven method of information gathering, it is a horrowshow designed to cow a populace. It is psychological pressure to contain dissenters at home & abroad. "If you do not obey, this is what we will do to you, too", is what the nation that tortures says to all around them. Never has it functioned as those who advocate it says, as a proven method that guarantees safety.
America is worth the effort of keeping it's ideals and policing it's borders and I say the failures we have had recently are not because we are an open & free society but due to a sleeping electorate and mute 3rd estate.
posted by Misanthropic Meanderings | 10:19 AM
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