Theocracy In America

Where did we go wrong?  Military Commissions(unlawful court hearings), pre-emptive attacks, enhanced interrogation techniques (torture), illegal search and seizure, warrentless wiretapping and surviellance, and worst of all a complete disregard for the Constitution of the United States of America.

 So, where did we go wrong?

In a post-9/11 country, we veiw the rest of the world as hostile, we’ve allienated our allies, we have committed human rights violations, stripping people of their dignity, become more religious (like those who attack us and our way of life), lost our will to see justice done, and have committed ourselves to a war without borders where everyone is the boogie-man.  In this new world we have lost the honor and integrity that made us who we are.  In other words, America just isn’t America anymore.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor we fought back by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (we are the only country in history to do so) and soon after the beginning of World War II, on February 19, 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, an evacuation order that commenced the round-up of 120,000 Americans of Japanese heritage to one of 10 internment camps—officially called “relocation centers”—in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. (1)

What came of that?  Nothing.

We lost something precious in those moments, not only the lives of our sailors in Hawaii’s harbor, but also the innocence in the way we viewed the world.  We were just as capable of committing atrocites as anyone else.  That past still haunts us to this day.

What will we lose in these moments?  What is the price that future generations will have to pay for our actions now?  Will we look back on the War on Terror and in hindsight recognize our wrong and hang our heads in shame?  Will we learn from the mistakes we’ve made and hold our leaders accountable or will we have learned nothing, as we haven’t from World War II and the mistakes we made then?  What are the repercussions that future generations will have to endure?

We cannot, and indeed, dare not, continue on this path.  We are not the Gistapo, we are not Nazis.  We are Americans.  We believe, fundamentally, in the right to a fair trial, we believe in treating all humans with dignity, hard lessons learned from our past showed us that every human life has worth.  We believe in the right to present evidence in our defence, and the right to be tried before a jury of our peers.  What is happening in Guantanamo Bay and around the world destroys everything that we hold sacred and lessens our ability to be the moral authourity in the world.  Might most certainly doesn’t make right.

And as for my rant: “$#!%”  This is so unmitigatedly stupid, so uncivilized, so demonstrably wrong, words fail me.  I cannot believe we have lost our $#!%ing minds and allowed this %@*! to happen.

(end of part 1)

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