A friend emailed me today she was losing hope and I didn't know how to reply. Then I read this
kick-to-the-emotional-gut post from an out-of-character Jesus' General and I didn't know what to say.
But I thought about both on the drive home. I thought of the times when I've been without hope.
Our country right now appears to be in just such a place.
I've been in a funk for the last few weeks. I'm absolutely horrified by what my country has become. Corruption has replaced the rule of law. The media has sold its watchdog role for a few pieces of silver and invitations to the ruling class' cocktail parties. The owners in our ownership society are rigging the system to enslave the rest of the population through debt.
Worst of all, where we were once a nation that at least pretended to value human rights, we now celebrate torture and eagerly commit murder in the name of promoting freedom.
America has lost its soul.
Jesus' General quotes
Sy Hersh Billmon:
It's apparent -- both from this story and from reports by human rights groups (note the date on that one) -- that the U.S. and U.K. embassies have been aware for some time that Iraq's Ministry of the Interior has been turned into what the old National Guard used to be in El Salvador, or the Presidential Intelligence Unit in Guatemala, or the National Directorate of Investigation in Honduras, which is to say: death squad central.
Truly, to quote Leonard -- the psychotic recruit in Full Metal Jacket -- we are in a world of shit.
I thought the same thing the moment I first saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib. "We've lost," I said and I didn't just mean the war.
I agree with both.
We lost our soul, or if a soul cannot be lost, we at least stained ours so red with blood it might never shine again.
For the handful of you who haven't read Jesus' General, it's a wickedly funny satirical site written in the style of a right wing conservative.
It must be hard for Jesus' General because how over the top can you go when mocking a side that includes Lucian Goldberg's little yellow hearted son Jonah Goldberg, Senator Bill Frist and Rep. Jean Schmidt.
He does it though. A few times before he's let his "inner Frenchman" speak, but normally he wields a razor sharp wit at the right.
Yet as he recounted the litany of torture and white phosphorus it's easy to sense his raw pain.
Just as it was with my friend's email.
At this moment, an Iraqi is dying because of our invasion. It might be a man, a woman, a child. The Iraqi might have been killed by a stray round fired by a soldier or a car bomb by an insurgent. Death does not care.
At this moment, someone is being tortured in a secret prison run by our government. Our government. He or she might be a terrorist or a farmer sold for a bounty who is wondering why this is happening to him.
At this moment, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have no plan and no intention to withdraw our soldiers from harms way - harm not only from physical threats but from the psychological toll that neither Bush or Cheney could comprehend.
At this moment, most of the American public is opposed to the war and to torture, but it does not matter to those in charge of our country and it is still going on.
So we're in a world of shit.
But here's what gives me hope.
We've been here before.
In the 1770s, the British Army appeared unbeatable, probably the strongest army in existence at the time.
Certainly they kicked the Continental Army's collective asses across the Eastern Seaboard. Remind me again who won that war? I don't know about you but I bow to no king or queen.
Second War of Independence. Washington, D.C., burned. The British troops land troops to take Baltimore. The drunken rabble of the city stopped them. The incredibly powerful British Navy shell Fort McHenry overnight. The fucking flag was still there.
Slavery. The rise of Nazism. The rise of the Soviet style of communism. Lynch mobs and legalized segregation.
We've always been in a world of shit and we've always risen above it.
Right now the odds seem overwhelming on the side of darkness and evil.
That's the way the odds usually are stacked.
And we've always risen above the world of shit we've found ourselves in.
Hope is what gives us the rope to pull ourselves out. Hope and love. It's what separates us from the right. We have hope for a better future. They fight because they fear tomorrow.
And eventually we'll win this time and we'll win the next too until eventually evil never rises again.
That's why we can never give up hope. It's our lifeline.