I've been a member of dKos for quite some time now. I've seen Pie Fights and Troll Wars. I've seen and participated in some rather... spirited debates on any number of topics. Those debates were sometimes vitriolic, sometimes brutal and sometimes downright vicious, but never once in all my time here have I ever seen pure, unadulterated hate. Not until this week anyway. And seeing it, out in the open for all to see, really made me sad for us and ashamed of us.
Let me say right up front that I don't write this to chastise nor to condemn. I hold no illusions and realize that there will be some who take exception to what I have to say. My only intent in writing this is to throw some food for thought out there, to perhaps make us stop and think. I feel that this is too important to simply let it go by the boards out of fear of getting torched. And before anybody asks, no this isn't a GBCW.
When we found out that Ken Lay had passed this week, I expected some crude jokes and maybe a few folks reveling in a little schadenfreude. What I didn't expect to see was my fellow Kossacks gleefully, even ecstatically picking at Lay's carcass, displaying the kind of hatefulness and spite we've come to associate with Little Green Footballs. Comment after comment in a thread hundreds of responses long literally dripped with venom and hate for Ken Lay as well as his family. What made it worse, to my mind, was that the folks who tried to calm the discourse down, and there were several, were slapped down viciously. The underlying message was "if you're not with us, you're against us".
Make no mistake, I am not a Ken Lay apologist in any way, shape or form. What he did is inexcusable. It's disgusting and he is a reprehensible human being. But that's the point. No matter what, at the end of the day, he is still a human being with a wife and children that will miss him. We may not understand why they'd miss him, but they will.
What struck me as I watched this train wreck unfold was how hypocritical it all seemed to me. We're disgusted by the Right for their dehumanizing, debasing and objectifying of people when they try to justify their abuses, their torture, their murder. We're outraged at the Right for their hypocrisy in defending the pro-life movement while supporting capital punishment at the same time. We're sickened by their rabid support of a war that has claimed the lives of countless thousands.
Yet here we were, joyfully tap dancing on the grave of Ken Lay. We, who mourn every soldier lost in Iraq. We, who mourn the deaths of innocent Iraqi citizens killed in the fighting. We, who are shocked and appalled when we hear of an innocent 15 year old Iraqi girl who was brutally raped and murdered. We, who are outraged by the massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha. We, who supposedly value human life more than our right-wing counterparts. Yet it was also we, who took an almost perverse pleasure in the death of another human being.
We are the party of compassion. We are the party that values human life. That is what makes us better than them. That is what gives us and not them, the moral high ground. It is our compassion, our love and belief in humanity that separates us from them. When we lower ourselves to their level, when we revel in death, even the death of somebody as repugnant as Ken Lay, we give that up and become what we despise.
I want to believe that the outpouring of rage and of hate was just a venting of frustration. I want to believe that we aren't beginning to dehumanize people as they do. I want to believe that we truly do value human life, that our compassion knows no bounds, that the loss of a human life, no matter who it might be, is not something that should be joyously celebrated. I want to believe that 6 years of this Administration isn't stripping us of our hearts and our humanity.
It was shocking and sad to see us behaving like Fred Phelps and his band of ghouls, gleefully dancing on somebody's grave. For the first time ever, I was truly ashamed of our community.
I know we're better than that, Kossacks.