War Crimes... and me.

I read a lot today, but Dahr Jamail's post - see Stories From Fallujah - wherein he interviews a physician who did humanitarian work there - will haunt me forever. If you haven't made the time or effort to read the previous link, I would prefer you simply stop reading right now.

What does it mean to be part of a cog, no matter how small, in the machine which perpetrates war crimes? The systematic murder and torture of noncombatants is enough to make me hate what America has become. We're a nation of sick and defeated people who have voluntarily traded our loftiest ideals for the immediate gratification promised - and betrayed - by our most base instincts.

The roaring, blood-sucking Fascist Beast becomes more efficient by the day while those of us consumed by it present indignant pixels of protest to make ourselves feel better. I'm not sure what disappoints me more: the malice and avarice of The Right, or the flaccid, virtually risk-free resistance put up by the rest of us.

There is a price to be paid for tolerating evil, and we will all continue to pay it for the rest of our lives. I feel swept up in something that I have absolutely no control over, and that feeling of helplessness is a unique - and rarely acknowledged - form of psychological torture that comprises part of that price.

This is the point where some kid gives gloomy old me a brief Chomsky lesson, and reassures himself there is hope, but I believe hope is lost. I've believed it for a while, really, although I occasionally find reason to think myself wrong. It's a hard thing to deal with, this notion that America - our potential for accomplishing great things - is dead in the water. But when we lose our humanity, we lose everything good about ourselves. Reading Dahr Jamail today, I cannot shake the feeling that we are both coroner and deceased, and our death certificate has been signed, sealed and delivered.

It's a shameful time to be an American, and I don't know how to resolve that shame, or if it's even possible.