One of Plaid Adder's finest pieces. I always say that, but this one is special!
Snip:
Sitting here on the other side of the Atlantic, we can still look at photos from something like the massacre at Makr al-Deeb and imagine that the people who dropped the bombs are as troubled by it as we are - that the pilot is sitting in the barracks somewhere with his head in his hands, tortured with remorse over the lives he has destroyed. And who knows; he may be. But one person who clearly isn't bothered by any of this is Major General Kimmitt, who can shrug off questions about the number of children who died in this bombing with those chilling platitudes: Bad things happen in wars. Bad people have parties too.
And if we accept that things like the Makr al-Deeb massacre are natural, necessary, and right, then we are all saying it right along with Kimmitt, the torturers of Abu Ghraib, and Satan: "Evil, be thou my good."
Don't worry - I'm quoting Milton's Satan here, the one from Paradise Lost, not the Biblical Satan. I haven't gone evangelical all of a sudden. But I will say that one of the worst things that the Christian right has done to discourse in this country is to capture the language of morality. We secular humanist types now feel as if as soon as we start talking about good and evil we are one step away from frothing about FORRRRRRNICATION! But good and evil are not the prisoners of any one religious system, nor do they require a deity or an eschatology to shore up their meaning. And it is absolutely insane that they have, in our country, become so thoroughly entangled with sexual morality. We spend all this time fighting about whether it is or is not evil for two consenting adults of the same gender to have sex with each other, and we have apparently failed to maintain our grasp on the concept that killing people is wrong. We have spent so much time as a culture obsessing over sex as foul, filthy, and obscene that we have forgotten how foul, filthy, and obscene violence is.
I hope we can get back one of these days to a responsible, honest, and usefully complex understanding of good and evil. I hope, someday, public policy and public discourse will be founded on a shared believe in the value of human life and human dignity rather than one sect's tendentious and self-serving interpretation of one book. I still hope to see us, one day, find our way out of the moral wasteland into which Bush has led this country. And the rest of the world no doubt hopes to see it too, because in our descent into hell we are pulling a lot of the world in after us.
I hope we find our way out of Iraq and that we find it soon. But it will only be the first step in what will be a very long journey home.
Read the entire, excellent article on DU's front page or here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/plaidder/04/23.html
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