So, when we tolerate criminal acts on the part of our political, religious & business leaders & do nothing to take away their wealth & power, we lower ourselves to their level, we become an accomplice to the evil they do. What does this mean? It means we are as guilty as are those who pull the trigger. We are as guilty as those who give the order to pull the trigger. We are as guilty as those who lie about the reasons for pulling the trigger. We are as guilty as those who cynically manipulate language to justify pulling the trigger. The trigger pullers know all this which probably makes it easier for them to go ahead & pull the trigger.
We, at least those of us with a shred of conscience & pride in this country still intact, are the only ones who can turn our country away from the bloody path we have chosen.
What does this all mean? It means we become the evil that we tolerate in others. It's a very, very old idea & the Greeks had a great word for it: enantiodromia, or you become what you hate. In this sense, every single American is guilty of every single second of torture & every murder, no matter when, or where, or why it was done. We all bear a collective guilt.
The only way to change this is for every one of us mature enough to understand what is being done in our name with our tacit permission to stand up & do everything possible to stop it.
Don't believe for a moment the perverse propaganda that we must kill these men, women & children because they hate us for our freedoms. Don't believe for a moment you have a right to endorse these endless murders & torture because those being killed are not interested in your god. Don't believe for a moment that they are about to attack us & blow up the White House, the Pentagon, or Candlestick Park & therefore we have to kill them all before they get a chance. They hate us because we are allowing our corporate/congressional cabal to use the US military to loot their countries & kill absolutely anyone who stands in our way. They hate us because we are doing to them what the most powerful empire on earth was doing to us in the late 1700's & what we did in turn to Native Americans, Mexicans, Filipinos, Cubans & so many others.
Now we are the strongest military empire in history. It has been a bloody business getting here. Our wars of empire, from our wars with Native Americans to Afghanistan, have killed nameless millions. At this moment, no nation is strong enough to stop us. That will change & if history is anything it is a reckoning.
Is there an upside here somewhere? Yes, there is. Outrage. There are voices naming these crimes for what they are: Alan Grayson , Elizabeth Warren , Bernie Sanders , Jane Mayer , Julian Assange , Medea Benjamin , Noam Chomsky , Cynthia McKinney & many others. Yes, MANY others.
At this moment in the history of this republic, every American needs to be thinking long & hard about what all this means & to what extent we as a people are willing to let the looting, torture, assassinations & destruction of our country continue.
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