Pensieri di un lunatico minore

The absence of morality

For some reason, this Administration—if one can use so active a word to describe the mind-boggling mixture of mendacity, incompetence and neglect with which this country stumbles forward—has determined that there are some number of people who are so dangerous that to even begin to think about giving them some vague form of trial presents an unprecedented, and unspecifiable, risk to this nation. The number of cases of false-imprisonment are documented and need not be regurgitated here, but we have found ourselves in a moral chasm stuck with multiple horrible choices of our own making:

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.

In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into “restraint chairs,” sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers.

There are those who will say that we are chosing the “lesser of two evils”: letting people starve to death or forcing them to eat. That simplistic, and intentionally short-sighted perspective is morally bankrupt. We, as a Nation, have chosen this course of decent into madness. We have allowed it to continue through our silence and by our acquiescence to the barbarity perpetrated in our name. We have absolved ourselves of the legal frameworks that define a just nation, defining some as less than deserving of the full protections of justice and in the process defining them as less-than-human.

We, as a Nation, are culpable in this great disaster of our own making. By allowing fear and xenophobia to wrest our sanity from us we have bought into the mentality of tyrrany and terror. We have allowed the failings of others, through the lies and the false prophets of Terror, to wrest control from the hands of democracy and deliver it to the cold embrace of fascism.

We are nothing, if not a nation of Justice. We are nothing, if not a nation of Democracy. We are nothing, if not a nation of Hope. And so, we slide, as a Nation, into nothingness.