A Sense of Helplessness

I am thinking again about the victims of our government, many of them innocent, imprisoned in our torture camps around the world, most notably in Guantanamo Bay. It depresses me to realize that even the election of a Democratic president will not guarantee justice for these people. I was horrified by the parade of Republican candidates in the debate on Fox TV, stumbling all over each other to advocate more torture - to thunderous applause by an audience of devoutly Christian American patriots.

Of the Republican candidates, only John McCain spoke against torture of the prisoners and he did not address it from a moral standpoint but rather because torture is ineffective as an interrogation method. But we are not torturing prisoners to beat information out of them. We’re doing it to demonstrate our power over them. We’re doing out of a collective sense of helplessness.

There are so many issues that have spun out of control in modern America. I’m deeply concerned about global climate change, runaway budget deficits, the erosion of our civil rights, the deliberate policies to take wealth from the middle class and deny vital services to the poor to enrich the already wealthy. But none of these issues strike me as deeply as our government’s systematic torture of people of middle-eastern descent - some born British citizens, others abducted from around the world.

In my gut I sense that this depravity goes deeper than the Bush administration - admittedly the most depraved Presidency in living memory and arguably in American history. But I think this evil runs deeper. It is a sickness at the core of American culture. The same sickness that created Nazi Germany. The same sickness that perverted the French Revolution and turned it into an endless bloodbath. The same sickness that led Mayan priests to unbelievable orgies of human sacrifice.

Could a President Clinton keep the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay? Would a President Obama close the secret American torture camps around the world? Even with a landslide victory, an incoming Democratic president would be hard pressed to end this madness. The American people have not just tolerated it. Those prisoners are not just victims of our indifference. I believe they are victims of our vengeance, and more deeply, victims of our sense of insecurity.

America cannot control the entire world and each of us feels the world slipping from our grasp - never stopping to think that we never had any right to it in the first place. For a brief moment, America held the world together. We could do it and we had to do it because we were the only industrial power to survive WWII. We got used to it - even though it was a situation that could never last. The rest of the world eventually re-built - and we were wise enough to help rebuild much of it.

But that wisdom has left us and in its place is an ebbing sense of superiority that we have now propped up with clumsy exhibitions of power and cruelty. I have no faith that the victims of Guantanamo Bay will ever be freed or that any of them will ever have justice. They are the most helpless. Some of them were our enemies. Others were innocent. At this point it doesn’t matter that much. They’re all torture victims now. Our treatment of them is not justice. It is sickness.

I have to fight for them. I feel it in my gut. I just don’t know how to. Yet.

rbs