Guts

[ebonypearl]

Bride with Gift
Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012203929.html?hpid=topnews

The military's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration's lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001.

And about time. I wish Bush had had the guts to do this. But he felt secrecy and torture and performing occult illegal acts were perfectly fine, that they “saved” us, when really, all they did was taint us. That taint permeated society and we hated it. It wasn’t American, that taint that Bush tarred us with. It was composed of pain and fear and things hiding in the dark, only partly glimpsed and partly heard, and the power of suggestion made it worse than it would be under the glaring light of knowledge. He kept us ignorant and tried to keep us shackled at home so the “experts” could handle it. And the “experts” handled it by shooting pets, breaking into the wrong houses, terrorizing innocent citizens, and spreading a culture of suspicion and dread.

Americans are busybodies by nature. We like poking and prying into the lives of our neighbors and co-workers and friends. In good times, this prying helps us out, it’s talanoa. We learn about one another’s needs and desires and in learning reach out to fulfill those needs and dreams and desires. In dark times, we poke and pry and seek out anything that could be used against our neighbors and co-workers and friends and we report it to the authorities so they don’t look too closely at us. Even the most innocent among us can be proven guilty of some crime under that type of scrutiny. This is gossip at its most evil. That was the direction Bush was leading us towards by modeling behavior that said “secrecy is good”, “torture is necessary”, and “privacy is bad.”

At this time, this is mostly a symbolic act. It will take time to replace suspicious sneakiness leading to secretive incarcerations ad torture with our more usual good-natured inquisitiveness leading to generous outpourings of help and well-intentioned advice. Yes, we were naïve, but our national strength lay in that naiveté. We have never been a people who could condone torture, hounding innocents, killing children and women, secretly imprisoning anyone. That’s just not American.

You can’t have a “war” on terror because terrorists aren’t so easy to identify, and when you give in to terrorists, you become perceived a weak and thus a better target for even more terrorism. It wasn’t Bush and his policies that kept the terrorists away from American soil after 9/11 – it was the American spirit, the rebels among us who would willingly sacrifice themselves to keep a terrorist from achieving his goal, and who would go all vigilante on any real terrorists we found. The way to prevent terrorism is to arm everyone with knowledge and provide them with the skills to carry through when they needed to act – and then let the world know we haven’t disarmed ourselves and made of ourselves weak, ignorant, and frightened targets.

What we need is transparency in government, openness in information, and a media that isn’t afraid to spend the few extra minutes to get the facts instead of acting as if rumors were real. We don’t mind waiting a bit longer to get the real information, and the media won’t have egg on its face when they have to correct their earlier errors caused by haste. Investigative reporters should take pride in truly investigating all the facts before they release their stories. We’ll wait.

What we need are people willing to act when time is urgent. Responding to disasters can’t wait 2 or 3 days, we need people who are living in the middle of the disaster to be prepared, and we need our government to acknowledge that we just might know what we’re doing so we don’t sit passively waiting for promised help that doesn’t arrive in a timely way while locals are being held outside the disaster area with supplies, food, and help. That Citizens Corp idea needs to be ramped up and presented in the high schools and colleges. No, I’m wrong. It should start in kindergarten, with the simple concepts and acts and work its way up. We’ve seen how capable children can be if we just let them – the 4 year old who called 911, the 6 year old who rescued a drowning sibling. We should let our children be as capable as they can be. Protect them, teach them, sure, but give them the skills and the ability to think and act on their own, stepping in only when they are in over their level.

It will take time for us to regain that confidence and to rebuild the skills we were told not to use by our government, but we’ll get there so long as our government doesn’t start telling us to “let the experts handle it” and to “go shopping” as the response to disasters and wars.

A citizenry that isn’t afraid to act, that communicates with one another, is a citizenry that is as safe from terrorism as it’s possible to ever be.

Comments

[chipmunk-planet.livejournal.com]

"The military's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration's lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001."

Thank God. Finally.

*relieved*