Torturing prisoners, rather than making the U.S. safer, puts us all in greater danger. Herbert:
People have been murdered, tortured, rendered to foreign countries to be tortured at a distance, sexually violated, imprisoned without trial or in some cases simply made to "disappear" in an all-American version of a practice previously associated with brutal Latin American dictatorships.All of this has been done, of course, in the name of freedom.
We are what we have always been. It's just that the mask has slipped. Think of Birmingham and Watts, of Wounded Knee, of the Phillipines and Cuba, of Central American wars fought over fruit, of Hiroshima and Hanoi, of steel strikes and all the rest of the places where American brutality has surfaced.
We remember what we want to remember, most of the time. We are not all evil, but we've never been what we wanted to be, either. And it's grieving for the death of the myth, the dream, the goal, that makes us Progressives instead of Republicans, I think.
What keeps me awake at night is that this is our tax dollars at work. Sometimes I think about it and makes me very uneasy: no matter how much I protest, a huge chunk of the money I pay in taxes is being used in these neocon adventures. I know there's not much of an alternative to that and this is how our society works, but I feel used: they take the largest part of my tax dollar to finance delusional crusades around the world, something I strongly oppose. Then they turn around and tell me they are doing it on my name.
It blows.
In the meantime public schools are going to hell, teachers are paid miserable salaries, our infrastructure is decaying at an alarming rate, and more Americans than ever have to get around without health insurance.
