Long day at work, when legal memos supporting torture -- and I can hardly type that -- became public showing new depths of depravity of the Bush/Cheney Administration.
So I thought I would get away from things, go for a nice long neighborhood walk. The first neighbor I see, asks 'What's wrong?' and I realize I have leaky eyes. Tough day at work, I say, hope you are well.
The next neighbor: 'Hey are you ok?' and I realize that multitasking today means walking and crying at the same time.
I shared that our staff is hurting from seeing legal memos justifying - almost inviting - torture. This is done in our name. We have worked to elect a different team for the government; we knew the Bush/Cheney administration did bad things, and yet...to see this in writing, from LAWYERS...it is egregious. It is too much. They went too far.
I realized that the neighbors had never seen me cry before. Not from divorce, not from being lonely in a new place, not from other losses. But THIS - this makes my eyes overflow, in public, in a way I have not done since my father died. My father, city prosecutor, HLS, who deeply believed in the rule of law.
Our national honor has nearly died. I hope and pray we can restore it.
*****
photo by margaretv
3 comments:
We CAN and WILL restore our national honor!
(eat well and save it. you deserve it. that should be your mantra.)
Ah...."We don't (fill in the blank)"? Remember THAT one? The list of things that our government once did, did for a whole long time, and perhaps continues to do grows ever longer. The evidence this week in those memos shows me that there was a point fairly early in the Bush game where they decided that they lived in an entirely different country than the rest of us. That THEY were the 'owners' of the United States and could do whatever they pleased and that the rest of us were political prisoners in some sort of outdoor refugee camp ...only we didn't know it. It is not only the rest of the world that we must convince that we don't do this sort of stuff - that this is just totally wrong...it is ourselves as well.
Have you been following the coverage of this in the New York Review of Books? They have been way out in front on this story for the last five years. Which invites the question - where was the New York Times and the Washington Post when all this was going on? No wonder that more and more people think they can live without our national newspapers of record.
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