What is the America You Know?


Wherein Our Heroine Considers the America She Knows.
Okay. I'm very late to this fray. I have tried long and hard to remain outside the political arena. Partly because I am looking for a job, and expressing a political belief can be dangerous when you are looking for a job in the Washington Metro Area, and partly because I don't really like political arguments. I think they are far too susceptible to Godwin's Law and its corollaries.

But things are just completely out of hand.

G.W. Bush referred to the evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib and said that it is, "Not the America that I know." Funny, the United States of America that I know includes citizens who will drag a man to death behind a truck because his skin is a different color from theirs. It includes a young man beaten and left for dead tied to a fence because he said the wrong things to the wrong people. It includes teenagers who acted as if they might have been in training for Abu Ghraib.

America also includes many examples of good things, good people. There are teenage good samaritans getting recognized for their actions. There are people volunteering to build houses for low-income families. U.S. doctors are joining with physicians around the world to help combat disease in poor nations.

The America that I know is all these things and more. The good stands with the bad. That is the way the world works, the way things are. But the foul things that people are capable of inflicting on one another do not go away when you refuse to see them. And if I, who love my country and want desperately for it to be a wholesome place, can see and remember the bad, then you can rest assured that those who do not love us will also see and remember the bad as well. Those people will not be fooled by blindly optimistic statements that ignore reality.

Besides, another occasion when Bush used the same phrase should have taught him something about America. It can be a dangerous place.
Posted: Thursday - May 06, 2004 at 08:48 AM         | |

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