Friday Night at 8: The Courage to Know

I’ve been gratified by the good response in the blogosphere to the Petition for a Special Prosecutor.

I believe most people, if they take even the smallest bit of time to find out the extent to which human rights abuses and crimes against humanity have occurred via torture, promulgated by this misAdministration and admitted to freely by Dick Cheney, know the right thing to do is to give them a fair trial, which means an investigation and, if proven guilty, conviction and the full penalties of the law for those who were involved,  no matter at how high a level of power.

Even the folks who have made comments saying they are against holding those in power accountable do not deny crimes took place.

Yet there are obstacles, and I’m not speaking of the usual obstacles of the media and those in power.  There are obstacles within the minds of the citizens of the United States of America.

One of the biggest obstacles is the sense of hierarchial priorities that the political rhetoric of these past eight years has pounded into our brains.

Who can forget the time before the 2006 election, when our own leadership “kept their powder dry” in order to win elections and so we did not get impeachment, we got several horrible Supreme Court Justices confirmed and lord knows how many bad federal judges, the list goes on.

And of course we kept our powder dry about torture.  The price, the cost, of that decision is a stain on the psyche of this country, I believe.

Now that Obama is soon to be inaugurated, I hear once again that we need to keep our powder dry, that there are so many other important things to focus upon, the economy being the most often mentioned, but also including climate change and health care and, of course, the “middle class.”  Haven’t heard so many “class” references with that latter topic for a very long time.

Priorities.

When you build a house, you start with the foundation.  If you don’t pay attention to how you build that foundation, if you do it wrong, the whole house will come crashing down eventually.

In our distracted culture, I believe we are being told it’s ok to live in that house, though … hell we may have a few months of habitability and we can worry about collapse then, but not now.

I think behind the rhetoric of “priorities” is a very human feeling:  fear.

On September 11, 2008, I read a remarkable diary at Daily Kos by Felix Culpa entitled Fear of Knowing I.

Felix Culpa speaks of symptoms:

The most salient point of the Fear of Knowing is its ubiquity, at least as far as I am concerned.  It’s not, that is, merely a cultural defect that I mean to point to, but a personal defect that I mean to bring to light.  It is the illness of our times and of myself.  

As previously described, the Fear of Knowing is expressed in the image of Hamlet’s Dilemma… such is a personal expression.  More generally, Hamlet’s Dilemma can be seen in Jeffserson’s Sense of Duty: the Duty, that is, to make revolution in the face of tyranny.  This duty, when experienced by some significant – which is to say, effective – group within a population has been termed The Spirit of ’76.  Fear of Knowing is a fear of that Spirit, for the Spirit of Liberation promises to destroy the world.  Use only in cases of emergency… which Jefferson rather idealistically imagined occurring once every couple generations.

This is the Change we can believe in, and it is striking to reckon how cosmetic such change has become.  One of the great flaws in the original essence of America seems poised on the verge of symbolic repair: a Black man might be president.  Yet the legal fabric of the Republic is threadbare where it is not in tatters.  Likewise, we are as a culture able to access information and interrelate on a scale that seems virtually unlimited, yet our discussions achieve remarkably less than they promise.  It’s a pattern that seems endemic to an imperial democracy: universal suffrage requires universal mental control, assisted by technological manipulation of the vote.

All of this conspires in creating a sense of profound dysfunction, of permanent frustration that is too frightening to recognize.  We become ghost dancers at best, responding to the march of historical inevitability with a warrior’s sense of style.  We take the moral high ground: not as an improved vantage point for attack, but as a refuge.  A shelter f

(emphasis mine)

This is the challenge of our time, I believe.

In the instance of the crimes committed by those in power in the United States of America, “knowing” will be very painful indeed.  In order to regain the spirit that caused revolution against tyranny, the citizens of the United States of America will have to take risks, exercise power, engage in a real struggle.

I’ve read comments saying that oh those in power always get away with whatever they wish to do.  The genocide of Native Americans.  The internment of Japanese in the USA during WWII.  Slavery.

I am proud and grateful to know fellow citizens and bloggers who continue to fight this fight, even decades or centuries later.  They have not given up and they will not give up. They have the spirit and are not afraid to know.

The foundation of our Constitution is freedom from tyranny.  That is the foundation.

I won’t be able to blame politicians if there is no justice done to the perpetrators of torture in America.  I won’t be able to blame anyone at all.  I will blame fear of knowing.  I will blame fear.

Being citizens is not a game of building blocks.  We are a deep and wide river of humanity.  We encompass all the skills and knowledge to rebuild our infrastructure and be good neighbors to each other.

But at the root, we need to be free.

I am in solidarity with all those who will fight for human rights.  I’ve written a lot about that topic in the frame of social justice, and I will continue to do so.  I find strength and courage in solidarity, a never-ending source of the antidote to the spiritual poisons of our culture.

But this is the root.  We cannot merely say “well from now on we won’t torture.”   We  need to show our response as an informed citizenry to those who have willfully and knowingly exercised this ultimate tyranny.  Without that response, the poison will not be healed from our body politic.

Happy Friday to everyone.