I read an article in the London Review of Books this morning. It's called Diary and is an interview of a man, a boy, who was picked up after 9/11 though he had no connection with anything, and was tortured and taken to Guantanamo and tortured and tortured and tortured for years. What information could he possibly have had, and even if he did, even if he did, what does it do to the people of a country that allow torture like this?
I read this, shocked, though we've heard it before, and we need to hear it every day until this country wakes up. We have nincompoops in the news, and those are the ones running for president and this has gone on. The guards who tortured were affected; those who were tortured, well, there I have no ability to imagine how it felt.
We recently watched a Showtime series called Homeland. If you have an opportunity to watch it, do.
What is this fear? Fear that Best Buy will ruin our Christmas because they run out of stuff?
Maybe those people who didn't get their presents from Best Buy in time for Christmas will learn something new about themselves. I like to stay on the positive end of things, especially this time of year, and to look for a place of balance in judgment, but when I read something like this, a boy taken out of a mosque in Karachi, a boy studying to one day become a dentist, a boy who had never heard of al-Qaida and the Taliban, I have to wonder what this country is about. Those who tortured said they had to do it, had to follow orders, and where do these orders come from?
Where do any orders come from? How do we choose to live?