Columbus Day, again

To be perfectly honest, I find a holiday like Columbus Day shameful.

Oh, I have nothing against holidays. In fact, if it were up to me, there would be at least one holiday per month, without exception, and I would have no qualms about finding rather innocuous reasons for having them. In March, we should all be able to celebrate the Vernal Equinox, if nothing else. In August, we should simply have a Holiday of Holidays, if nothing else. Yes, every month deserves to have a holiday, and not one of those wimpy floating ones, but a real Monday holiday as it should be.

Of course, if we're going to take this approach, I would insist that each month have a holiday that is meaningful and mostly -- and I emphasize, mostly -- inoffensive to the population. You see, we could declare, say, St. Patrick's Day as a national holiday, but that would be partial to the Irish. We could have a religious holiday in August, but this would be disrespecting of non-Christians. I'm sure, though, that it wouldn't take long to find a Monday that was acceptable to everyone. After all, we only need to have a will to have a way.

Columbus Day, in all due respect, is not one of thoses days. Yes, I know that his intentions were honorable, that he merely wanted to find an alternative to the status quo of his day, but the way he went about it and the results of his personal policies made live more than difficult for millions of people, and we're talking about millions of people who never had and no longer have a voice in their own demise.

Yes, Columbus Day honors the overtaking of different cultures for no other reason than one believed that one's own culture was the best the world had to offer combined with the arrogance of believing that white, Western Europeans were in a better position to decide what was good for the world than any other peoples are the face of the earth.

In the meantime, we've come to realize that Columbus really didn't get it right, that he didn't understand the world with which he was confronted, and that he represented a way of thinking that derided and suppressed any way of understanding the world that didn't conform to their own.

No,I don't believe there were any evil intentions. No, I believe that Columbus and his crew's intentions were good. But, at the same time, I believe that they simply failed to recognize that those who were already here deserved to be treated with the same respect as any other human being on the planet.

Unfortunately, we didn't get it then, and it's quite obvious we don't get it even now. We may never learn, even if I hope that I'm wrong.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program ... for torture

This week, the Senate Committee's report on torture was released. I would have liked to have ignored it, but I can't. I would have liked not to feel compelled to say something, but I can't. I would have liked that it didn't turn out like it did, but it did.

Disclaimer: Unwillingly, I was a soldier in the United States Army on active duty between 1971 and 1975. My Military Occupational Specialty was Interrogator of Prisoners of War. In other words, there's a part of this post that is simply personal.

Two things, in particular, bother me. On the one hand, there are voices that say the report should never have been made public. I couldn't disagree more. While I know it's not true in reality, I still believe that a government should be the servant of the people, and the people have a right to know what those who are acting in their name are doing. I know from first-hand experience that far too much is classified and too often it is because we simply don't want others to know what we are doing. But we know anyhow. On the other hand, there are those who assert that the release of the report could tarnish America's image in the world. It is already tarnished, by its own actions. My mother told me that if I did something wrong, I should own up to it and take the consequences. I don't know why this wisdom would not apply to supposedly adult representatives of one of the most influential nations on earth.

And, oh, for all of you national-security paranoids who believe that the release of such information could be a threat to the safety and security of the nation: wake up, get real, and get a life. The United States has never been more threatened that it is right now, and this report had nothing to do with that. The people who authorized the actions that are the focus of the report bear the full responsibility for that threat.

There is a fairly strong consensus across what little there is of a political spectrum in the US that the actions which were investigated did in fact take place. It might have been the Nation or The American Conservative or the wire agencies or the mainstream press or so-called liberal news or journalistic services on the internet.

But the list wouldn't be complete without at least one voice that would like to play it off as nothing more than a partisan ploy by the Democrats to distract from the "real issues" facing our country. Oh yes, there's always one. How calloused and, well, ignorant does one have to be?.

I, for one, am appalled that it took this long to get this far. As an interrogator, I was trained not to torture for it was well-known in those circles that the only thing torture gets you is inaccurate intelligence. There were, I will admit, some heartless, nasty, immoral, and downright sadistic folks in the branch who looked for every excuse to satisfy their own dishonorable desires. Unfortunately, they weren't send home (or anywhere else where they might have got some help), and so they remained, and, as it appears, eventually gained the upper hand.

What the (the executive summary of the) report tells us is that we, as a nation, are guilty. We betrayed our own values in the name of expediency. We committed acts of inhumanity and violated the human rights of others for our own trivial ends. We might like to think we are the beacon of hope to all freedom-loving peoples of the earth, but we have shown our true face, the twisted, distorted grimace of power-addicted bully.

But, we still have a chance. We can own up to our actions and face the consequences, just like my mom once encouraged me. The perpetrators need to do the same, and if they are not willing to do so on their own, they need to be brought to justice by the rest of the world. If we, as America, fail to act, we forfeit every right we ever thought we had to the moral high ground of international politics.

Are we able to do the right thing? I can only hope so.