Our current wars have desensitized us
Reading the pundits in The New York Times during the aftermath of the Arizona shooting has been instructive. Either we should take hope that the alleged killer is a nut case and not typical, or we should blame the Republican Party and right-wing radio talk-show hosts for the climate of hate they foster.
What’s missing — not even a hint — is that nine years of the legally unjustified and grossly immoral bloodshed in Central Asia, caused by the U.S. military and endorsed and paid for in our name by a craven Congress and two unprincipled presidents, may have a slow brutalizing effect on all Americans. We’ve all seen the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and heard about the same at Guantanamo. We’ve caught glimpses of the shooting of journalists by laughing U.S. soldiers in an Apache helicopter and watched endless footage of “our” troops terrorizing at gunpoint old men, women and children in their homes at night. We yawn at the mayhem and slaughter caused by roadside bombings and terrorist attacks in marketplaces and at Muslim shrines and never connect it to a murderously imperialist and racist U.S. foreign policy.
Yes, we have become desensitized to it all. There’s just too much bad news here at home to worry ourselves about what’s happening in Central Asia: economic recession, foreclosures, pensions disappearing, sticky unemployment or underemployment for an unlucky 17 percent, and lack of job security for the rest of us, while politicians in both parties call for even more austerity and corporate profits surge to record levels.
It’s enough to shake up the most stable of us and send a few, gripping their easily obtained semiautomatics, over the edge. Where is Louis Armstrong when we need him to sing “What a Wonderful World . . .”
Robert Fraser
Rolling Meadows