A Look Back

I published this on my old blog back on October 6th of last year. Thought it was prescient today.

Injustice: American Style

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." While America has never seen fit to enforce these truths absolutely; in the context of the era under which they were written, the words themselves were entirely revolutionary. At no point in this basic proclamation endowing all men and women with a basic humanity not to be violated, was the term 'American' used as a qualifier for deserving such distinction. As a nation still rabid in the grip of phantom fear, we find ourselves failing in our daily confrontations with those who would render those words useless.

Recently, in one of his few acts still strongly supported by the general public, George Bush negotiated legislation that provides guidelines in the interrogation and 'trying' of supposed terror suspects. Among these, no clear distinction of torture was created, other than to allow discretion to be left in the hands of those whom have already failed to utilize it; however, the legal adjudication system created is far worse in its lack of respect for humanity. It allows permanent detention without trial; in trial it allows those standing accused to be dealt with without public knowledge, without being supplied of evidence kept in secret, or even the identity of witnesses testifying against them.

In our zeal to deal retribution to those we have judged responsible, we have forgotten a very important necessity in the ingredients for proper justice: guilt. We claim that these individuals are guilty of crimes so heinous that we should not be required to adequately prove their guilt in the first place; our fear has allowed us to accept whatever happens to these individuals in secret, while allowing us to awaken daily with the air of innocence. Our judicial hatchet men do it all without us directly knowing, as we still continually reassure ourselves that we are the good people, and the captured barbarians operate divorced entirely from the law, as the line between ourselves and our 'enemy' blurs dangerously.

We forget that each citizen's name is written invisibly on every flag, whether it flies over the White House, or Baghdad. That even the most despotic of nations took a first step down the wrong path, on which we may have treaded out too far to turn back without analyzing what inside ourselves allowed us this moment of weakness in our resolve for honor and fairness. That what is right is right, and what is popular is popular; and though they sometimes happily coincide, the path to righteousness is often found through the solitude of speaking against the crowd.