Rant

This post is completely dead-on... and crushingly depressing.

I read it yesterday shortly after losing a hearing where the judge all but admitted that he was choosing to do what he thought was right even if it was not the appropriate decision under the law. The combination of these events left me rather sad and frustrated. It was a strange frustration, completely devoid of anger. It was a frustration based on the realization that no one seems to care about things I think are really important - obviously important - and that I am impotent to convince them otherwise.

As a general idea, that post sums it up nicely, albeit sarcastically:

When push comes to shove, when the truth is revealed to [the American People], they will always -- always -- do the right thing.

That is sarcastically exactly right. We have, at least lately always seemed to do the wrong thing. And be ok with it. That last sentence is really important: It's not that we won't make mistakes, but rather how we respond to them that really matters.

Swimming in my depression/frustration yesterday, I thought to myself that we are a depraved, heartless, ignorant, immoral and unjust people. I felt shame, really.

Emotionally and temporaly removed from those moments, I might have been a little harsh in that most people are kind-hearted and decent, and most people have a clear sense of what is right and wrong. But collectively? Collectively I don't think I was far off: War is something to be cheered and politicized and the deaths of innocents something to be knee-jerkingly defended and never somberly contemplated. Simultaneously, laws are something to be skirted whenever political inconveniences, or practical judgments can't be reconciled therewith. Perhaps the latter notion could be viewed sympathetically - if not outright accepted - if we had consistently demonstrated our moral awareness and clarity to be so strong and righteous that we would be wise to trust it, even over our cherished laws. Of course, we only ever seem to digress from our laws - our most basic and traditional principles - in ways that are often substantively immoral and illegitimate: to cover up murder, and abuse; to gloss over corruption where profits are prioritized over lives.

We get pretty pissed, and morally indignant about steroids and philandering golfers, but as that post highlights when we learn that our troops murdered plainly innocent pregnant women (yes plural) and then all levels of government officials conspired to cover it up we don't stop and ponder the benefits of our foreign wars, we don't call for accountability, we don't seek investigations, we don't even collectively say "how tragic." We don't do single fucking thing, we don't even fucking bring it up!

It would be easy to simply blame the giant orge-cluster-fuck that is and are our national political-media-corporate establishment, who are utterly devoid of all of the qualities indicating the presence of a human soul, that as a collective society we can't be anything other than immoral. But when I think about, as non-emotionally as possible, I am compelled to feel shame.