This article was in my local paper and expresses the same views that I have about the situation. I wanted to share it with you.
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Iraqi prison photos should distress all Americans
The Home Front: Jacey Eckhart, The Virginian Pilot
We’re good American parents. We’ve trotted the kids up to Our Nation’s Capital. Plunged down the little elevator at the Washington Monument. Eaten hot dogs at the White House. Bought souvenir key chains at the National Museum of American History. We’ve always given the United States Holocaust Museum a skip, though. Too intense. This year, a teacher “suggested” that we take our eighth-grader to the Holocaust museum before the end of the school year. I am weak in the face of teacher guilt. So we went.
We weren’t through with the first floor before I was in tears. I cried for the Jews certainly. But mostly I cried for…I don’t know what I cried for. No one else was crying.
As I walked those halls, I kept seeing those pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. An American pointing and laughing at naked prisoners. A prisoner with a hood on his head. A pyramid of naked Iraqis with swaggering Americans standing behind them.
The Iraqi prisoners were not starving. They were not bleeding. They were not being eleminated by the millions. But the images in the newspaper and the display at the museum struck me as disturbingly similar. There were the conquerors treating naked prisoners as less than human. They mocked the body. They twitted the soul.
And I was shaken. I am shaken. The pictures have not shaken my faith in the military or our leaders. These are, after all, pictures of very few behaving badly. Thousands of others act with honor. But these pictures have shaken my faith in Americans. I thought we were better than that.
We are a people constantly exhorted to remember. We drag school groups through our museums to prove what evil human beings can wreak when they allow their basic instincts to rule. We dedicate a huge memorial to the horrors of World War II. Yet we still produce Americans who give thumbs up to a naked pyramid. How can that be?
Perhaps it’s because we rarely accept our human nature. We allow ourselves to think that The Other Guy may give in to prejudice and hate and discrimination, but we wouldn’t. We are Americans. We conquer to free, not to enslave. That doesn’t mean we are above our instincts or that we are beyond the touch of history.
Naked pyramids do not suddenly appear. They start with words that mock racial and culteral differences. They start with thoughts that others are less than ourselves.
We create museums designed to make us remember, yet we refuse to accept. We can behave badly. We do it all the time. We can’t rely on simply knowing that abuses occured then, there. We have to recognize that the same things can start here, now. We have to understand that the thought before the thought becomes a naked prisoner on a leash. We accept. We expect. We prevent.
We’re good American parents. We teach our children the value of other cultures. We teach the sanctity of the body. We teach the uniqueness of the soul. And we are shaken to know that sometimes it’s not enough.
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