Last night I watched a piece on 60 Minutes about Joe Darby, the Army guy who blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib scandal. Maybe I’m a little too sentimental or naive or something for my own good, but watching that report disgusted me. Basically, the guy who blew the whistle was just a stand up soldier from Cumberland, MD, who felt that he needed to do the right thing. Now, ordinarily, you would think that they would reward such a stand-up kind of guy. What happened next should be enough to sicken anyone.
After his name came out publicly, first the Army had to move Darby to another unit so the members of his unit wouldn’t come after him for blowing the whistle. Frankly, that’s nothing. The real kicker is that his home town of Cumberland completely turned on him, and I mean completely. For example, there was this:
The commander of the local VFW post, Colin Engelbach, told 60 Minutes what people were calling Darby. “He was a rat. He was a traitor. He let his unit down. He let his fellow soldiers down and the U.S. military. Basically he was no good,” Engelbach says. Asked if he agrees with that, Engelbach says, “I agree that his actions that he did were no good and borderline traitor, yes.”
As a result of all of this, Darby and his wife have had to settle elsewhere (they didn’t say where for obvious reasons) and start all over, because the Army did a security assessment of his home in Cumberland, and decided it would not be safe for him. A lot of the people in Cumberland wanted to kill this guy for doing the right thing. On top of that, they celebrated the soldiers accused of the torture of those Iraqis.
And that’s the thing that gets me. I would like to think that as Americans, we are better than the stuff that went on at Abu Ghraib. Not doing those things made us better than the terrorists and all of those people we say are our enemies. Apparently, I was wrong. Apparently, being an American these days means humiliating brown people at any opportunity, and threatening anyone who would point it out to the rest of us. Apparently, we are the culture of torture and humiliation. These are the new American values, not truth, justice, freedom, liberty. And in the end, that’s sad that we’ve so easily given up everything that makes us Americans, and better than the totalitarian regimes of the world and the terrorists of the world, just so we can say that we have the right to do whatever we want to the people we say are our enemies.
It truly is a sad world we live in now.
Welcome to America. No this isn’t your daddy’s “America”, where Superman was the greatest superhero AND role model for children and adults alike. Nor is it the place where telling the truth, even if you were doing something wrong, would soften the punishment you received for doing it. Nor is it the place where morales are even remotely written in stone, or even ink no less.
Yes this is the NEW America, where we follow leaders blindly and do things in the congress behind the public’s back and then say they never tried to stop that law. The place where we don’t hurt ANYONE’S feelings by telling the truth or how we really feel, but instead lie and deceive so that we are not looked upon as “bad” people. A place where “moderation” is so gray, you can’t see where it’s abstinence or obsession. A place where coming out and saying, or doing, the right thing will get you in trouble, whereas saying, or doing, the wrong thing will grant you praise.
Welcome, to America.