As the world sees us

I will be visiting my old friends in Ireland and England this summer for the first time in three years. And I'm already wondering if I can manage to re-cultivate the little bit of an Irish accent I picked up during the years I lived in Dublin. Because, quite frankly, I don't want to be recognized as an American. Hatred of the U.S. is now widespread throughout the world and with good reason. I'm ashamed to be associated with what my government is doing.

I offer you two articles this morning having to do with why we are so hated. The first is by Bill Gallagher entitled, "Bush continues to alienate world".

President George W. Bush has created an atmosphere of unparalleled distrust toward the United States as people from places around the globe now shudder when he makes increasingly frequent declarations about his "vision" for the world. From avowed enemies to longtime allies and even our closest neighbors, open hostility toward the United States is epidemic.

People who once looked toward America with admiration and respect and as a beacon for liberty and civility now see a supremely arrogant rogue nation that holds international law and institutions in disdain.

George W. Bush and the neocon crazies who pull his strings, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, have created this reality and an indelible image and ignominious legacy that will take generations to erase.

From the appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations to the shoot up of the car carrying Italian secret service agent Nicola Calipari and journalist Giuliana Sgrena, Gallagher recounts some of the reasons we are so thoroughly despised.

The other article I'm offering this morning is still another on the subject of torture. In "The torturers among us" Carol Towarnicky writes:

In an introduction to "Torture: A Collection," a book of essays, Ariel Dorfman writes that torture "presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others' suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness..."

Some Americans, it appears, already are well along the way to that "distancing" - if the last half hour of Friday's "Radio Times" on WHYY-FM is an indication. The guest was Jane Mayer, whose article in the New Yorker detailed the policy of "extraordinary rendition," in which suspects kidnapped by the U. S. government are sent to countries known to use torture.

The host, Marty Moss-Coane reported that half the callers favored torture being done in their name - even though some of those tortured are innocent. (Note: This was not the Rush Limbaugh show; this was public radio.)

Just as it is easy for people who advocate torture to distance themselves from the pain of others, so it is easy for those of us who are appalled by torture to distance ourselves from the fact that it is being done in our name. I know it is painful to think about. Actually, that is entirely appropriate. We need to think about it anyway. If we allow ourselves to become numb like the torturers themselves we will be no longer willing to speak out. And then we become complicit. However long it takes, we must find a way to make this stop. Please do not lose heart. Let us do whatever we can to make compassion and lovingkindness manifest in our world wherever we find and experience the horrors humans can visit upon one another.