Mr. President, We Have Already Lost Our Soul
Watts Cookin’
by Joe Watts
President Bush now tells us that if we leave Iraq before the job is done, “we will have lost our soul as a nation.”
Actually, we have already lost our soul as a nation. It happened when we invaded Iraq in a war of our choosing. (Italics for emphasis). It was abetted by a compliant Congress more interested in their political futures than in doing what’s right. It was supported by a paranoid public. It was driven by extremist nationalistic fervor. The news media, our guardian against secret government, not only lost its compass, but actually gave wings to the lying and deception. The few voices of reason were ‘mocked’ down and labeled unpatriotic by the neo-con war planners and their religious right wing cheerleaders, led by ‘talk radio’ stooges who have destroyed civil discourse in this nation.
We not only lost our soul, but we became the evil we deplored in others when we abandoned the moral principles that were the bedrock of our glory years. We arrested innocent people, put them in secret prisons where we could torture them and have ‘fun’ with them, and gave them no chance to plead innocent. Unsavory Muslims didn’t deserve a trial. We abandoned the Geneva Conventions and ‘in order to save our own Constitution our president began to destroy it.’
As a nation we had a chance to redeem our lost soul by changing presidents at the next election, but we failed. We weren’t ready for redemption. The American people turned a blind eye to the lies, the deception, the wholesale abandonment of moral principle and it became America’s War. It especially became Utah’s War, as we continue to lead the nation in support of this upside down morality.
The fact that the USA deliberately stood silent and encouraged our gun slinging partners to ruthlessly destroy the nation of Lebanon shows that we are no where near repentance. We are blind to our unfair foreign policy in the Middle East that is in essence a blank check to Israel. The ‘we are right, everyone else is wrong,’ the ‘if you’re not with us you’re against us’ attitude has become the ugly Hallmark of America. As a nation we have gone from revered to hated in six disastrous years.
We are still publicly condemning and mocking the Rocky Anderson’s and Cindy Sheehan’s who are courageously trying to bring this nation to its senses, while the voice of Utah Morality, the LDS Church, stays ‘on mute’ on the most important moral issue of our time.
It was a war of anger, of greed, of misplaced vengeance. There was no righteousness in it. It was driven by the dark side of our character, highlighted by an Arrogance taller than the Twin Towers. We will not ever redeem our soul until our Arrogance is pierced and brought down to Ground Zero.
