Blowing a Gasket -- Yep. Me.

I had a very interesting experience recently, in which I blew my stack, seemingly out of nowhere, but not really...

In order to talk about it, I'm afraid I have to 'out' myself politically, but I doubt that my politics will really surprise anyone.

I voted for Obama, with tears running down my face all the way from my car into the polling place, through the line, into the booth, out again, and all the way back to my car. I wept and wept, silently and constantly, at the mere possibility that he might win. With my mind on Nelson Mandela and Steven Biko, and Emmett Till, and Barbara Jordan, and Shirley Chisholm, and George Russell, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Rev. Dr. MLK, and Ann Richards, and Molly Ivins, and on and on.

It was crowded in that voting booth, but surprisingly comforting.

Given the usual tenor of politics in this country [I've lived overseas, and no, it's not the same everywhere] I hardly dared to hope that the man would keep his promises, but there was a quiet little pilot light flickering away, all the same.

Then, on his first day in office, he signed an executive order putting an end to this nation's use of torture. And another one setting a one year time limit to close the Guantanamo Bay offshore dungeons...

... and that little pilot light has been getting braver and brighter with every news story, every speech.

Then, later this week, I stumbled across a discussion of those executive orders. Among people of faith, supposedly. And I saw grown up U.S. citizens, people who have drivers' licenses [and get to vote and everything!] acting as though our right to torture people into giving forced confessions, then incarcerate them indefinitely as public menaces because of those confessions extorted under torture, was somehow defensible, somehow debatable. As long as they were furriners, preferably of the Islamic persuasion.

Now a brief digression. If anyone reading this is old enough to remember the movie "Airplane", Lloyd Bridges had an extremely funny role as an overwhelmed air traffic controller who decompensated at an exponential rate throughout the movie. Starting off by saying he'd picked the wrong week to give up coffee... then cigarettes... then scotch... and ultimately delivering the funniest punchline of the entire movie, IMO, before falling flat on his face.

Wow. Now I know exactly how that character really felt - except I didn't do it in stages. I went over the falls in one swell foop. Not only did I fall flat on my face, I bounced.

That little pilot light suddenly turned into a flamethrower.

I rendered up a diatribe that would probably earn honorable mention in an Irish Cursing competition, but shed far too much heat and very little light, and managed to insult most of the known universe on top of it. Starting with the fact that violating Habeas Corpus doesn't merely go against our Constitution, it goes all the way back to the Magna Carta... ending with the fact that there is an International Court of Justice in the Hague, which would have been the place to adjudicate any international cases of suspected terrorism, except that we sneered at it and rejected its jurisdiction so that we could invade a country that was never any threat to us and had nothing to do with 9/11.

The facts alone would have been fine, but I also insisted that anyone who actually believes that confessions obtained under torture have any validity at all is a moral idiot with less brains than an amoeba...

... not quite in those words, but pretty damn close. With several inventive variations on that theme.

***sigh***.

The strange part of all this is that I do, of course, believe that way, on one level. Deep in the heart of me, I truly believe that people who think what we did in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay was justified, who think that the horrendous number of civilian casualties in Iraq are just 'part of the cost of doing business', are exactly the kind of people this blog exists to 'out'.

That there's no difference at all, none whatsoever, morally, between

an abuser in your family using a double standard to punish you for requesting from them, once, what they demand from you, day in, day out, 24/7/365, and

an entire nation using a double standard, with lies, smoke, and mirrors, to justify destroying Mesopotamia.

But dang. There I was, rebuking away like an Old Testament prophet, hair on end and smoke curling out of my ears [Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah! What do you mean I'm just making it worse? How can I MAKE it any worse?]

and ya know what?

In behaving that way, I became indistinguishable from those I rebuked.

To quote Charles M. Schulz,

"AAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGHHHH!!!"

***facepalm*** ***facepalm*** ***headdesk*** ***headdesk***

Lessons of the War:
[1] given the right mix of circumstances, anyone can blow their stack, even those who really should know better and have been trying to know better for years now;
[2] it really is counterproductive to return evil for evil;
[3] sometimes talent is a two-edged sword (it was a truly outstanding diatribe).
[4] affect is not necessarily your friend.
[5] Stormchild needs to stay away from minefields until she learns to keep her dern trap shut, even under extreme provocation, and
[6] when * you * make * a * mess, * it's **YOUR** responsibility * to * clean * it * up. [In this case, my responsibility].

This little humbling episode will probably be good for my soul, ultimately, but it bothers me greatly that I almost certainly did my 'cause' far more harm than good.

And yeah, I went back and admitted to God, everyone there, and myself that I had behaved exactly like a troll.

Because I had.

***facepalm*** ***facepalm*** ***headdesk*** ***headdesk***

Stormchild, over and out.