President Obama’s Synopsis of How America Responds to Evil Left Out the Psychologically Most Important Point — Our Indiscriminate Retaliations Create More of the Same

© 2013 Peter Free

 

17 April 2013

 

 

The President has mastered the art of evading the spiritual point — while surreptitiously acting directly against it

 

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon double IED bombings, President Obama eloquently said:

 

 

[T]he American people refuse to be terrorized. Because what the world saw yesterday in the aftermath of the explosions were stories of heroism and kindness, and generosity and love:

 

Exhausted runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood, and those who stayed to tend to the wounded, some tearing off their own clothes to make tourniquets.

 

The first responders who ran into the chaos to save lives.

 

The men and women who are still treating the wounded at some of the best hospitals in the world, and the medical students who hurried to help, saying ‘When we heard, we all came in.’

 

The priests who opened their churches and ministered to the hurt and the fearful. And the good people of Boston who opened their homes to the victims of this attack and those shaken by it.

 

So if you want to know who we are, what America is, how we respond to evil -- that’s it. Selflessly. Compassionately. Unafraid.

 

© 2013 Barack Obama via Georgetown/On Faith, Obama on marathon bombing: Americans respond to evil ‘selflessly, compassionately, unafraid', Washington Post (16 April 2013) (paragraph split and reformatted)

 

That is true and admirable.

 

Insofar as it goes.

 

 

The spiritual point looms larger and darker

 

Almost all of us miss that aspect, thanks our shared unwillingness to recognize that our own anti-terrorist violence models the same — even in people who are not associated with any of the many prongs of that effort.

 

 

America’s anti-terrorist retaliations kill innocents in a similarly uncaring way

 

The Grand American Hypocrisy is this:

 

 

After 9/11, the United States killed (at least) tens of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And today, America’s drone strikes continue to kill a sizeable proportion of innocents equally indiscriminately.

 

Both of these evils are due to:

 

fear — which the President says we don’t have

 

and

 

conveniently compartmentalized compassion — which terminates at our shores and with people “like us”

 

That’s what I mean by missing the spiritual point.

 

 

Glenn Greenwald said much the same thing, yesterday

 

Glenn Greenwald put the moral situation well:

 

 

[O]ne wishes that the empathy for victims and outrage over the ending of innocent human life that instantly arises when the US is targeted by this sort of violence would at least translate into similar concern when the US is perpetrating it, as it so often does . . . .

 

[W]hatever rage you're feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that's the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries.

 

Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday's victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs.

 

It's natural that it won't be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate.

 

© 2013 Glenn Greenwald, The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions, The Guardian (16 April 2013) (paragraph split)

 

American terrorism in the name of anti-terrorism is just as evil as what happened in Boston, no matter who did it.

 

 

When America drone strikes too frequently unimplicated men of military age — and then follows with another strike, when first responders rush to aid the victims —

 

You have Evil.

 

Yet, our eloquently hypocritical President does this kind of thing on a regular basis, with virtually no opposition from the American public.

 

For some reason, in America’s perverse morality, it is not okay for terrorists (from abroad or from our own soil) to blow Americans up.  But it is okay for Americans to shoot, bomb, missilize and dismember whomever inconveniently occupies the geographic target zones of our wrath.

 

 

The moral? — Emulating our enemies makes us identical to them

 

The United States’ only claim to greatness has always been its professed tendency toward peace and equal rights for all.  Presumably this package includes the basic right to live and avoid dismemberment.

 

However, in these days of unreasoning anti-terrorist fear, we have indulged imprecisely targeted violence, as well as an assault on American liberties, both of which violate our historically held principles.  It may be that the spiritual sign posts envisioned in the Promised Land fade away under the complacence-making influence of material wealth and comfort.

 

That said — the spiritual rule is to take another’s suffering into oneself and not to pass it on.

 

The best way to honor the suffering associated with the bombings at the 15 April 2013 Boston Marathon — or any other terrorist and terrorist-like event — is not to foist it on equally undeserving others.