Madness

My friend Veronica told me about a TV show she watched. They interviewed a woman in Bangladesh that worked in a sweat shop for 17 cents and hour. She worked 12 hour days and still did not earn enough to feed her children anything but lentils. They brought her to the United States and took her to WalMart or KMart or wherever it is they sell the clothing she makes. One pair of pants sells for more than a month’s wages. And then they interviewed a woman shopping at the store, she had two pairs of the jeans the Bangladeshi woman sews in her basket. They asked if she would pay a little more for her jeans so that this woman could eat chicken instead of lentils. The American woman went off on a long rif about her car payment and her house payment and all the money she owed. She justified, in front of us all, her need to purchase her clothing, to live her life, at the expense of the woman standing in front of her. She publically stated she was willing to cloth herself in the blood and sweat of another human. She was willing to wear, literally, another woman's suffering.

Yesterday, I listened to Laura Flanders interview Joseph Margulies discussing the legal situation at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. I read the piece in Time Magazine last week about Detainee 063. Margulies quoted the Time article and I was struck by the what I had missed. The missing is my own denial. It is self protection that keeps madness at bay. It is my own justification for living in a state that can use and abuse others, around the globe, in our own drive and need for affluence.

Part of the torture and questioning process at Guantanamo is a focused effort to dehumanize the detainees. Just using the word, detainee, is part of the process of dehumanizing. We never call the captive men by name. We treat them like dogs or cattle or worse. And don't doubt, it is us that is doing this. A Republican Senator justifies the centers by saying they are in a lovely spot that could be a resort: a lovely resort with chains on the floor and walls where people are taken to the extremes of physical pain to break them. We are willing to hid our torture and pretend that we are holding our detainees in affluence as well. And it is us, we Americans, our military, who is torturing captive men every single day. In our name, your name, my name, this is happening.

And of course we dehumanize ourselves in the process. We become people without names. We are the captors and the torturers. We see the worst of what it means to be human come out in ourselves, in our ability to deny humanness to another so that we may purchase cheap jeans and cheap oil.

Who are we? Why are we not screaming at the top of our voices for this madness to stop?