how we treat the weakest among us

It is nothing new that some humans glory in power over others. When Jesus was speaking in what is called The Sermon on the Mount, he said how you treat the weakest is how you treat me. There are several ways you can take that statement, but one is that he saw the connection between us all as souls united beyond the physical to one big organism.

Have you ever seen a quaking aspen grove? It looks like it's a lot of separate trees; but in reality, it's one organism under the ground. The trees come up from that same root structure. If humans recognized this about ourselves, we'd treat 'others' differently, if for no other reason than simple selfishness.

Instead, we see it as them against us. This damages our ability to deal with any kind of crisis when it's constantly a bad guys against good guys and gotchas are the only way to win. John McCain and Sarah Palin have been taking this to the nth degree, but it's been here in many forms for a long time.

Do anything to win and then say we will all work together? How exactly does that work when you have done all you can to character assassinate the 'other'?

On a deeper, even more poisonous level, it impacts how we see something like torture. Some people, even those who claim to be most religious, feel torture is not only all right, but approve of it: America the Global Pioneer of Torture. Does this thinking come out of shows like 24 that glorify torture as how the good guys win?

Countless times I have heard the reasoning that torture is okay because what if your loved one was kidnapped and a bad guy had them and you could get the bad guy and torture him to save your loved one, then you'd do it-- which translates into justifying government torture as a valid tactic. That example is so full of shit (pardon my French) that I can't repeat it without some cursing.

That example is not where torture has been happening. We are not talking about one person doing it but about a government policy, fishing expeditions where Bush either gave or allowed to be given the orders to do it.

Who have been the victims of torture? Many were released later as mistakes. Some were combatants caught up in a net and forced to confess to a crime that they may not have even known what it was but would say anything to finally get relief. There were those who, under torture, told us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and here's where they are-- except they were not there. Torture probably led to some of those orange alerts for planned terrorist attacks that were never planned but someone had to say something to stop the pain.

Get it! Torture does not work except in movies! Torture is sadistic and it's the bad guys who do it or should be. Torture is about taking advantage of the weak and brutalizing someone because you can. It's ordering someone to do that to another human being thereby dehumanizing both. It's about some feeling empowered because they can order such done. It has also probably made trials in any real court of law impossible because of the abuse of what has been a civilizing set of rules and for what?

When McCain first ran for president, he was against torture. He knew very well that it doesn't work from first hand experience. It seems that was before he saw the polls and began his hedge. Might not be okay for the military to torture but might be okay for the CIA (so turn over prisoners to the CIA?). Did he lose his honorable stance in order to make points with a key voting block? In this country, especially in the South, it's a big deal to be pro-torture, a winning issue: Southern Evangelicals and Torture.

The irony is those who think this way often call themselves Christian while they are condoning torture as a perfectly valid approach to fighting terrorists who also torture. Christians? As in following who? "Whatever you do until the least of these, you do unto me." Matthew 25:40

Barack Obama's unequivocal statement on torture from October 4, 2007:

"The secret authorization of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security. We must do whatever it takes to track down and capture or kill terrorists, but torture is not a part of the answer - it is a fundamental part of the problem with this administration’s approach. Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them. Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America’s standing in the world, not how you strengthen it. It’s time to tell the world that America rejects torture without exception or equivocation. It’s time to stop telling the American people one thing in public while doing something else in the shadows. No more secret authorization of methods like simulated drowning. When I am president America will once again be the country that stands up to these deplorable tactics. When I am president we won’t work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution, we will be straight with the American people and true to our values."

So where do you stand? There is a choice to make. Who are we as a people?From Farm Boss, for anyone interested in more information on quaking aspen groves: biogeography