So fucking tired

[nancylebov]

NPR is interviewing an anti-torture guy from the ACLU, which is fine. Someone calls in to say that terrorists treat people really badly, so why should we do anything differently? The anti-torture guy says, "Because we're Americans."

I have this werid belief in universal values. I would like Americans to not torture because they have some respect for people and for truth and for the long run. I want Americans to behave decently because it's worth doing, not because it's a special American thing.

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

"We're special because we're the only ones who believe in universal rights"

Not "the only ones". But substitute "at the forefront of the group" and it works for me; the US Constitution is now one of the oldest founding national documents, and certainly one of the first to establish broad rights (as opposed to, say, the Magna Carta, whose rights grants specifically excluded large segments of the populace).

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You're special because you were ahead of the field on granting rights two hundred odd years ago?

It does rather demand that someone ask what have you done for rights lately?

It's 2005. The "we're the land of the free and you all suck" rhetoric is getting really painful to hear. Living in other free countries with human rights all my life, I had no idea how much I'd bought that American exceptionalist rhetoric until the 2000 election, when it seemed to me so much worse that it had happened in America, "forefront of the group" of the free, than anywhere else. I was genuinely shocked to find out that counting votes wasn't something axiomatic for you the way it was in the democratic countries where I have lived. And now you're torturing people, and you want to fingerprint me if I visit, and give foreign visitors no civil rights at all?

Better than Syria, yes, but can you really claim to be "in the forefront of the group" of a world that includes Canada and Denmark?

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

You're special because you were ahead of the field on granting rights two hundred odd years ago?

No, I phrased what I said poorly.

What I meant was, having established the granting of rights across classes, and carried it on in several correct (if too long delayed) steps later, we ought to continue to bear ourselves according to those principles, and to extend them.

I'd like to think I work towards that comportment on a personal level, and wish we could, as a nation, establish that among our fundamental values.

Hope this is clearer.