- America tortures and says it is wrong… Or is it? The hub bub over ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ reflects that legalistic shift between the spirit of a thing and the letter of a thing. The Atlantic has a stirring article on the topic that pokes at some of the recent statements by President Obama, Senator King and others. Somehow this 600 page behemoth of a report (that no senator or congressman has likely actually finished) allowed us to distance ourselves from…well, ourselves. During the earliest stages of the War on Terror (TM) we were an angry nation who dove headlong into the mess that is Afghanistan because we believed the source of the attacks were there and we were going to get the bad guys by any means necessary. Thirteen years later, out comes the white paint and the whole mess is cleaned away with a handful of symbolic ‘we went too far’ guys trotted out in front of the cameras to make sure we can have plausible deniability of a systemic problem. Nope. Not buying it. This is a systemic problem. We have a lot of those here, and the sooner we are willing to acknowledge and address instead of acknowledge and move on, we’ll be a lot better off.
- As the semester winds down I am surprised at how little some students actually care about learning. They want to have fun and get good grades but the whole learning stuff is beneath them. They know what they need to be successful and satisfied (there’s that word again) with their lives. Of course they do, because the TV tells them they do and their limited realities don’t require a whole lot more than what is already provided in 140 character or picture form. Sadly, this is a losing battle at times and a battle that can be won at others. Also sadly, I take every loss to heart.