Oh the Humanity

While it's still unclear whether this is a personal strength or weakness, I am a firm believer in individual humanity. I believe each and every one of us has moments of inescapable humanity, times when the mirror is held up before us and we must confront the truth of who we are. We all have honest hopes and dreams, loves and fears. We all hurt deeply at one time or another, and we hurt others as well. There are times when every human being breaks down to cry.

We live in a world and time where it is painfully easy to doubt the humanity of our fellow men. The airwaves are filthy with images of people acting anything but humanely to one another. The horror and atrocity we can inflict on others never fails to shock, even though we have literally the entirety of human history pointing to just that very truth. Generally, however, when we act our most inhuman, our most vicious, we're acting in groups, thinking group think, doing group deeds.

On an individual level though, we're all but variations on a single theme, and I've always believed we all face, too, the occasional dark night of the soul. These are the mirror moments I speak of, when we're forced to confront the truth of ourselves, the motivations behind our deeds, and the consequences of our actions in this life. I've always trusted in my fellow man's ability to feel deeply, to be human, and therefore to be able to return, even from the edge of the abyss.

Which is why, when I let my mind go down that road, I have such a hard time coming to grips with George Bush and his administration. I wonder often what it is that prevents them from seeing the larger implications of their actions. Surely they understand the numbers in their reports and studies correlate to actual, living, breathing, human beings. Surely it can't all be about money and power and nothing else. Surely there's more.

For a time, especially when it came to their disastrous foreign policy initiatives in Iraq and the wider Middle East, I kept coming up against the same brick wall: they simply have to believe they're doing the right thing, I told myself. I had to. It made no sense at all otherwise. There's no way a human being, blessed with a God-given soul and capacity for compassion, could continue to plow through the world, razing everything in his path if there were indeed these moments of true self-reflection. Is there?

As the misinformation used to justify the war becomes more readily apparent, though, and as more and more light is shed on the way this administration does, and has done business, the less I'm able to entertain this theory. The party line may well be that, deep in their souls, the President and his hawkish fellows know, without a doubt, that by "establishing a free and democratic Iraq" they will reshape the Middle East itself, and democracy will spread like kudzu across the region, leading to nothing but peaceful and prosperous tomorrows. But even they don't buy it.

Much was made of the fact that George Bush would be the first American president in history to hold an MBA degree, and as such he would bring a keen business sense to running the affairs of the country. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and the president's own dodgy past with the SEC notwithstanding, you can be sure the promise has been delivered upon in at least one respect.

They've brought to the Oval Office a critical corporate holdover; the quarterly mind-set. Every move made is geared towards maximum short-term profit, long-term consequences be damned. Concern for the effects of actions on the wider population, foreign or domestic, simply never enters into the calculations, pushed instead to the wayside in deference to the shareholder expecting quarterly earnings. For this administration, aside from Bush's base of support, the polls are their shareholders. Not the human beings behind those numbers, mind you; just the numbers themselves.

Even a cursory examination of the major actions associated with this presidency shows each inextricably linked to a political goal. Whatever must be said or done to accomplish an aim has been said and done. The fact that this administration hijacked the events of September 11th, 2001 to move ahead with a preplanned invasion and occupation of Iraq is only the most glaring example of a similar story which has played itself out again and again since Bush was installed into office by Supreme Court decision. So much for their vaunted disdain for the Judicial branch deciding matters of national debate.

Surely though, there are some nights when these men, and women, must wake suddenly in the deep of night, sweating and painfully aware. Surely they have moments when, say, confronted by images of the professional soldiers' mutilated corpses hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates, or the frightened faces of an ever growing collection of civilian hostages, or, though they would deny them, the images of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, they have to question whether or not the actions they've taken, and the motivation behind those actions, have been worth the cost. Surely they must. They're human after all. Even if they feel themselves unaccountable by the electorate, press, or congress, surely they realize accountability transcends all of that and they will, someday, have to answer for their deeds..