Josh Marshall on Point

As I'd mentioned, I've been having a hard time getting my head around the Abu Ghraib abuses, and the distasteful realization that there's going to be much, much more, most of it even more reprehensible than what we've already seen. I've turned inward, looking for a way to express what I'm feeling, but I'm not quite there yet. It's having a much wider ripple effect on my world view.

But, today Josh Marshall has a post that comes very close to summing up at least part of what I and so many others are feeling lately(emphasis added):

I haven't been able to read much news in the last thirty-six hours, or at least not as much as usual. So I'm still catching up with the details of today. But when I try to write about this, I have to confess that the words, metaphorically at least, get stuck in my throat.

For myself, it's not so much the horror of what we're seeing itself. Certainly, history is littered with far greater outrages. But how exactly did we find ourselves on the doling out end of this stuff? Morally, how did it happen? And in simply pragmatic terms, since this was a grand gambit for hearts and minds in a region awash in anti-Americanism and autocracy, how exactly did we get here? More than anything, a self-inflicted wound of this magnitude just leaves you speechless.

This is not America. I find myself saying it, out loud, in many different contexts, so often these past few years. What have these bastards done? What have they wrought, and how long and bloody and far reaching will the consequences be. Never mind the fact that, in my eyes, there is no acceptable or sufficient way for me to explain any of this to my children. Suffice to say, the television has not been tuned to the news in our house for some time now.

I've consciously unplugged, for my own good, but I've been wrestling with that as well...when you avert your eyes from horror, and though you could scream but do not, do you become complicit in the wreckage it rears?