What we can get used to

It's depressing and scary to consider what humans can come to know as "normal" and "right."

I watched the film Munich this weekend, and I'm just finishing up Ishmael Beah's amazing and frightening book, A Long Way Gone, about being a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, and then I read Sy Hersh's latest New Yorker report on Abu Ghraib. It makes one fear for the future in a world where individuals can so easily discard standards of morality, ethics, law, family and community, and live in a nightmare of perverse and violent "righteousness".

I feel lucky to live where I do, and how I do. I know there are people who live on my street who live in fear and desperation, and whose idea of a civil society is far different than my own. I know there are people who despise what our country stands for (and I don't mean that they hate freedom, I mean they hate wasteful, boastful, arrogant bullies). I know there are religious zealots who feel they are living and acting inside a higher order. I know this and it threatens to paralyze me, when it should be motivation to do more to make sure that our country and community are on the right path.