Half Of Us Are Morally Repugnant.

 I have been told to start writing these again, so here we go.

In the last couple of weeks there have been a couple of unpleasant things in the news, death and torture. 

There has been the story of two black men killed by the police with the judicial system not even bringing them to a trial to determine if they had done anything wrong.  With a video of one of the men being killed while pleading for his life this is outrageous, or it should be.

The other story is the release of a report on the torture of "detainees" by parts of the USA military/industrial complex. I say military/industrial because some of the "interrogators" were actually private contractors.  The findings of the report were that the USA tortured people in sites around the world with an array of techniques from rape to mock executions to simply inflicting pain.

There will be no official, legal consequences of these abhorrent actions.  Why?  Because the government is responsible and these actions have been taken by organizations that are supposed to be for our safety. The idea is that for our own safety sometimes extreme actions are required, and nasty things happen.

While these actions are deplorable my interest is more in the reaction of the general public.  While there are certainly many, many people who are appalled by these events not even remotely close to everyone is.  I find this shocking.  I'm not shocked that government institutions will do evil things, the record is too extensive and clear.  I am shocked that on the most basic of moral questions, whether it is OK or not to kill and torture prisoners, huge quantities of Americans fail to get the right answer.

This disgusting truth is made even worse by the numbers.  A quarter of Americans are satisfied or pleased that not one of the policeman who strangled an unarmed man to death has been charged with a crime.  Only one quarter of Americans believe torture is never justified.

Talk to a few people who hold these beliefs and the reasons become sadly too easy to understand.  The police and the military are respected organizations with authority. These organizations are there to keep us safe.  There is widespread fear of a group of people, and importantly these people are "not us" and this fear justifies, as far as I can tell, anything.

A policeman said that his job was to "go home at night," that he had to treat "everyone as a threat" and that if you "don't comply you take your chances."  Because the police are scared if you don't do whatever they say when they say it then anything they do, up to and including killing you, is justified.  Of course this fear is directed towards the "other", and this "other" is black men, those aged between 15-19 are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by the police than white men of the same age.

At least judicially this default position, and justification, is accepted.  Police killed 2,718 people between 2004-2011 and only 41 policemen were even charged, 1.5%.  As a point of reference UK police killed nine people during the same period.  In the USA if the police kill you it was your fault.  In the UK they don't kill you.

The "other" with torture are called terrorists.  It doesn't matter that they have not been charged, or convicted, or sentenced in a court to determine whether they are actually terrorists  It doesn't matter that if they did the same to us we would be horrified.  The US authority has picked them up and they are foreign and Muslim, so anything is acceptable because those people are scary.

I learned this week that half of the people around me are morally repugnant because they are cowards.