In vino veritas...

Last night, my husband and I went out to a sports bar, looking to get out of the house and maybe watch some of the Olympics away from the kids. Trying to watch ice dancing when you can't hear the music -- because, after all, no self-respecting sports bar is actually going to be blaring "Carmen" from their television speakers -- is rather an exercise in futility, although it was interesting to watch the skating without the music.

I am a cheap drunk. There is a line from the junior show (a musical staged by the junior class every year) that played my first year at Wellesley, "You can't change a Wellesley woman's mind with just one drink!" which applies to me: it takes only two. Over my second rum and coke, I said something which has been terrifying me lately, and which I do not know what to do with. Something which I have been afraid to admit to anyone.

I am desperately afraid I have become a "good German." You remember them? The ones who stood by while the Nazis took power? The Nazis did not begin with concentration camps and ovens -- they started much much smaller, with the Nuremburg laws of 1933, and even before that. And all along the way were people who stood by, who did nothing.

It has become popular in some circles to equate the current Administration with the Nazis. I am not doing that here. But there is a great many things which we as a country are doing which are horrific and which undermine all that we once stood for.

We have accepted torture -- in fact, if not in words -- as a legitimate exercise of state power. (Oh, sorry, that should be "aggressive interrogation techniques.") We throw people in prison with minimal due process, on the grounds that they are "enemy combatants" -- even citizens. (Just ask Jose Padilla -- who was held for four years before being charged with criminal charges -- about the sixth amendment's guarantees of a "public and speedy trial.") We have a President who admits to illegal wiretapping, and claims that he is exempt even from legal requirements so favorable to the executive that since 1979 (the first year FISA was in effect) only 4 of over 18,000 requests for warrants have been rejected (all in 2003, in which 1,723 were approved). Opposition to the war is portrayed as being at best anti-patriotic at best and treasonous at worst. Desire to get to the truth of what is happening at places like Abu Ghrayub, or in Fallujah, where we have been so eager to "win" that we use weapons that skirt the line between chemical and non-chemical weapons (weapons we would decry as illegal and immoral were they being used against our own soldiers) is "undermining the troops."

And so on.

And I don't know what to do. I go about my everyday life. I watch what goes on, write the occasional letter to my congressional representative or senator (which gets acknowledged) or to the editor (which doesn't). I don't talk politics much with people except online (see my post about my family). In that last, I am cowardly and I recognize it.

And it makes me wonder, how many of those "good Germans" were simply people who were appalled but helpless? What can one person do in the face of institutional evil?