Where's the Outrage?

A friend posted about the anti-war protests last week - and included a question from one protester who noted that so few people bothered to march against the war and wondered where the outrage is...so I responded:

The outrage has gone out of me like so much cold water from a bathtub.

The 2004 election ensured that we would continue this war to the end of the Bush presidency and into the next administration. Reid and Pelosi have accepted the argument that the Democrats win by losing votes on Iraq. They continue to fund the war, convinced that they will be accused of not supporting the troops if they cut off funds. Even Carl Levin was afraid to go that far.

John Edwards called on Congress to send Bush the same bill every time, but they caved and gave him a bill without a timetable for withdrawal. Even after the 2006 election, there is insufficient wisdom or courage (or both) to take control of the situation.

There is no longer any outrage here -- just exasperation, sorrow, and resignation.

We are reduced to empty hopes that incompetents without a plan or sufficient resources can nonetheless succeed. We are left with the selfish comfort that comes from knowing it is not my son or daughter whose life has been spent with so little care, with so little purpose, and then used to justify further bloodshed in their honor.

We are called by our hearts to grieve, and by our heads to move on - to lower our expectations.

We are past outrage and saving our strength for some future day when this dark cloud has passed over, and America regains her consciousness.

So much has been lost. Is this what 9/11 has meant for us? A departure from reason and decency? A descent into hopelessness and belligerence?

We live in an America that elected a buffoon and empowered him to wreck our national security, to bankrupt our treasury, and to trash our national image in the eyes of decent men and women of the world.

We live in an America that has surrendered its hard-won rights and liberties to protect against a terrorist attack, and that has ignored or embraced the use of torture and the abuse of persons held in our custody.

We live in an America that has taken its military from the ranks of the poor, and then borrowed from China to give tax breaks to the rich.

We live in an America that has denied 50 million Americans the most basic security of health care coverage, and worries more about the cost of "socialized medicine" than about the cost of lives ruined by bankruptcy and untreated illnesses.

We can lecture Turkey on the Armenian genocide of 1915, but will do nothing to save Darfur in 2007.

We condemn Islam for the acts of suicide bombers, and then appoint men to Attorney General who think waterboarding may be an acceptable way to interrogate a prisoner.

For the past seven years, we have slipped into a shameful and degraded condition. Of course it is outrageous, but what will we do?

I am sending John Edwards all my money and doing what I can to get the man elected. And in January 2009, we will move to fix what has been broken in these terrible years under this most terrible president.

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