First Day of Classes (Monday)

I'm listening to "Let your Glory Fall" by Vineyard right now. All the of the familiar Vineyard praise music is very nostalgic to me. Makes me feel at home both psychologically and spiritually. I'm sure it has something to do with having good parents.

My first class, Dissent in American Political Thought, turned out to be quite something. It was very full and by looking at the syllabus, I could tell that the class is going to be positively exciting.

We weren't able to go over a lot in the class, but my Professor did mention one shocking news development that led me to my own online confirmation.

An article in Harper's Magazine titled The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle by Scott Horton reports on three inmates who committed "suicide" at Guantanamo. Confirming the suicide deaths, the Commander of the base is reported as saying,

"used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

When the story of the suicides broke back in the U.S>,

Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Gordon, the Pentagon’s chief press officer, went still further, telling the Guardian’s David Rose, “These guys were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg.”

However the story was about to get both weirder and darker. The U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), released a report on the incident two years later which described the suicides has having taken place so:

"each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously...the NCIS report claims that an unnamed medical officer attempted to resuscitate one of the men, and, in attempting to pry open his jaw, broke his teeth

To top it off, "at least two of the prisoners also had cloth masks affixed to their faces, presumably to prevent the expulsion of the rags from their mouths". The total absurdity of the report is more fully appreciated in reading the article. The deaths of the three men, terrorist or not, were probably tortured and then murdered in violation of innumerable laws both legal, moral and spiritual.

The last two paragraphs are chilling.

Nearly 200 men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. In June 2009, six months after Barack Obama took office, one of them, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni named Muhammed Abdallah Salih, was found dead in his cell. The exact circumstances of his death, like those of the deaths of the three men from Alpha Block, remain uncertain. Those charged with accounting for what happened—the prison command, the civilian and military investigative agencies, the Justice Department, and ultimately the attorney general himself—all face a choice between the rule of law and the expedience of political silence. Thus far, their choice has been unanimous.

Not everyone who is involved in this matter views it from a political perspective, of course. General Al-Zahrani grieves for his son, but at the end of a lengthy interview he paused and his thoughts turned elsewhere. “The truth is what matters,” he said. “They practiced every form of torture on my son and on many others as well. What was the result? What facts did they find? They found nothing. They learned nothing. They accomplished nothing.”

I posted the link on my facebook too. Acts like these both sicken me and dishearten me. It is hard for me to accept the depravity people will sink to for their beliefs, for their passion (misguided or not). To see the full extent of covering up and lying that has gone on, says something about our pride--that even though we make ourselves to be great and strong, we are still a slave to shame. We fear shame and the result of shame--dejection and isolation. It is because of acts like this that I cannot bear to actively support and participate in our government. I feel that we Americans have made government our Idol.

Government has become something which can save and protect us from people we fear (when we should fear no one but our God). Government has become something that can save us from the Redcoats, Slavery, Nazis, Communist and Terrorists. For Conservatives, a Government controlled by them will save us from Liberals. For Democrats, a government controlled by them will save us from Republicans. Government will feed the poor, will be a hand of justice, deliver our mail, make us rich, and protect us at night. Christians have endorsed this false idol. One very recent example of this support can be seen in how the "sights" on high powered rifles used by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are inscribed with condensed citations of verses such as 2 Corinthians 4:6 and John 8:12. What twisted mysticism is it that we Christians have the audacity to attach God's truth to tools that aid in the killing of God's children.

I don't like labels, because they come with connotations and implications that I'm not even fully aware of let alone endorse. But it is because Americans, including Christian Americans, have bought into the Government Idol that we have failed to see, envision and bring about creative solutions for the problems in our world. All creative solutions that I have so far involve at the very least the rejection of this Idol and a return to a very basic trust in God. Going back to what I said about labels, the idea of rejecting such an idol is rooted (some argue) in God's theocracy before King Saul --or more modern--in anarchist thought cultivated by Anabaptists, Tolstoy and Dorothy Day. They do not wage war against government but merely passively resist when cruelty is required of them (such as the draft) and otherwise ignore it. They come up with solutions to violence and poverty without ever venturing into legal and political ground. Such creative ideas still retain their originality because full trust in God contains eternal promise and possibility.

So, from this one class I've learned a lot and clarified a lot for myself (in just writing this out).

Question for tonight:
If our government is treated as an Idol, how appropriate is it for us to ask God to bless it?
Might it be better for us to repeat the 1st Commandment and to ask for mercy, forgiveness and grace, for guidance and humility, in our constant search for a better way to choose our actions as an individual, a family, a community, a nation, a world?