Weightlessness

Right now, at this moment as I reflect, both houses of the US congress are debating the torture bill. No one knows the fate of this legislation. We, all together as a nation, are suspended in midair. Which direction will we go - continuing to soar up to new, greater levels of civilization or falling back down to baser forms of government to await some future day, some future nation which will rise higher than we have?

I feel this is a defining moment for Americans of the US. Will we, collectively, choose to go backwards? This is the choice - legalizing forms of torture and imprisonment without redress - which would take us to the year 1215CE. Maybe this is truly what is desired by our government rulers, for this is what they will become. If this legislation passes, democracy would be abolished in our nation at a stroke.

If we abandon it, democracy will still flourish in other countries. I have faith that reason and enlightenment will continue even if our form of government changes. It's not the end of the world. It's just the end of our identity as the good guys. We wouldn't be able to hold our heads proudly as the finest defenders of freedom on the planet. We couldn't go on feeling like the humanitarian moderate promoters of the rights of the minority and the welfare of the disenfranchised. We'd never be able to wear the white hats again.

Perhaps it would be for the best if we came down from our high horse and joined the ranks of other nations, inhabiting shades of gray when it comes to citizen's rights and freedoms. We would be less a superpower and more of a bloated irrelevant double-talking group of people trying to recapture past glory. Maybe the world would hate us less but of course, they would also listen to us less, deal with us less, trade with us less, talk with us less.

But imagine if the torture bill is not passed - either through some procedural manuvering or is defeated. Our flight will continue at the same altitude we had reached when the debate started this morning. Because the question, the issue, of how to treat 'enemy combatants' will still continue. The debate will go on. We will not begin to soar upward again until we can regain the lofty air which surrounded us before we endorsed preemptive war against our enemies. We will struggle on to contain the backdraft of fear which has overtaken so many of us and, like a sheering gale, threaten to drive us down, back through ages, of freedoms won from tyrannical rulers.

So as we float, weightless, we hang in doubt whether we plunge down into historic ages past or struggle on to regain heights we saw too briefly and strive to exceed them, into the light of peace.