Can You Handle the Truth

A personal viewpoint on the impact of morally corrupt leadership on the soul of America

Anger is, I’m aware, an unhealthy emotion to sustain. But still, for more than a half century I’ve nurtured a slow-smoldering anger directed at the peoples of Germany; an animosity that flares up when I’m confronted with reminders of horrors committed by that nation in the thirties and forties.

When I catch a fragment of WWII footage on the History Channel, notice a copy of the Diary of Anne Frank on a book store shelf, or see again those stark, surreal, sepia tone images of concentration camp atrocities, I’m incensed. Scenes of skeletal corpses, stripped of clothing and humanity, being shoveled into open mass graves never lose their impact. So, perhaps unfairly, I’ve reserved contempt for those people who let it happen.

Should Germans of that era, most of whom are deceased, bear the sins of the insanity that gripped their nation in the last century? We were misled, they say, victims swept up by powerful forces, driven by a madman. But, in the end, citizens of that nation underwrote unspeakable barbarity, all the rest is merely babbling.  German citizens are – or were - collectively responsible for permitting a single twisted individual to lead them and the world into an inferno. They participated; Hitler could not have led Germany into a hellish bloodletting if the people had not followed.

Past as prelude, I wonder. Now, sixty years after the bloodbath of WWII, fifty years after returning from Korea, I see massive guided missile strikes level cities, indiscriminately kill and maim thousands of defenseless civilians. “Shock and awe” our leaders brag. Yes, it’s a shock to see children with limbs blown off. And I’m in awe of their arrogance. Worse though, are scenes of barbaric torture, prisoners lying in pools of blood, or corpses of others beaten to death by Americans. Acts of obscene brutality carried out in my name.

Today another strutting, leader – a man who claims God’s guidance – has taken a nation into an unjust war, But this time it’s my country, and I am complicit. It is my country committing atrocities, and I share the shame, the burden of guilt with you – and you – and every American. We were misled our leaders said. Oh no, hell no, it was you and I who were misled – who, more accurately, allowed ourselves to be misled – “they,” the leaders, knew precisely where they were taking America. We allowed this leader to launch an unprovoked, preemptive war on a nation that had nothing at all to do with 9/11 and posed no threat at all to you and I. We let our government act with contempt for international law – exactly as the leader of the German people did in the last century.

Only now, in 2004, while America is still a democracy, the power to stop the insanity before it consumes us is in your hands, and mine. If we allow it to continue, you and I, and all Americans will not be able to say it was our leaders who failed – the failure will be ours.  The guilt will be ours. The legacy of shame will be ours.

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