Obama and his views regarding torture...

I don't pretend to know what it's like to be President of the United States. But I do understand one thing. I understand that idealism has a tendency to fade away when you're faced with facts. Ugly facts. Ideally we'd like to have no hate and no wars and no torture. But that is not the world we live in. When a man becomes president, no matter how peaceful and loving he is, a group of people who are long-time insiders sit with him and tell him things you and I cannot begin to conceive of. Things we weren't meant to hear and never will. There's a very good reason people look like hell when they're done with their 4 years as president. (Except for Bush cuz he's an idiot and he probably didn't even understand half of what was being said to him anyway.) The things the president is told behind closed doors change his outlook, change how he proceeds. We don't always know why these decisions are made. If we believe that all and all Obama is a good man with only the best of intentions for our future and our world, then we must also have faith that if he makes unpopular decisions there are reasons behind those decisions that perhaps we cannot ever fully understand.

As to the torture itself. People have been employing torture throughout the millennia. People have also been waging war for a variety of incredibly bad reasons throughout history as well. Torture is a part of war. If there is war, there will be torture. It is just a fact. Not a pleasant one, but nonetheless, it exists. It comes right out of the ugliness of war. Do people stop torturing to "get intelligence" and then make a sick game of it? Yes. They do that more than not. But this is where I think Obama is exercising a kind of fairness that is hard to explain. If you create a monster and set it loose on the world, do you blame the monster? I think he's chosen not to blame the monsters. Perhaps he's waiting to get at the creators. Perhaps he wants to eradicate war because with that eradication he understands torture will also be put to rest. I'm not sure what his thinking is. I do feel that he will make unpopular and seemingly incomprehensible decisions based on exactly this sort of thought process. We must wait and see where he is going and not jump to conclusions.

Monique

Juicy pear;
Sweet and ripe for picking
Succulent skin to devour.
The vulchers -
who don’t eat fruit -
come at your flesh like
fresh kill,
raw carnage
savage feast
you, their tasty
desert dish
satisfy their
buzzard bloody beaks…
brimming full of your innocence and light.
they fly
ever upward to their perches
content in their bellies
empty in their souls, as their eyes;
half closed in sleep,
already search out the
next delicacy.