we are all diminished

The Kill Team | Rolling Stone Politics:

What you'll see when you click on that link will either make you angry, sad or (if you're someone who's missing a critical puzzle piece shaped like Human Decency) fill you with a sense of satiation. An eye for an eye, and all that.

But years from now, perhaps many years, when someone has to write about the United States and how we went from being a shining light on a hill to being a gutter filled with blood and craziness, the story of our involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan (and our silence and inaction in Africa) will condemn us.

War is bad. It's almost banal to say it that way. It has become cliche. And we, trying to be hip, worldly or knowing of the very manly way the world works resort to cliche a lot. We say, war is hell; we invoke passive voice and say bad things are done; we say that no one can ever know what it's like.

Perhaps all of this is true.

But I know in my heart that I never want to know what it's like to look at a severed head, or exploded guts, or the vacant milky eyes of a dead teenager and not feel something like repulsion for the act - as well as the people who committed it.

We should shun these men, the system, and the war that created the context for their murder.