Oops! Our Bad

Trey Smith

At some point — and more than a decade would certainly qualify — the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can’t just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are. That’s particularly true when, as is the case in Afghanistan, the cause of the war is so vague as to be virtually unknowable. It’s woefully inadequate to reflexively dismiss every one of these incidents as the regrettable but meaningless by-product of our national prerogative. But to maintain mainstream credibility, that is exactly how one must speak of our national actions even in these most egregious cases. To suggest any moral culpability, or to argue that continuously killing children in a country we’re occupying is morally indefensible, is a self-marginalizing act, whereby one reveals oneself to be a shrill and unSerious critic, probably even a pacifist.
~ from US Attack Kills 5 Afghan Kids by Glenn Greenwald ~

On the heels of yesterday's 6 posts under the title of "The Question of Who," we have this from Greenwald. Though a different essay by a different author, it still fits within the same general theme.

Let's take this overall idea and drop it into everyday life. Let's say we're talking about an employee at a convenience store. Each night the employee is tasked with counting the till and doing an end-of-the day report. Other employees tasked with this same responsibility have no trouble with the job, but this one employee -- let's call him Bob -- frequently makes silly mistake after silly mistake.

The first few times Bob screws things up, his supervisor chalks it up to Bob's inexperience. The supervisor takes Bob aside to reexplain the procedure. Yet, as the weeks pass, Bob continues to make the same mistakes over and over again.

On the whole, Bob is a good employee. He works hard during his shift and is great with the customers. Each time he messes up his end-of-the-day report, he appears to be genuinely apologetic. He promises to correct the problem and yet, only a few days later, he makes the same old mistake again.

After a while, his supervisor begins to doubt Bob's sincerity. It's one thing to make innocent errors, but Bob doesn't seem all that interested in learning from his mistakes. In the end, it doesn't really matter if Bob is screwing up on purpose or he's simply being inattentive. The result is the same!

An attentive employee would work hard to rectify the problem. The supervisor doesn't believe that Bob cares that much to bother with trying to fix the issue. Even worse, Bob seems to treat apologies as some sort of magic wand. He seems to think that all he has to do is say how sorry he is and the slate is wiped clean.

This same scenario is how the US treats foreign civilian deaths in the so-called "War on Terror." We feign sorrow at our "mistakes," but we repeat them again and again and again. If we genuinely were sorry for the death and destruction we cause to the innocent, one would expect the frequency of these "mistakes" to diminish over time. But it seems that every few weeks, we are apologizing anew for the latest "goof up."

Bob can and probably will be fired. Too bad the same can't be said of our leaders!