what matters more than this?

I am an enemy combatant.

Right now is a tipping point. It is one of those Moments in history that will, God willing, be in textbooks someday, if there remain textbooks, as a great marker of the dimming and crumbling of our age. It will be remembered with horror, if not by our neighbor's children, by their children, and its echoes have already shaken the globe.

It is the moment when the world's only superpower declared to the world, without hedging or subterfuge or shame, that they approve of the torture of other human beings as a standard practice; that they are not bound by international law; that, once and for all, no begging or decency or bargaining will sway them, and that the only ones left to stand against them are those without the immediate power to do anything about it. It is the moment that the supposed Great Hope Of Democracy gave up on pretending that things were all right and said, right out, in clear words, that it would not be morally bound to treat others as human beings, and that no-one would define their others but themselves; the moment that the world knew of secret prisons and manual-approved tortures and the suspension of fair or represented trial perpetrated by those who promised to protect these things, and that those with the power to end it shrugged, and smirked, and said try and stop me.
It is the day the United States shod itself in iron, once and for all and without sugarcoating, and deemed itself proud to do so.
It is the midnight when the Shining City on the Hill let its lights go out, and all that was heard in the dark was the cocking of many guns.


Some of us saw it coming, yes. We saw the clouds on the horizon, and were roundly mocked for it. We called out at staged photo-ops and Potemkin villages. We cried out at laws rescinding basic civil rights that would surely, surely be suspended as soon as the need was gone. We called out when protestors were called terrorists on Senate floors, when dissenters were called traitors and enemies of the state, when the wretched specters of our past were hauled out, spit-shined, and called glorious victories, from the camps on our Pacific coasts to the slaughterhouses on that ocean's other side. We cried out when our neighbors disappeared, only to turn up nameless and orange-clad in Cuba. We called out at the abandonment of the International Criminal Court, at the laying waste of the authority of the U.N., the Kyoto Protocols, the Geneva Conventions, the Army Manual, the Bible, the Qur'an, the United States Constitution, the basic human conscience, bit by bit by bit. No more checks. No more balances. No more rules but because we can.
It was a slow erosion, and every little bit counted, but no-one wanted to call those bits what they were--our high ground, our morality, our decency, our hope. Our ability to cooperate went first in a storm of arrogance and wrath, but then our ability to see what we were doing went, and our ability to discern lies from fictions, and then our ability to see each other as real humans and real families, and then all of our perspective on mercy and law.

The smoking gun was, indeed, a mushroom cloud. It's just that that cloud was half a century ago, and those who saw forward were called fools and maniacs.
We did not learn from the Philippine War, where butchers blamed their crimes on their victims and the newspapers ate it up, where allies who'd given their lives alongside our own soldiers were turned on and killed because they were too brown to run their own homeland.
We did not learn from the senseless waste of a generation's youth in World War One's trenches.
We did not learn from any of it. Vietnam, Iran-Contra, the rise of the fascists, the turning over and over of People's Revolutions that ended up starving their people and grinding them down, dictators beheading dictators, coups begetting coups, many on our dime. We did not learn because neither had our ancestors learned from the Sicilian Expedition, from Poike Ditch, from Qin Shih Huang Di. We refused to learn from torn-out Aztec hearts and the charred mouths of murdered Sufis, and we have been infected with this thing, this basic original sin of humankind:

Separation. Solipsism. The old lie that this is how it must be, that we are alone, that a balance tipped means everyone's death, and that even that doesn't matter, because first comes Me. The vile and noisome Father of Lies, that Us and Them is the way of things, and Them needs to be beaten to death and ground into the dust before Us can thrive.

Now is that great lie's ultimate moment: the moment when power, given every chance to know itself and its shortcomings, to rise to its better self, to atone, to evolve, to nurture the garden of human greatness, looks that hope in the eyes and says, smugly, no.

Weeping will not fix it.
Nor will screaming.
It is time, you who are wrapped in your mantle, to stand up and settle the responsibility of being a human being on your shoulders, because right now, nothing matters more than this: that those with the most power, with the power to draw scars across a world or to deliver into birth its decent future, with the power to declare you a person or not, have declared that you are not, and that nothing is more important than their power, not even their longevity, not even their profit, any more.
It has happened before, on smaller scales, with smaller but no less heartbreaking betrayals.

Stand with me and dedicate your beating heart, your shaking hands, your bones and tongue and pride and blood and moving feet, your very future, to oppose this--to call our brothers and sisters back to remembering themselves, remembering each other. Throw yourself with me against the wheel. The machines of hate and control and exploitation and, yes, fascism, will leave none of us un-ground, in a macrocosm of that basic street rule, that nobody who enters a knife-fight leaves uncut.
It is worth everything we have to keep this monster from growing any further, because, in the end, it will be worth everything everyone else has if we do not. If we do not stand together now, there will be nothing to stand on. No-one is safe, any more. No-one is safe and no-one is free until we topple this abomination and expose its innards to history, so that our children and our children's children may see it for what it was, and shudder, and set their hands to never allowing it again.

It is already grinding you. At least use its workings against it, until it is no more. We owe it to each other, and to the unborn.

This is a moment that echoes in history, that will be in whatever books there will be. How do you want to be remembered, in that story? Who will you tell your children you stood with, and what will you tell them you stood for?