Why are we shocked?

I reads this today in World Magazine, and it resonated with what I was thinking all along about the prisoner abuse in Iraq.

“We desperately want to say that what these Americans have done isn’t typical of America � that it is an aberration, a terrible exception to what we know about our country. We want to argue that the grisly photos are surreal and unrelated to the people we know. Our problem is that here too we aren’t quite sure of our ground… Some chickens are coming home to roost. They are chickens we have been hatching for a generation and more… We’ve been building a culture that asserts its right to goof around playfully with the kinds of things that, when seen now in the context of Iraqui jails, horrify us. The violence, sexual slavery, the domination, the bizarre � all these are the stock in trade of America’s music industry, of cable TV, of video stores, of the internet, and of newsstands in grocery stores. We like to kid ourselves into thinking that we are just playing games with all this stuff. But then when a few young but morally rudderless Americans are transported halfway across the world, made to think they are on the side of virtue, and asked suddenly to act responsibly, we’re surprised that they can’t…. These young people are a product of their culture….There is room to criticize Mr. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. But they are not primarily responsible for the coarsening of a culture that took place for a generation or more leading up to the unveiling of such wicked acts. Listen carefully just now. It’s a bit too easy to charge all this to the account of those immediately responsible for the policies of the Iraq war. It’s more to the point right now to remember who has been opening the doors to this cultural poison in the first place.”

� Joel Belz, Publisher, World Magazine, May 22, 2004