Governments and room-temperature IQs

There is an article in today’s Anchorage Daily News that makes me both sad and angry. There are 3,800 soldiers returning to Fairbanks from Iraq – 26 of their fellow Fairbanks residents returned from this single unit Iraq posting in body bags. That’s 26 people from a town not a whole lot larger than Whitehorse – appalling is too weak a word for that situation.

On a related subject, it seems to me that Canadians are starting to get hardened to seeing our people killed in Afghanistan – how long are we going to let Harper kill our neighbours for no good reason? The Americans have gotten themselves into another Vietnam – have we, too?

There was a program on TV a few nights ago that I haven’t recovered from yet, and it relates strongly to the military situation. There have been some 70 cases across the States of somebody claiming to be a cop phoning a fast-food restaurant and getting the managers to do an assortment of bizarre, cruel, demeaning things to staff and even customers.

The featured horror was a young girl who was accused of stealing a customer’s purse. The manager, and then her fiance, had the girl strip naked and submit to increasingly-perverted demands, all at the demand of the faceless voice on the other end of the phone line. The fiance is now in jail for sexual assault, the manager (who showed no remorse at all) got off on probation, and the guy who made the call (a prison guard) was caught but won a verdict of “innocent” in court. This begs the question “what has happened to the moral anchor that used to guide people??” Why do so many people obey authority (even unproven authority) without question? How can a person rationalize torturing a young girl, doing a cavity search on a customer, or allowing the government to kill their neighbours?

The only answer that seems possible is that there are a whole lot of very stupid people out there. How scary is that?