{"id":1716,"date":"2009-05-08T18:05:50","date_gmt":"2009-05-08T18:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1716"},"modified":"2009-05-08T18:05:50","modified_gmt":"2009-05-08T18:05:50","slug":"a_little_note_on_courage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2009\/05\/08\/a_little_note_on_courage\/","title":{"rendered":"A Little Note on Courage"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned in the previous entry<\/a> that I don’t think modern Americans have the same self-image of nobility that previous generations did. According to David Kurtz over at Talking Points Memo<\/a>, we don’t have as much courage, either. Here are some numbers for you to consider the next time you see one of those over-the-top political attack ads<\/a> trying to convince you there is no alternative to maintaining our own American gulag at Guantanamo:<\/p>\n

Number of Gitmo detainees that the GOP hopes to keep off mainland U.S. soil with its “Keep Terrorists Out Of America Act”: roughly 250.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Number of Axis POWs detained in camps on the U.S. mainland at the end of WWII: roughly 425,000.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Axis POWs. That would be Nazi and Japanese soldiers captured abroad and shipped here, to our soil, to sit out the war inside American borders. Well-trained, fully indoctrinated fascists who would’ve loved to slit American throats for their Fuhrer and their Emperor. And yet we managed to keep them locked up, didn’t we?<\/p>\n

I’ve got a prison only a couple miles from my house, and I’m sure it’s full of serial killers, gangsters, rapists, murderers, white supremacists, and paranoid militia types, but I’ve never lost one wink of sleep because of it. So why is the thought of 250 suspected terrorists — suspected<\/i>, mind you, still not proven in many cases — locked down inside a mainland military prison or even a civilian Supermax facility so scary? We’ve already<\/i> got terrorists locked up in our mainland prisons. The Blind Shiek<\/a> and Timothy McVeigh<\/a> come immediately to mind. (Okay, McVeigh is dead, but you see my point.)<\/p>\n

Al Qaeda is not<\/i> composed of immortal, superpowered, super-intelligent boogeymen, and behaving as if it is only gives them power over us. I, for one, am sick of being scared, or, more accurately, of politicians and talk-radio personalities telling me I ought to be. Gitmo is a PR disaster and must be closed if America is to regain the moral high ground in our struggles. If you’re that worried about the Gitmo detainees causing trouble, just turn them out with the regular prison population. I’m sure all those gangsters and militia types I mentioned earlier will be happy to keep an eye on them for us…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned in the previous entry that I don’t think modern Americans have the same self-image of nobility that previous generations did. According to David Kurtz over at Talking Points Memo, we don’t have as much courage, either. Here are some numbers for you to consider the next time you see one of those over-the-top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}