Our Collective Shame

      Yeah, we’ve been here before. Lots of times in fact.

      Afghanistan and Iraq, most recently. But also: Panama, Grenada, Chile, in this hemisphere, and Iran and, of course, Vietnam, across oceans. All just in our lifetime.

      So, maybe Venezuela shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Particularly given our current regime. Over the last few months, we’ve unleashed military in our own streets, against our own people. Why not do the same thing on someone else’s streets?

      The other day, here at Writing About Our Generation, we were discussing a new story idea. It was going to be an annotated list of Trump’s Greatest Crimes during his first year in office. The shuttering of USAID, and the many deaths worldwide that has probably caused, was going to be high up on the list. So was the unleashing of masked enforcers in our cities and the pardoning of insurrectionists and the crypto scams and so much more.

      But then, on Saturday morning, we all woke to the news that the Trump regime had attacked a sovereign state, had kidnapped that state’s putative president and his wife, had blindfolded that president and carted him off, had bombed several locations in that sovereign state, had promised to occupy that state as long as it wanted.

We have maybe a potential new No. 1.

      The news naturally elicited a number of emotions: anger, frustration, sadness. But most of all, shame.

      Shame because we are all citizens of what has become, in so many ways, a rogue state, run by preening wannabe frat boys who think they can do what they want and not face any consequences. Because they haven’t.

      Yes, as a nation we’ve done some similar things before, under different presidents, and our history is far from untainted. But never, it would seem, have we done it with such brazenness, with such contempt and disregard not just for the law, international and domestic, but for the opinion of anyone not already deeply on board. They didn’t even have the decency to lie, like in the run-up to the Iraq War.

      The sense of shame takes me back to the days of still another war, this one in Vietnam, to the time when many of us traveled around Europe with a Canadian maple leaf pinned to our backpacks. We didn’t want others to think we were from the U.S., from the country waging a senseless, brutal war.

      There are no pins we can use now. Our shame is evident to all. We can’t cover it up.