Jesus Christ, What Happened to America?

I just read this op-ed about Guantanamo Bay. Like so many other awful things I feel helpless to change, I’d stopped thinking about Guantanamo Bay. Obama said he was going to shut it down, and I was deeply disappointed when he didn’t.

I mean, mother of God, read this op-ed. What the hell are we doing?? If after all these years you don’t have enough evidence to put them on trial, let them go. This is just plain immoral and wrong and sinful, and frankly, if one of the issues of releasing them is that it would be admitting that they were wrongly held and therefore would make us vulnerable to lawsuits, then we should stand trial. We are supposed to be better than this.

I saw the movie 42 over the weekend. One of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Kirby Higbe, was traded when he refused to play alongside Jackie Robinson. In the movie they have Higbe complaining about being traded for speaking his mind. Without a shred of irony, he laments about what has happened to America, that America is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Who knows if he ever really said this, but it represents a sort of blindness to injustice that still exists.

A picture of a coming storm. I took this while walking through Union Square.

Stacy Horn

I've written six non-fiction books, the most recent is Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York.

View all posts by Stacy Horn →

2 thoughts on “Jesus Christ, What Happened to America?

  1. What can we do?! What can we do?! Just read the op-ed and have that smothering feeling of helplessness… again. Thank god for the New York Times and the journalists who are still putting this stuff in front of us. It should be on the front page.

  2. It was yesterday. But yeah, maybe to begin, just spread this op-ed far and wide.

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