A New Day -- Bush still in denial?

The American people are sending an overwhelming message. It's time for change. The old chestnut, all politics are local, has been roasted. It's national issues -- where our county has gone wrong -- that are on the voters' minds. Hubris and aggression don't make for a foreign policy that reflects the core values of this country.  We are not a nation of torturers.  Terrorism is a tactic. Torture is a tactic. They are both represensible and one will not negate the other. Democracy is a fragile choice that must be made by a society and continually protected and earned.  We cannot choose it or impose it on the people of Iraq, Iran, North Korea or any other nation. They must have the courage and vision to choose it themselves and throw off oppression and tyranny, whether religious or political.

We can only help create the conditions for democracy to grow and spread by our living example of the blessings of peace, prosperity and happiness possible in a diverse society. That doesn't happen by demonstrating that we will be as evil as the evil we oppose. We must renounce torture, not just a phony gamed definition of torture. By accepting fear of terrorism as a modus operendi we ourselves choose to be less democratic, more open to authoritarianism masquerading as safety.  To be free will never be safe.  Only by casting off fear can we be safe from terrorism -- as a tactic, its power depends on fear.  To be the best of America we must be the home of the free and the brave.

A society can be gripped by fear and hatred and ruled by regimes that feed off those emotions and the promise of a religious or political ideology to offer protection from them.  Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Cambodia under the Kymer Rouge, the genocides in Rawanda and Darfur, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo are all too common reminders of human society's capacity for horrendous evil. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their ilk play to the same base nature of fear, and domination by the strong rather than the example of the wise.

A "war" on terrorism can never succeed.  Terrorism has no homeland to conquer except in the hearts of men and women reacting to powerlessness and oppression.  Terrorism must be renounced, not conquered.  That renunciation can only come from the strength and courage that it takes to be free and to allow everyone else to be free. Democracy is the only field in which that seed can grow.

Perhaps, on this election day, we have begun once again choose to be the land of the free and the brave.