Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts.
More and more, being an American is feeling like this:
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Last night, while Muammar Qaddafi* was newly dead or dying, I had an interesting dream.
In the dream I was a young nurse, working her first shift at a hospital. I have no real-life ambition to be a nurse; it's just a symbolic artifact of the dream. The head nurse was teaching me how things were to be done at the hospital. She murdered our first patient of the day--who had complained of pain and asked for medication--with a large overdose of morphine.
As the patient caught on to what was about to happen and she pled for her life to be spared, the head nurse looked at me patronizingly and said of the sick woman, "Do you hear all that nonsense, all that crazy talk it sputters? Do not listen to it. It doesn't know what it needs. I know what is best."** Paralyzed with shock and fear, I watched helplessly as she injected the drug and the patient died.
Later on, another patient--a painfully thin refugee from Iraq who appeared to be wasting away from an AIDS-like illness--whispered to me that the head nurse was abusive toward him, that she made threats to him and pinched him hard enough to leave bruises when no one else was looking. I whispered back that I was sorry and that I would try to help him transfer to a different hospital where no one would hurt him. He laughed bitterly and replied, "Don't you get it yet? There are no other hospitals. This is it. This is all there is."
Is it?
I still hope not. But if that's true... I think it's high time for a little hospital reform.
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* An undeniably awful leader and a murderer himself, if I understand the situation correctly. [Update, 6/2012: I don't know even that much anymore. I guess I didn't/don't understand it at all. I'm not even sure it's possible to do so when limited (as plebs are) to the information currently available to the general public. Just forget what I said--I know nothing, neither do you... and that really bugs me.]
** On waking I recognized this as a very loose paraphrase of something Jean-Marie Charcot said of a patient he had diagnosed with hysteria: "Note the emotional outburst... Again, note these screams. You could say it is a lot of noise over nothing."
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