One down...

...one to go. One more final tomorrow, then I'm done. Feels kinda strange. Tonight's exam on Virginia Woolf took all three hours and some change. A little more strenuous than I expected, because I wrote a pretty thorough essay. For what it's worth, I think I nailed that part, even though I probably bungled a good chunk of the objective. I'm terrible with names.

Anyways, that's what's been important in my life lately. I did spend a little time today looking around at the images of torture and death from around the world. I noticed Tom, Sue, and Capps all had wothwhile things to say on the current, incredibly pointless debate about whether the images at Abu Ghraib should've been released publicly.

So I looked again at some of the pictures from the prison. Then I watched the video of that poor guy getting decapitated — or as much of it as I could stand. There were more videos on the site of other people being killed (by terrorists, I guess), but I can't handle them. My reaction to both our atrocities and theirs has been the same. I don't really get angry or outraged; it's more a mixture of confusion and, most of all, sadness. Simply put, these things didn't have to happen. I realize it's an obvious statement, but that's really the heart of it: people willingly chose to do this to other people. I simply don't get what drives anyone to knowingly and deliberately inflict severe pain, humiliation, or death on others. I can barely empathize with people who get in fights. What was going through the minds of anyone in those images, I will never understand.

What has also been troubling to me is the relativism sparked by these images. It should be self-evident that all of these actions were horrible. They don't mean anything except that hatred exists in the world. There is no policy implication. There is no one to blame who did not participate in or condone the actions. A person doing something disgusting to another person is that and nothing else. It is never justified. I think every person with a moral compass knows this intuitively. For all the gray area between torture and coercion, I think everyone knows that in an ideal world they are both wrong; even as the world actually is, Abu Ghraib wasn't remotely close to that gray area. To talk about either situation in anything less than absolute terms is a willful self-deception. And that is why all this talk of justification for this and revenge for that only reemphasizes the extent to which people want to delude themselves. It just makes me sad.

I don't really know why I just wrote all this. I hadn't planned on it, and I don't know if it contributes anything at all, really.

Of course the images should have been released. They are the reality of what is happening. What do we gain by ignorance? Doesn't all of this illustrate why using violence to fight violence should always be the absolute last resort, because it inevitably leads only to more violence? Why people keep doing this to each other, I just don't understand.

I need to go study.