"It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it"
I recalled this statement while I was reading a very powerful look at the My Lai massacre that took place during the Vietnam War. The depravity of humanity gone mad is revealed in this account and one would think that we would never again commit such atrocities. But the powers that be convinced us that we should put it behind us and move on. And now it seems we have repeated the depravity again in Iraq.
Is it true that our future is shaped by what and how we react to events and realities of the present? Have we gone even deeper into depravity since My Lai? And if that is true, what did we not do that would have kept us from drifting into an open acceptance of torture and unjustified bloodletting today? If the future we get IS up to us, what failures of our past determine what we leave for our children today?
What is it we want the future to be? If we know that, and if we know what was failed to be done in the past, that caused our today, then we should know what must be done to set the tone for the future of our Country.
So why not look at Vietnam and see what it is that we have failed to learn from My Lai? Discover what would have prevented us accepting torture and massacre of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think we ignored red warning flags in the run up to Vietnam and then we failed to prosecute War Criminals for their crimes after that war.
