Yesterday was a bad day for my desire to believe in the idea of human decency.
First, I heard an NPR interview with Eve Ensler & Dr. Denis Mukwege about the policy of the strategic rapes of hundreds of thousands of women in the continuing civil war in Congo. The rebels under recently arrested Laurent Nkunda have systematically raped between 300,000 & 400,000 women—well, from babies of a few months to octogenarians—over the past ten years.
It seems that raping women effectively destroys the infrastructure of villages—whether you send in HIV-carrying troops to spread the disease throughout the populace or just gang rape little girls or shoot women in their reproductive organs. The beauty of this strategy is its cost effectiveness: no need to spend money on RPGs or automatic weapons; no worries about supply lines; & yet the devastation is complete.
Once a village is destroyed the rebels inherit the assets, which is the whole point.
But it’s not just the actions of people half-way around the world that has me in a tail-spin. A sickening story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about a woman who starved a puppy to death had me in tears at the headline.
I’ll confess that I couldn’t actually read the story, just kind of skipped through a couple of the paragraphs. I went back to it because I thought I should get the facts, but I just am not up to that sort of thing.
If ever there was an argument to support the benefit to society of capital punishment, this incident is it.
A starved puppy, little girls raped as a policy of war. If you try to tell me that humans are the highest form of life on this planet I just won’t believe you. We're instruments of hell.
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