It's another rant-y day in the neighborhood...

Have a look at this article about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who apparently said during an interview in the UK that "it would be absurd" to say that inflicting pain on terrorism suspect is wrong. This creature, who is supposed to be looking out for my rights under the US Constitution actually said the following:

I suppose it's the same thing about so-called torture," he said in the interview. "Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?

Well, Your Honor, I would start with the Bill of Rights, and the part about protection from unreasonable search and seizure; cruel and unusual punishment. And from this article, I can't even determine if he's talking about terrorist suspects or someone caught in the act of performing acts of terrorism.

I absolutely despise how militaristic and violent the US has become. I don't know that we've evolved from the days of the "Wild West." We treat everyone who enters this country like a potential terrorist (come on people, retina scans?) but our terror alert rating has fluctuated between high and elevated since it was enacted. I've yet to see any proof that we're safer than we were in August of 2001. I know that the President likes to say that the proof is in the pudding - we haven't had attack of 9/11 proportions since then. We never experienced terrorism to the extreme it reached in September 2001 before then, and we had no Department of Homeland Security to provide for our safety. I'm not pretending that the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 where six people died, or the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, in which 168 people died, didn't happen. But we can't go back in time. We'll never know if the DoHS would have prevented the nearly 3,000 deaths of 9/11.

Today, the Senate voted to expand the country's power to spy on people, with no direct protection for US citizens. (According to the New York Times, the bill only provides for checks to see if those the government chooses to watch are US citizens after the fact.) We're still holding people prisoner without trial or charges at Guantanamo Bay, and we're still inflicting capital punishment. The US executed 42 inmates in 10 states during 2007. I am pleased to see that the trend is declining. However, according to Amnesty International, "In 2006, 91 per cent of all known executions took place in just six countries: China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan and the USA." Check out the human rights abuses in these countries. I'm not happy to see the US listed in this grouping.

Check out our newspapers and the local news. We're using violence against each other at an alarming rate. I can hardly bring myself to watch the local news anymore.

As a nation, why are we so aggressive? Where are we hoping it will take us? Why are our own officials supporting this image to the media, and why are we, collectively, representing ourselves in this way?