Death and Dishonor

The recently released video of US Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters dishonors our country and demands punishment.  However, the outrage also struck me as odd.  I once heard Sister Helen Prejean talk about the way the death penalty sows hate in our society.  In order to kill someone under the banner of legal, state-sponsored action, we all have to hate that person to the point that we dehumanize them first.  Nobody wants the state to murder a person with human value and dignity equal to our own.  But monsters? Those we can kill.  Likewise with war.  It should not surprise us that the people we have trained and sent to remote corners of the world for multiple, year-long tours to hunt and kill our enemies would celebrate their success in this way any more than it surprises us when Rob Gronkowsi spikes the ball with such energy after a touchdown.  In fact, we seem to prefer that kind of response, Gronking, to quieter more "honorable" responses like Tebowing (students from a NY high school were suspended for Tebowing; nobody's been suspended for Gronking).

Sebastian Junger's Washington Post piece, We're all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy, says it best: "As a society, we may be disgusted by seeing U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters, but we remain oddly unfazed by the fact that, presumably, those same Marines just put bullets through the fighters’ chests."

Something is definitely wrong here, but it's not with those marines alone.