I was going to write about how war dehumanizes the warriors as well as the victims. We've seen it with the photos of Abu Ghraib, the massacre at Haditha, the treatment of the Guantanamo suicides as a "publicity stunt" and now the idiotic video of a Marine singing "Hadji girl" about murdering an Iraqi family for fun.
So while I started to write this I went searching for quotes from Frederick Douglass about how slavery dehumanized white slave owners as well as slaves. I got sucked into reading A Narrative on the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass. And now I would rather read that than write something that is going to break my heart and disgust me about man's inhumanity to man. I know, I'm just going to read about it instead of writing about. But Frederick Douglass gives me hope. He had every reason to hate. Instead he fought injustice where ever he saw it, against blacks, against women, even against Catholics in Ireland.
I'm going to read this and see if I can arm myself with whatever it was Douglass used to keep himself from dehumanizing other people.
