I was reminded of a story today. 

Between one and two years ago a friend of mine, we’ll call her The Power Plant, and I were driving with another friend to go to somewhere. Where – unimportant. It was nearing the end of winter and there was still snow in bank form on the sides of the road. I called “shotgun,” not wanting to sit by myself in the back seat. The Power Plant had just been taught that even if one called “shotgun,” any other person could call “blitz,” pull down their pants and if they still made it to the car first, they were allowed the privilege of sitting next to the driver. The Power Plant proceeded to do what I just described, except that more than just her outer layer of pants came to the ground. Her bare ass waddle-sprinting toward the car, I watched in horror as she overestimated her target’s distance and fell into the surrounding bank of snow. She grabbed the car door, pulled her pants back up, and looked back – embarrassed of her actions. She didn’t look embarrassed until she had achieved her goal though. 

And that’s America.

America is the nation of doing something brash and crazy in order to achieve a goal and not being embarrassed of our means of achieving our goal until we have that goal in hand. This torture debate going on perfectly exemplifies what I’m talking about. We did something stupid and embarrassing and wrong to get to where we are at, and now we are looking back and only now are we realizing how stupid it was. Here’s the difference: After The Power Plant’s incident she was made fun of relentlessly for flashing her vagina  for a front row seat in a car, whereas our country is looking to just move on without any punishment for the people who committed the embarrassing/stupid events. Of course we can’t take back what has been done, but we can acknowledge what happened so that we learn from our mistakes. If we never made fun of The Power Plant for letting the cold Minnesota winds blow through her ass crack for a little more leg room, it would have been an awkward situation that we felt uncomfortable about and couldn’t bring up. If we never acknowledge the war crimes we committed and punish those responsible we will constantly look back to this time in our nation’s history with shame. 

So let’s do what’s right and make this whole torture thing into a funny story we can tell our grandkids about.

Oh, waterboarding! lol