The Automatik

I’m posting the most adorable photo I could find. I’m posting this because if and when you click the link below, you’ll need this photo.

CuteOverload.com

From Wired.com:

As an expert witness in the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard who was court-martialed, psychologist Philip Zimbardo had access to many of the images of abuse that were taken by the guards themselves.

DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK if you are at work. Please. These are extremely graphic and disturbing images.

I got to the second photo and I started weeping and couldn’t stop.

This website started as a place to talk about music and films and pop culture. But all of that seems so trivial in the face of what I’ve just seen.

When Hurricane Katrina happened, I wasn’t in my native New Orleans, but in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, having moved away five months earlier. I was working a contract job as an Executive Assistant. Not my ideal job and not my ideal workplace, but I needed the money.

Seeing the video footage of Hurricane Katrina victims trapped at the Superdome and corpses in the street filled me with the most overwhelming sense of sorrow, anger, and shame. I went into the bathroom and cried. I didn’t really know anyone in the multi-story building, the one which housed a major financial institution. There was no way I could stop the grief and I sure didn’t want to share it with any of those strangers.

But I’m sharing this grief today because I’m once again filled with sorrow, anger, and shame. I’m ashamed to be a human being and I’m ashamed of my countrymen and women who would do these things.

In the early 1990s, my film class watched Night and Fog and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, documentaries by French filmmaker Alain Resnais about the Nazi atrocities and the bombing of Japan, respectively. I’d never seen anything so revolting in my life. In the first film, there were photos of piles of skulls and hair and of lampshades made from human skin. In the second, there was footage of the shadows of people evaporated by the bomb blast and those who survived, only to have their flesh rot from radiation.

The sensation of sickness and shock was more than I could bear and I’ve never been able to watch any more footage of this type since. But I’ll never forget those images.

And I’ll never forget these.

When I was younger, I was silent when faced with racism, sexism, and homophobia. Now I think that being silent is the same thing as condoning such behavior.

I can’t be quiet about this kind of thing anymore. Life is too short. . . and in the case of the above atrocities, nasty, brutish, and short. Put me on a list; I don’t care. I’ll be proud to be on the same list with those who would speak out against such things, because those things are WRONG.

I ask again: what went wrong, America?