THE 'TERRITORY OF SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS'

Recently, I was going through some old papers--trying to clean the accumulated junk from my study--and I ran across a photocopied page from a Wendell Berry essay with one paragraph circled. I couldn't remember photocopying the page, or making the circle, but as I read the passage, I understood why I had found it significant. I would like to quote the passage I had marked and just a bit more. The essay is in the collection titled What Are People For? by Wendell Berry, the essay is titled "Writer and Region."

[T]here is the Territory of self-righteousness. It is easy to assume that we do not participate in what we are not in the presence of. But if we are members of a society, we participate, willynilly, in its evils. Not to know this is obviously to be in error, but it is also to neglect come of the most necessary and the most interesting work. How do we reduce our dependency on what is wrong? The answer to that question will necessarily be practical; the wrong will be correctable by practice and by practical standards. Another name for self-righteousness is economic and political unconsciousness.

There is also the Territory of historical self-righteousness: if we had lived South of the Ohio in 1830, we would not have owned slaves; if we had lived on the frontier, we would have killed no Indians, violated no treaties, stolen no land. The probability is overwhelming that if we had belonged to the generations we deplore, we too would have behaved deplorably. The probability is overwhelming that we belong to a generation that will be found by its successors to have behaved deplorably. Not to know that is, again, to be in error and to neglect essential work, and some of this work, as before, is work of the imagination. How can we imagine our situation or our history if we think we are superior to it?

In reading this now, I think of Abu Ghraib, of the War on Iraq, of the smugness of our President when he asserts that it was morally correct for us to preemptively invade a sovereign nation while forgetting that his arguments for going were all fabrications and exaggerations. Will future generations look back on this generation, shake their heads sadly, and say to each other, "THEY were so impatient. THEY were fighting a battle in Iraq that had little to do with Osama bin Laden, or al Qaeda."?

Our children's children will not remember that it was GWBush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld who pushed for war, who argued to overthrow Saddam because of the danger he represented to the US. They will remember that it was THIS generation who did these things; it was THIS generation who refused to push for a viable energy policy that was NOT dependent on Middle Eastern oil; it was THIS generation who allowed soldiers to die while occupying foreign land rather than while protecting and preserving our own land; it was THIS generation who allowed the national debt to grow uncontrolled once again, passing that debt on to them.

Our great-grandchildren might look back on the election of 2004 and say to themselves, "If we had lived then, we would not have voted for Bush again. We would not have allowed the nation to continue on its path. We would have changed things." Of course, maybe they would have, or maybe not. The point, however, is moot because our great-grandchildren are not the ones who can make a difference NOW. WE are the ones who can do that!

I cannot argue that Saddam Hussein was a good man, or that the people of Iraq are not thankful that he is gone. I can argue, however, that we were wrong to use force where diplomatic pressure may have accomplished as much. I can argue that we are wrong to try to impose our democracy on a people who have never known any form of free government. I can argue that we failed to protect this nation by beginning a war with Iraq rather than eliminating al Qaeda cells around the world. I can argue that George W. Bush is NOT the right President for this country at this time in history. I would rather trust a man who has been in war to lead the US during a time of war.