According to 12 year old litho, jr., his orthodontist spoke those words last week while putting on his braces. What follows is the letter I would like to, but probably won't, send the man:
More on the flip...
One of the people rounded up in those raids was my wife's uncle, my son's great-uncle. For months his family had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. When the military finally released him, he was a changed man, quiet, introspective, his previous outgoing personality a relic of the past.
Torture has a way of doing that to you.
We went to Chile just last month, spent most of the summer there. The country is a changed place today, almost unrecognizable from the the place I first visited in 1987, in the last throes of what is universally regarded as the cruelest Latin American dictatorship of the twentieth century. It's been twenty years since Chilean voters threw the dictator out on his ear, twenty years of democratic rule that has modernized the country, made great strides against poverty, and gained the international stature necessary to join the prestigious Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In the December elections, Chile made a transition from a center-left president to one from the center-right, an act of political maturity that would have been unthinkable in the polarized atmosphere of the early 1980s.
My son and I did many things in our month in Chile, but one afternoon we took a walk around downtown Santiago. We paid a visit to the Plaza de la Constitución, the huge square in front of the presidential palace. In the picture to the right you can see what the Moneda Palace, which occupies the entire southern end of the Plaza, looks like today, nicely cleaned up thirty-seven years after Pinochet bombed it into a smoking ruin and twenty years after democracy was restored.
Immediately to the west of the Moneda, on the southwest corner of the Plaza, is the Treasury Ministry's skyscraper. I want to direct your attention to the windows on the upper left hand side of this building. Those windows today are all indistinguishable from each other, each of them pretty much the same. When I first arrived in Santiago, however, back in June 1987, one of the windows (I can't quite recall which one) was surrounded -- literally surrounded -- by bullet holes. It turns out that loyalists to the elected president had holed up in one of the offices in the Treasury Ministry and had resisted the tanks in the square below. The tanks replied with devastating and overwhelming firepower.
The Treasury Ministry wasn't the only building on the Plaza de la Constitución that still displayed bullet holes in 1987, a full fourteen years after the fighting that accompanied the bloody overthrow of the elected government. The Finance Ministry, on the east side of the Plaza, also still had bullet scars, as did the Provincial government offices, on the southeast corner across from the Moneda.
I frequently asked myself why the military in all those years never bothered to repair the damage their bullets had caused in important civic buildings in the nation's capital, and I can only come up with two reasons. One, the generals didn't really care about those buildings. Yes, they repaired the Moneda almost immediately, because the dictator Pinochet himself took over the presidential offices inside. It would cost money, though, to repair the other buildings, and the military regime simply didn't care enough about the buildings to lay out the cash.
There's another, more sinister possibility, however, and that is that the generals left the damage right out in plain sight as an object lesson to the populace of what could happen to them if they got out of line. The Chilean dictators were never shy about using force to bring their opponents to heel -- just ask the former officers currently resting in Chilean jails for the crimes against Orlando Letelier, Carlos Prats, and Bernardo Leighton.
The point, doctor, is that this is what dictators do. They use extreme violence against their own citizens and trample the rule of law in the process. They threaten, they intimidate, they torture, and they kill.
I defy you to show me in what way the United States today resembles a dictatorship.
The Chilean dictatorship had many varied and complex causes, but one of the critical factors that led to the breakdown of political society and constitutional government was the intransigence of the political actors of the day. Compromises that could have resolved the political crisis were possible throughout the years Allende was president, but for one reason or another those compromises always broke down. At the end of the day, Allende's opponents simply could not tolerate the fact the man had won a free election and deserved the right to hold the office which he occupied.
Today in the United States we have people who claim the president wasn't born in the United States, who claim he is a secret Muslim, who claim he supports terrorists, that he is a Nazi, that he is a dictator.
Words have meaning, and they have consequences. I am sure you, like I, would hate to see the United States devolve into the kind of political crisis that led to the torture of my son's, and your patient's, great-uncle, that led to the deaths of thousands of civilians in extra-judicial executions at the hands of their own government.
If we truly seek to avoid that outcome, though, we need to be very careful about the language we use to express our political disagreements today. You may not like the health care law, or the auto bailout, or the stimulus package that saved our country from depression. Your political disagreement with the president, however, does not make him a dictator. Rather, it reflects the simple fact that the political forces that back him were stronger in November 2008 than his opponents. This November it is entirely likely the president's opponents will prove stronger at the polls.
The United States is a democracy, doctor. It will not remain that way unless all of us work hard to ensure we do not go down a different path.
Think about it. Think about your words. Think about your own personal political responsibility.
Sincerely,
litho