The efforts of good people

I heard this story on NPR yesterday driving home and I have to say it really got to me. It was a story about how a certain Major Stacy Garrity made the simple decision not to dehumanize the prisoners under her watch, and how this benefited the prisoners, the community and the soliders that worked there. It's very much an anti-Abu Gharib story--a testimony to the idea that it's not a certain thing that people will be pulled under by racism, hatred and vengeance. Of course, Garrity seems to be a smart and resourceful woman, going way beyong the call of duty, not just injecting common decency into the prison system, but also making sure that there were games for the prisoners, jobs for some of those found innocent, contact with families, mail, and also that the soliders in the prison go out and do positive things like help orphans. It's nice to know somebody realizes that if we're there to liberate Iraq, it's not going to be helpful to treat Iraqis like inhuman monsters.
Anyway, it gave me some hope that things could get better. And then I saw this crap spewing out of Bill O'Reilly's mouth:

And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans.

Maybe people aren't capable of the mental leap beyond racism and hatred. Maybe it's just impossible for many people to conceive of a war situation that's anything but genocidal in nature. I don't know.