Al Giordano wonders why there is so much outrage over the AIG bonuses when other, more important matters get nary a mention. He also wonders why more people don’t actively harness their anger to do something positive about the things that spark their outrage:

I have felt outraged at key moments in recent years by various human events: Like learning, in 1999, that President Bill Clinton, when he came to Mexico for an “anti-drug” summit, stayed in the mansion of a drug trafficking banker (some similar outrage seems to be sweeping France right now over the same thing). But when something outrages me, I try to do something about it that goes beyond mere expressions of my angst via public tantrum (as I did then). Other things that have outraged me in recent years were the march to war after September 11, 2001, and the subsequent revelations that torture was suddenly back in the Pentagon’s playbook… I was outraged by the US complicity in the attempted 2002 coup d’etat against an elected government in Venezuela and continue to experience outrage that 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States are kept under inhumane conditions by the refusal of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, as recently as 2007, to gather up enough votes to put them on a path to citizenship. We all encounter matters that shock our consciences.

It never ceases to piss me off how OUTRAGED people can get over relatively minor stuff (e.g. AIG bonuses) but yet pass by truly shocking and outrageous things like the U.S. government’s deliberate, systematic torture of prisoners during the reign of Premier Bush without more than a neutered whimper.

Where’s the perspective? Where’s the true human empathy? Doesn’t it say something truly scary about us, as a people, that we get all hot under the collar over some greedy execs while bona fide war criminals get off scot-free?