What appears to have been the desecration of the bodies of dead Afghans by U.S. Marines, as disclosed in a video clip that someone now wishes he'd never figured would make an entertaining souvenir, shows yet again how war's hideous pressures can corrode the character of those who must fight.
But in a world blighted with far too much violence and cruelty, the simple humanitarian gesture thankfully endures. Twice in the space of a few days, U.S. forces came to the aid of endangered Iranians at sea off their coast. First, the Navy rescued 13 fishermen from pirates, and then the Coast Guard plucked a foundering cargo vessel's crew to safety.
"Without your help we were dead," the vessel's owner said. Ordinary people in Iran, if not their hard-core anti-American leaders, should find the rescues appealing.
The basic rule for how to treat other people properly - do to them as you'd have them do to you - has a reciprocal aspect. It invites the reasonable expectation that if we do right by others, they'll do right by us.
The real test, though, is whether other people are treated graciously even when they're treating you like dirt.
The toxic condition of our politics these days shows how difficult that test can be.
The candidate or side or party that feels it's been wronged seethes with resentment and vows to turn the tables. Not just a little bit. And so the conflict escalates.
Politics in our system is designed to be competitive, true enough. There is an ongoing contest not only of ideas and values, but for the power necessary to put those ideas and values to work. How far will people go to acquire and hold that power?
The law sets out certain boundaries, but it's plain that political conduct can be harmful even if it's legal. The well of democracy can be polluted by selfishness that destroys trust, alienates opponents with whom one should be able to reasonably disagree and leaves voters mired in cynicism.
There aren't many political topics that seem more arcane and down in the weeds than the redrawing of boundaries for voting districts to adjust for population changes.
But in fact, redistricting over the years has given rise to some of the country's bitterest partisan battles. It is a supreme test of how far a party will go to press every advantage as it tries to crush its rivals into insignificance.
North Carolina's Democrats ruled the roost for decades. As elections became more competitive following the great migration of Southern conservatives to the Republicans, Democratic legislators who redrew legislative and congressional district boundaries every 10 years, as they were charged with doing, became more and more aggressive in using those boundaries to help maintain power.
In 2010, the year of the tea party-led GOP upsurge fueled mainly by animus toward President Obama, those Democratic-drawn lines failed to prevent a Republican legislative takeover. Then it became the Republicans' turn to fix the boundaries by which voters, in their allotted districts, would choose another set of leaders. Or, practically speaking, to fix the boundaries by which leaders in their chosen districts would be allocated another set of voters.
This exercise by all indications took the cake for grind-them-into-the-dust exploitation of the redistricting process. And it's hard to cry along with the disadvantaged Democrats, who hadn't gone to the same lengths but who perhaps just hadn't gotten around to it.
Where the damage really has been done is twofold. First, the new districts isolate black voters in an attempt to create that many more districts where black voting power is diminished. Yes, African-Americans in North Carolina tend to vote Democratic. But using race as a proxy for partisan leanings, as the new districts blatantly do, should set off a bank of constitutional alarms.
So should the redistricting scheme's unprecedented degree of precinct-splitting - again, driven by race in many instances. Far more precincts have been split than when boundaries were redrawn in the past. Hundreds more. The effect is to confuse voters, weaken their ties to officeholders and - a huge issue - make elections themselves needlessly complicated and expensive, to the point where several county elections directors warn of fiascoes dead ahead.
Democrats and public interest advocates are challenging the new maps in court and seeking a delay in the May 8 primary so their complaints can be addressed. Republicans argue that the changes all pass legal muster.
Judges will decide. But what's clear is that the GOP, given a chance for revenge, could not contain itself. It could not manage to dial back the retaliation, to treat the other party as it would like to be treated.
Is there a place for the humanitarian gesture in partisan politics? When it comes to something as fundamental as redistricting, there has to be. Instead, what we've seen are politicians so intent on power and payback that they're willing to desecrate democracy itself.
