If not sooner or as soon as he distanced himself from Reverend Wright’s words, let alone with quitting his church over them to become more powerful, we should have known. And it’s easy to “sell our souls” by centimeters, of “not as bad,” and I’ve certainly been guilty. It creeps up on us.

It’s hard to know exactly when that sudden, terrible decisive action needs be taken, but there is a point when not taking it is the worse crime against humanity. In thinking of the necessary terrible wars fought, I think of the Kali myth of going into battle to help her husband. She licked the blood from the ground not as an act of simple bloodlust, but because not doing that would mean a demon would have sprung from every drop spilled.

What that looks like in a decisive war action is in need of serious and long discussion.