The Confession: I am blessed to know some of the coolest people alive. (That’s not the confession) However, in place of writing my Connected Communities post yesterday morning, I wallowed in self-doubt and discouragement. (That’s the confession) Stay with me, there’s a point to all this. 

In the movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Cate Blanchett is hit by a car. The narrator recounts all the mindless actions leading up the the accident. With each event, he explains how a slight alteration would stop the accident from ever happening.

I played the narrator in my own mind. But hindsight is a dangerous thing. It’s very much like a hot tub. If you stay in for too long, you lose the health benefits and have only a sick stomach and headache to show for your effort. I needed to recognize that I’d studied the failure sufficiently and put my energy into creating a solution. It was time for a reminder that I’d been in the hot tub long enough. 

(This is where it ties into community. Kinda.) 

As many people do when they’re feeling down on themselves, I looked around to see if I could find some inspiration.

I took one glance at Twitter and felt worse.

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Scroll down to the video if you just can’t wait to see me sputtering cold water out of my flooded nasal cavity and mouth.

When it comes to discussions of interrogation and the nature of torture, “waterboarding” is the media darling of the hour. 

The CIA describes waterboarding as follows: 

“In this technique, the detainee is lying on a gurney that is inclined at an angle of 10 to 15 degrees to the horizontal, with the detainee on his back and his head toward the lower end of the gurney. A cloth is placed over the detainee’s face and cold water is poured on the cloth from a height of approximately 6 to 8 inches. The wet cloth creates a barrier through which it is difficult – or in some cases not possible – to breathe.” -Stephen G Bradbury

The goal of waterboarding is to inspire terror in victims by forcing them to experience every part of drowning except the actual filling of the lungs with water. When the subject is terrified and has endured so much pain that only relief from the water matters, the questioning begins. 

I was intrigued by the idea of waterboarding when I first heard about it because it doesn’t make sense as an effective way to get reliable information out of somebody. 

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