Dangerous Morality

 

Bill Clinton played around because, as he himself said, "he could." That seems to be a prevalent morality these days. Truth doesn’t matter, as long as you can get away with it. That attitude is the mea culpa of the corporate crooks. It’s the excuse of athletes who’ve been revealed to have taken steroids; I didn’t, they say, and then, even if I did it wasn’t illegal. And every day we see people flying through red lights.

It doesn’t matter how many laws we come up with; if people don’t do the right thing because it’s the right thing, society comes apart at the seams. It already has; in parts of most of our cities, and in many rural areas as well, authorities are only in marginal control of the community. Drugs, violence, poverty, ignorance and criminality hold sway in certain sections of our country and those who might do something about it -- to break the cycle -- don’t intervene.

I put most of the blame for our social disintegration on a failure to discuss who we are as a people. That’s not something we Americans do. We’re all off doing our own thing, mostly only coming together on holidays and in times of crisis. We don’t save. We don’t read. We have third-world schools and public health care. We pretend global warming isn’t a threat. We invade foreign countries. We elect liars to lead us. We spend a quarter of our waking hours watching the idiot box

Those who say that our last national election was about moral values are both right and wrong. Yes, we are upset about our national community, but it’s not about Christianity. Christianity is the focus because we don’t know how else to confront our individual and collective civic failure to invest as heavily in our responsibilities as we clamor about our rights.

We shouldn’t be so overtly hypocritical about our national morality. We scandalize the Christ Consciousness before an anxious world and make them wrong for calling us on it. We give credence to public deceivers, backing platitudinous piety at the expense of our integrity. We let others do our thinking for us, and turn deaf to objections. Even asking a question is suspicious.

How do we install a higher civic morality? What would induce three-fourths of the American people to endorse and commit to getting our country back on an honest track? Where do we start?

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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