The Real Moral Decline

Posted on July 14, 2002 in Social Justice

After Watergate brought down the Nixon machine, the minions of the right began to promote a new myth: that every politician was as crooked as Dick Nixon, so why even try. The media bought the idea, dutifully putting slightly crooked Democrats on the front page, and the right wing began buying up the press, undermining laws against monopoly and conflict of interest with the aid of strategically placed Reagan administration underminings of reforms that had ensured we had a press that was free not only of governmental control, but also oligarchical control. Libertarians began the shock troops of a movement that declared that liberals were out to deprive us of freedom of speech (e.g. the freedom to call someone a “nigger”). The campaign depended, of course, on distortion of what was actually implemented. The foes of changes in legal language wrongly declared that reformers were out to tell us what we could or couldn’t say. The reality, of course, was much simpler: the changes in the language of our laws was simply to remove vulgarity from a common ground.

Affirmative action was another red herring that the Right slung about. I remember how personnel officers would lie and say that they had not hired someone because they had to fill a quota. I sometimes went back to the institution where this was claimed and it still looked as lily white as it had before. Very simple they lied to me. They had a secret political agenda.

These things, all based in the language of lies, are the real moral decline in America. Good people don’t trust good people or they fear that someone will “adjust” things to the favor of the powerful by taking out a good man. I don’t undertake kneejerk subscriptions to conspiracy theories, but I have to admit that their reiteration in the tabloid press has, in itself, seemed to be a kind of conspiracy. Tabloids seem to teach us two things: that we can never trust news claims of corruption and second that it isn’t worth being good because you will be killed.

A couple of days ago I mentioned America’s “quitter” mentality. Calling anyone who hesitates before implementing a possible evil “a quitter” is yet another tactic the ones most responsible for our moral decline use. But they are the ones who have given up. They are the quitters. Clint Eastwood, when asked why he wasn’t going for a run at higher political office, simply said “I ain’t no Mother Teresa.” Clint’s just the type of quitter that we’ve seen these past thirty years. Certainly he is no saint now, but what he’s saying is that he’s given up being a good person. And many of his followers have joined him. This is not the stuff of which heroes should be made. And this is the source, I believe, of America’s downfall. We’ve given up trying to be good. We don’t think about the ethics of what we do and more importantly, we go along. Mother Teresa wasn’t extraordinary nor was she perfect. But it has been in the best interests of those who want unbridled use of evil to declare that what she attained in her life isn’t humanly possible. Nor do we believe it exists in any person other than her. This resignation is the most impaling moral decline of our time. We should, I think, pay heed to the Bible, which often speaks against greed and militarism, but addresses the topic of sex less than a handful of times. It tells us: greed and hatred are the greater problems. It’s time to stop maligning the poor, spreading the lies that insist on impossibility, and start throwing out the quitters from our cultural and political lives. Use the vote and your purchases. There is no need for violence.