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Jewish World Review Dec. 30, 2010/ 23 Teves, 5771 Getting Our Moral Mojo Back By Arnold Ahlert
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"We've become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down." — Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, regarding the NFL's cancellation of Sunday's scheduled football game between the Eagles and the Vikings due to the blizzard.
Ed Rendell is taking a lot of heat (sorry) for the above statement, and maybe he should be, with respect to the subject matter. But as I read stories on the web, most specifically about New York City's apparently dysfunctional response to the same blizzard, I get the impression that Rendell is spot on in his assessment. That New York's massive, lumbering, unionized bureaucracy, led by the Nanniest of Nanny State Mayors, Michael Bloomberg, is inept is hardly surprising. What's surprising is how many New Yorkers are sitting around on their duffs waiting for that bureaucracy to "rescue" them. The prevailing "rationale?" I pay taxes, why should I have to do anything for myself?
It doesn't get any "wussier" than that.
It's amazing to think that we are the descendants of Americans like George Washington and his Continental Army, who braved frigid conditions, bad food and inadequate clothing, even as they staged a surprise attack at Valley Forge which turned the tide of the American Revolution. It's amazing to think there are people still alive who lived through the Great Depression, in which every aspect of one's life was affected by the specter of hopelessness and despair — but who, in the space of a few years, rose up and defeated the greatest threat to freedom in the history of man. What happened?
We swapped character for material comfort, that's what.
Don't get me wrong. I'm neither an ascetic, nor particularly spartan, and I love free-market capitalism when it's not corrupted by crony capitalists. But much like Mr. Rendell, I am struck by the sense that we have become a nation where any sort of unpleasantry or discomfort must be avoided at all costs. Think about such an idea as it relates to nearly fourteen trillion dollars of national debt — a substantial portion of which has been run up precisely to avoid unpleasantry and discomfort. Think about the current recession, which has gone on longer than it should have, precisely because government is determined to provide a "soft landing" for a nation that really deserves a good smack on the back of the head.
An article in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reports that twenty-five percent of America's children and teenagers are on prescription medication. G0d only knows how many of them genuinely need medication, and how many are just "too much trouble" for parents to endure. How many of those same parents are themselves popping little "helpers" to get through the day? When did life in the most affluent society in the history of man become such an intolerable burden?
All year I write about politics, and it's no secret that I consider the overwhelming portion of progressivism to be nothing more than an attempt to instill an unseemly level dependency in as many Americans as possible. But if we're being honest, progressivism's appeal lies in the fact that so many Americans are more than willing to sacrifice their dignity, self-respect and their freedom for comfort and safety. If I went back thirty years and told Americans then that someday, most of the country would submit to being groped by a government stranger at an airport, that people could collect a government unemployment check for almost three years, or that government could ban certain cooking oils, sodas and Happy Meals, is there any doubt I would have been laughed out of the room?
Who's laughing now?
People familiar with my writing know the I try to inject some aspect of morality into my columns whenever possible. This is by design. No system of government can succeed, even one as thoughtfully constructed as ours, if the majority of people are morally confused. This is the most pernicious aspect of progressivism: its effort to create people who are all-tolerant, all-inclusive, multicultural and non-judgmental has given us hordes of Americans who are at best morally confused, and at worst thoughtless, self-absorbed egocentrics who can rationalize virtually anything. How many of us have either thought, or said aloud, something along the lines of "up is down" or "black is white" in recent years?
What is that, if not an expression of moral confusion?
There are those who theorize that such a decline is inevitable, that the rise — and fall — of great nations is hard-wired into human DNA. Baloney. All of us have free will. All of us are capable of making choices. And I suspect the overwhelming majority of us still know the difference between right and wrong, even when we fight tooth and nail to obscure it. People can rationalize anything, but that doesn't mean the growl in the stomach, or the little voice whispering inside one's head goes away.
"I shot and killed someone 17 years ago," hip-hopper Trevell Coleman told a police officer at a Queens station house, admitting to what would have remained an unsolved murder. Coleman literally traded his freedom for a long, possibly lifetime, prison stretch — and his peace of mind. Many people, including the brother-in-law of the victim, think he's an "idiot" for doing so.
Can one appreciate the level of irony behind the idea that a murderer has a better sense of right and wrong than his detractors?
This is what we're up against. The politicians and the pundits can talk about jobs, the economy, terrorism, etc., etc. but all of it is tangential to the central problem facing America today: we've got to get our moral mojo back. That doesn't mean everyone must become a fire-and-brimstone religious fanatic. But it also doesn't mean that the pseudo-intellectual legalese, or therapeutic psycho-babble that passes for cogent thought is any better. It means getting back to an almost forgotten idea that is so simple, yet so over-archingly transcendent, it could literally solve most of our problems:
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
Such is the essence of morality, for it requires both empathy and imagination, equal measures of give and take, and a genuine reverence for one's fellow man — even as all of it accrues to one's self-interest in the process. It doesn't get any better than that, my fellow Americans.
Happy New Year!
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