Reality Check 101

Things haven’t changed much since mankind’s fall fromParadise.  Wandering eyes (greed), self-indulgent flesh (sensuality), and self-will (pride) still war for supremacy, first through individual lives and then to the culture as a whole.  Throughout ages of recorded history the war has ebbed and flowed in one direction or the other, but values such as love, self-control, personal purity, and selflessness have always been respected as “gold standards” for both public and private behavior.

At the birth of our nation and during its formative years, the founding fathers exhibited an extraordinary wisdom in anticipating the whimsical side of human nature as forces of good and evil rage in and around it.  They understood that if the wholly innovative structure of freedom they formed was to survive, government not only needed the ability to promote (at times enforce) the gold standards, but also needed the internal mechanisms for applying those same standards to itself.  The end product was a government shaped as no other had ever been.  Three co-equal, mutually independent but intricately cooperative branches, were to oversee growth into the future through the will of the people.  The legislative branch was to codify societal consensus, being guided by constitutional restraints.  The responsibility of the judiciary was interpretation of those statutes – not by prophesying cultural shifts, or anticipating the outcomes of their choices, or incorporating international precedent, but by interpreting through the written filter of constitutionally sanctioned law.

According to men like Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Patrick Henry, all of this was predicated upon the assumption that the people and their leaders would live in moral “rectitude” respecting the indispensable contributions of religion.  Religious right-wingers, as many of them would now be labeled, were to be an integral part of what drove the fortunes of the republic. To our discredit, we have wandered a long way since then.  Large segments of our population truly believe public servants have the super-human ability to make choices without engaging their personal convictions or being influenced by their religious or non-religious loyalties.  In May 2004,Max Boot (Council on Foreign Relations) detailed the court-driven growth of decadence since the 1950s, but then proceeded to deny any indication of cultural decline!  A commentary originating with theBaltimoreSun in May seemed to be equally in the dark when the author suggested immunity for any Catholic politician who breaks Catholic Canon law in the performance of his or her duties.

These examples serve to illustrate how far removed from reality post-modern liberal thinking is.  Human beings are moral and spiritual creatures; their conscience and convictions precede their actions.  Their created design makes it impossible to separate who they are from what they do.  One’s ethical system or religion or irreligion permeates the whole of one’s character and personality.  The meteoric rise over the last forty years of divorce rates, crime rates, sexual promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, prime time vulgarities and over 33 million dead pre-born children is not the result of decisions made in a vacuum.  It is the fruit of decisions promoting secularized public policy by people with convictions and agendas.

In spite of it all, “We the people…” are not governing effectively.  It’s not that most Americans have personally abandoned the gold standards.  Polls have demonstrated increasingly solid pro-religion, pro-traditional morality, pro-traditional family, anti-judicial tyranny sentiments across the country.  It’s just that too few of us seem to care enough to act.  So, while good people remain spectators, evil prevails.

            It is still possible to set things aright however.  First and most importantly, the advice that Deist Rationalist Thomas Jefferson voiced still rings true.  During the Constitutional Convention he implored all present to call upon “the Father of lights” who “governs the affairs” of all men.  Second, good people must insist on governing again; even if they must expend the time and energy it takes to contact legislators and vote.  It should cause Americans great shame to watch 60% of eligible Iraqi voters participate in their elections amid homicide bombings and artillery fire while in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” we’re lucky to get 55%.