With Thanksgiving coming up, I’d like to suggest a nice, safe topic to discuss with our families and dearest friends: Are Americans a moral people anymore?
It’s a question that needs asking, because anyone who pays attention can’t help but notice a lot of immoral things going on.
Topping the list are three despicable atrocities, slaughters in Nevada, Texas and New York City. Words still fail me, but I’ve come to realize that each massacre leaves me slightly less shocked, trending toward a chilling new “normal.”
The only bright spot was the story of Stephen Willeford and Johnnie Langendorff. While most people would have just grabbed their cells to either dial 911 or take a video, Willeford grabbed a rifle and ran barefoot toward the danger, wounding the church killer, who then drove away. Then random motorist Langendorff picked up armed hitchhiker Willeford and gave chase to the end. Only in Texas, right? Well, I would hope only in America.
Then at a “lesser” level, as a tiny example of a larger decline, we have the constant reports out of Washington, D.C. that make up the “Russia” narrative. For months now, we’ve been told time and time again of Russian interference in our elections, of Russian collusion by certain others, of Russian this and Russian that, including what a failed presidential candidate coyly mentioned in her tell-all-but-reveal-nothing book as a “salacious dossier.”
Yep, that “dossier” that her party (and at least partially her campaign) paid a law firm to produce – anonymously, buried in $10 million of billing line items. And never mind that various top-level Beltway bigwigs from both parties raked in the Russian dough, including acting as unregistered foreign agents on behalf of a Russian-puppet Ukrainian government. Irony and hypocrisy aside, such is not the conduct of people with a firm moral base, is it? How did such creatures reach the top levels of our republic?
Consider that Nov. 6 and 7 marked the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik coup in Russia that put Lenin in power and released the scourge of Communist totalitarianism upon the world. The Black Book of Communism tells the tale, of at least 50 million people killed, not in war between nations, but by governments slaughtering their own citizens in order to advance “revolutionary” goals.
Communism’s sole contribution to humanity was their slaughter of more Nazis than the Allies in the second World War. Did Stalin lift a finger to support France or Britain before Hitler’s armies invaded on June 22, 1941? Heck no, before that, Uncle Joe split the spoils of Poland with Hitler, had invaded the three Baltic countries and was at war with Finland.
I could go on, and on, but the reality remains that Communism was, and is, structurally immoral. Furthermore, while Communism is supposedly dead, its immorality survived, and again thrives in Putin’s Russia. Now it infects America in dangerous ways.
Now, how could Russia be so influential unless America has, in a larger sense, somehow become more, um, morally receptive?
So what’s my point? I suggest for Thanksgiving, you get a copy of President John Adams’ letter to the Massachusetts Militia of October 11, 1798. If you don’t, here’s the important old-white-guy stuff:
First, Adams wrote of public discourse “towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practicing iniquity and extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and insolence: this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world.”
Sounds a little too familiar, doesn’t it?
Then Adams declared, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.