Are you paying attention to what is happening these days? Even if you think you are, are you really just barely noticing what is going on in America? If so, these words are for you.
The poet Mary Oliver has said that attention should be accompanied with feeling, with some level of emotional engagement, for it to really matter.
Our country is enveloped in a fog that obscures the fact that important institutions and people are dying.
- Our political institutions, which began with a Constitutional Presidency and Congress, are being destroyed. People are being deported, lodged in foreign prisons facing torture, or placed in a growing number of domestic concentration camps called detention centers, without due process of law.
- We have a domestic para-military force, called by some “the President’s private army,” known by the initials ICE and CBP.
- We used to have a national government led by people who respected the laws (most of the time). We recognized laws, practices and guardrails that existed to minimize financial and other forms of corruption.
That too is dying. We now have a President who is extorting money from the Department of Justice. He wants $230 million in “compensation” for legal fees and reputational harm as a result of the Mar-a-Largo documents search. We also see members of the current administration, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, taking large sums of money from Middle Eastern countries.
But the most serious thing currently dying in America is our sense of values, our belief in public morality. We no longer seem to care if our leaders do not just blur but totally erase any notion that there is a difference between good and evil in our public life.
Are you aware of the constant scurrilous lies, misrepresentations, and fake news coming from presidential cabinet members like Kristi Noem and even, sad to say, Marco Rubio.
And what about the crude, hate-filled, and profane gestures and language (s-word and f-word) that are becoming common in public statements and in posts by our President? These linguistic changes were not initiated by Donald Trump or MAGA. Our culture has been coarsening for decades.
Yet, isn’t it clear that the Trumpers have done nothing to slow our slide toward moral depravity? Instead, they have contributed to this decline.
And the fact that all of this is occurring with almost no real outrage from Republican Congressmen, other than Kentucky’s Senator Rand Paul and Representative Thomas Massie, is a clear sign that respect for public morality among our legislative leaders is heading for hospice care.
A picture of our need for “a shared basis for mainstream moral authority” and how this has been lost can be found in George Marsden’s book, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the crisis of liberal belief (2014). I think it interesting that he sees our traditional morality and religion declining in part due to our worship of science and technology, even while we still celebrating ourselves as a church-going nation.
Many believe that public morality should be linked to religion, even though we all know some very moral non-believers. It was good, then, to see Catholic bishops defending the poor and their condemning the brutalization of immigrants. Clerics from many Christian and non-Christian faiths joined together in Minneapolis to protest ICE’s violent treatment of protesters.
And let’s remember the Buddhist monks who recently made a 2,300 mile winter journey to Washington, D.C. to promote peace and unity.
It would be nice to see more public outrage coming from the folks in the pews of our mainstream religious denominations. I do not expect the evangelical Christian nationalists to support a shared sense of public morality. They are not big on sharing and only want their particular right-wing political theology imposed on the rest of us.
Edmund Burke, a founder of modern Conservatism, is reputed to have said that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
It is time for the good men and women of America to begin to do something to restore life, health, dignity, and public morality to our country.
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