Where Are We Going?

Do we have a direction for this country? What are America’s goals? After living (stumbling) under what passes for “leadership” these days, I feel this country is more lost today than ever.

Actually, we are headed in several directions. We are headed for a second great depression, according to economic experts; we are headed for war with Iran, according to U.S. News and World Report and according to the rhetoric that our paranoid, war-hawkish ‘leaders’ are spouting; we are headed toward environmental disaster, according to environmentalists everywhere; we are headed toward third world status, according to our downward trend on the list of information technology rankings. Our increasing illiteracy, our increasing waistlines and our vanishing chances of having a workable and equitable healthcare plan has us decreasing in the rankings of the world’s healthiest nations. We are leading the world in number of incarcerated individuals, a dubious honor at best.

In a recent poll, 70% of respondents to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey say things are going badly for this country.

We are told as individuals that we should have a 5-year plan, a 10-year-plan, and beyond. Can anyone tell me what those plans are for this country?

The U.S. has become more dangerously polarized through our blind impassioned pursuit of terrorist (that we certainly have had a hand in creating) and we are antagonizing them even more with each sip of oil from foreign wells.

As a nation, we have lost our sense of what is right and wrong, fair and unfair, just and unjust. George Bush’s gang thought it right that we destroy a nation to protect our interests and access to oil. They thought it just to use telecoms to secretly gather information on millions of Americans in their pursuit of terrorists that, oddly enough, has not led to any arrests. They thought it fair to hold hundreds of those who they consider to be ‘enemy combatants’ for years without a trial. They thought it fair to place unqualified cronies in such high government positions as the head of the U.S. Attorneys Office, Director of FEMA, Commissioner FDA, Chair of Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Administrator of Medicare & Medicaid Services. But ask any individual you come into contact with throughout your busy day for their opinion on any of these topics and they will give you a very different version of what is right, fair and just.

Our emerging world market economy is creating an ‘every-man-for-himself’ value system. Traditional morality, i.e., selflessness, altruism, sharing and cooperation, is the glue that built our society and it is crumbling.

This is the key factor behind much of the social unrest globally, according to George Matafonov, author of a new book entitled Fire & Water: Market Morality & Civil Society. "While the threat of terrorism and multiculturalism are often convenient and easy scapegoats, the root causes of social unrest globally lie in the experiment in trying to model the moral core of society on economic theory, rather than traditional human values," said Matafonov. "While economic theory results in efficiency in competitive markets, it has no place outside the market," he added.

As humans, we have been living in societies for tens of thousands of years and have developed values and a sense of morality to enable us to live in peace, harmony and prosperity. In the space of less than 50 years, economic theory has turned all this upside down by insisting our chief value should be competitive self-interest.

Religion has taken a beating by people who lack the incentive or the inclination to give it a ‘test drive’ and by reports that prove clergy are humans. Catholic church sex scandals have become legendary. Evangelical church leaders become involved in sexual immoral conduct, tax evasion, extramarital affairs, shameless theatrics to raise money, and infighting. Christianity has taken on so many different doctrines that there is no longer one central belief. Even the idea of God holding dominion over earth as its creator is no longer acceptable to a growing number of people. Supreme Court decisions that ban recognition of God in public life have the effect of abolishing Christianity in public life and discrediting Christianity in private life. These Supreme Court decisions are driven by organizations such as American Atheists, the group founded by Madelyn Murray O'Hair in 1963, the American Civil Liberties Union and many others.

Family values are deteriorating through moral decay that allows adulterous relationships that in turn increases the divorce rate. The resulting increased divorce rate increases out-of-wedlock pregnancies that are costing taxpayers more than $112 billion annually. The unfortunate side effect of divorce is a single-parent family that is subject to a life filled with early pregnancy, school dropout, and delinquent behavior. Children who grow up without a father present, even when adjustments are made for income, are 375% more likely to need professional assistance for emotional problems, twice as likely to repeat a grade of school, and more likely to suffer a wide variety of other disorders including anxiety, peer conflict, and hyperactivity. While television and the movies gather headlines as the motivation behind teen violence, school administrators blame "family breakup" for violence in the schools. As a result of economic pressures to work longer hours or multiple jobs, children of single-parent families find themselves unsupervised. They can’t help but have feelings of abandonment even if they understand why they are left alone.

The idea of a democratically elected government has become a joke. Our elected officials are guided more by whichever corporation has the most lobbyist who gets the most attention with the most money as opposed to what the taxpayers really need in their struggle to survive. Super delegates have a disproportionate voting power and can back any candidate they want regardless of who their peers vote for.

As we search for alternative energy sources in an attempt to wean ourselves from fossil based fuel, the very symbols of what we are fighting against, big oil, is busy developing a corporate environmentalism designed to appeal to green consumers, while fighting tooth and nail any legislation that would interfere with their financial bottom line. This hypocrisy is nothing more than an overt attempt to maintain their influence, and product brand, over a society that should be focused on finding alternative energy sources.

David Suzuki, a noted environmental activist, author and host of CBC Television science magazine, published a post on guardian.co.uk on how humans have lost the vital skill of forethought. He asks why we choose to ignore the warnings from the worlds leading scientists and Nobel prize winners of the coming ecological disaster. We have the capacity to alter our current course of ‘the degradation of our very life support systems - air, water, soil, energy and biodiversity’ and yet we choose to devote our attention to ‘every antic of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears’.

All in all, this is a pretty dismal picture of life in America. As long as this nation is devoid of strong moral leadership we cannot hope to focus our many talents and our creativity towards finding equitable and viable solutions that will benefit everyone.

What lies ahead is anybody’s guess. Somehow, just making more money seems pretty unfulfilling. What do you think?