Our nation sits on a foundation built of decency and respect for the law. Before there was a constitution, a Congress, a presidency or justices, there were those two things. It is impossible to write laws to direct every human interaction, hence decency is mandatory. If no one respects the law there is no way to enforce it short of becoming a complete police state, and even then it does not really work. If our nation is to work at all there must be decency and respect for the law. And yet the two leading stories that confront us, for the last several days and for several days to come are rooted in the absence of those two things.
The campus chaos throughout the nation is rooted in a lack of decency. Let’s be honest, they are rooted in antisemitism – a specific hatred of a specific people. Such prejudicial hatred is the precise opposite of decency. But further the actions of miscreants (“protesters” is just not the right word here) are entirely illegal. The entirely illegal trial of Donald J. Trump in New York City is born of hatred for the man – not disagreement, not distaste – hatred, the ultimate indecency.
The problems we face right now do not come with easy fixes and they will not be solved quickly. It is easy to say the problem is in our character because in the end, it is. But the thing is our character is unchanging – this is how we act when we do not have anything better to aspire towards, and therein lies the path back to reason.
The three fundamental institutions of our society are government, education and religion. All three now serve the needs and desires of the so-called “leaders” that operate them more than they do the people. Church has turned itself into an entertainment medium meant to keep the pews full and the plate fuller, paying the staff, not to make those in the pews better. Stories like this are unsurprising to any reasonable church observer. The pandemic revealed our teachers to be a bunch of self-serving salary collectors that would rather mail it in than actually work for a living. Our government is increasingly intrusive in daily life simply for the sake of making more bureaucrats and increasing their power. (I could rant for hours about that story I just linked but will resist as it would get all chemically and regulatorily geeky.) In order to bolster their ability to do so they throw bones to the least productive of us. In such a world what is there to aspire towards?
Our character has returned to its normal state because we no longer expect any better of ourselves. This nation was not designed to operate properly unless we aspire to be better. We are broken on a fundamental level because we have ceased to aspire to be any better. The place to start to make the nation better is with ourselves. Make sure we aspire to be better and work towards those aspirations. It’ll be hard; it’ll be difficult, but in the end, it is the only thing that will make a difference.
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