How The United States Is Failing The Moral Test

The true test of our character never lies in times of ease or abundance. Our character is tested in times of pain, in times of hardship, in times of tribulation and sorrow.

Over the past decade the character of our society has been tested repeatedly, and we have repeatedly failed the test. We've failed to live up to our own standards, failed to rise above our temporary circumstances, to remain true to the moral and ethical code that has been handed down to us by our founding fathers, built upon through the generations who followed them.

In times of economic hardship, we turned on our neighbors, our elders and even our own children. We've shaken our fist and stomped our feet at the poorest and weakest among us. We've attacked the foreigner and the immigrant, who came to our shores seeking safe haven and a better way of life.

We've screeched louder than the demons of hell about the burden of caring for the sick. We've shown that we'd sooner see old men become homeless and children turned away from the school lunch line, than to dig in our pockets, pay our taxes and assume the responsibility of caring for the weakest members of our society.

In 2001 we were tested. When the twin towers fell to earth in flames, taking with them our fellow citizens, our neighbors, friends and loved ones, we responded by crying out for blood. As history has revealed to us, we didn't care whose blood it was, what we wanted was to punish, to do harm to someone, in return for the harm that was done to us. We allowed ourselves to be deceived, to be led off to war against our perceived enemy, to decimate a country, to exterminate more than a million people, without question.

During times of war, we were tested. How did we do? We showed our willingness to go along with human torture. We demonstrated our ability to rationalize the 'rightness' of depriving others of their most basic human rights. We embraced the idea of Gitmo, of secret prisons and secret prisoners, people detained indefinitely, guilty until proven innocent, but deprived of a trial and a jury and therefore deprived of the right to be proven innocent. We showed our hypocrisy, when we cried out against the government's supposed authority to detain American citizens indefinitely, without a trial, but remained silent when we became aware that citizens of other countries were being held without the right to a trial.

Every day in the United States, our society is being tested. How are we doing? Our state sanctioned executions have become public forums for cruel and unusual punishment, and do we care? The American death panel is hard at work dreaming up new ways to kill people, testing these methods on real human beings, while families watch in horror, because this is what we demand, in the name of justice. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, self proclaimed Christians of the right wing variety claim this is the will of God. Is it? Jesus said, "You have heard it said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you do not resist an evil person." (Mathew 5:39) The words "Do not return evil for evil" are clearly spelled out in both the book of Romans and 1 Peter.

There are two paths to choose when confronted with an evil. When our daughters are raped, when our sons are murdered, we can become the thing we despise or we can take the high road, refusing to return evil for evil. How can we say that those who murder must be murdered and not understand that doing so makes us murderers, as well? Not even when state sanctioned murder becomes state sanctioned torture and murder, are we willing to demand that the state stop killing on our behalf.

Someone else is inserting the needle, not us, but that does not make us innocent. We are the death panel. We are the face of the executioner. We are the blood thirsty killers, but we're killing those who 'deserve it', so that makes it right. We're only torturing people who did bad things, therefore our torture isn't a bad thing.

It's easy to do right during times of ease. It's easy to be generous during times of plenty, to be compassionate when compassion demands little in the way of self sacrifice.It's easy to be non-violent in times of peace, to be just to our enemies, when we have none. It's easy to claim the laws of conscience and Constitution for ourselves. It's easy to do unto others as we would have them to do unto us, when the 'others' are people we know, people we deem worthy.

What these trials reveal about our society is that we live under an illusion of ourselves as civilized, just, moral, principled. Underneath the facade of "America," there lurks a monster, barbaric, brutal, violent, greedy, immoral, unjust, corrupt, inhumane, hideously ugly. The true face of the monster that we are is revealed each time we face a test, each time we are called upon to rise to a difficult challenge, but respond with violence, cruelty, hatred, selfishness and inhumanity.