America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great (14 page)

Even today we exploit our fellow human beings for work. Is it moral for us, for example, to take advantage of cheap labor from illegal immigrants while denying them citizenship? I’m sure you can tell from the way I phrased the question that I believe we have taken the moral low road on this issue. Some segments of our economy would virtually collapse without these undocumented workers — we all know that — yet we continue to harass and deport many individuals who are simply seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Is there a way to apply logic to this issue and arrive at an intelligent solution?

All we have to do is look to our northern neighbor, Canada. They have a guest worker program,
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which allows people to enter the country as officially recognized guest workers who pay taxes, receive benefits, and are able to come and go as they please without infringing on anyone else’s rights. They have the reassuring knowledge that they have contributed to the local
economy while at the same time helping their families at home. Why is immigration such a difficult issue for us to deal with? I believe we are so tempted to play politics with this issue that both logic and morality have been thrown out of the window.

What does the fact that we are so often involved in conflicts with other nations say about our morality? Since the inception of our nation, there have been very few extensive periods of peace. To approach the question another way, does an individual of high moral standing frequently find himself fighting with others? By bringing it down to an individual level, it is easier to see that the number of conflicts does not predict the level of morality. Instead, we need to first look at the reasons for the various wars before commenting on their morality.

Most of our numerous conflicts could be justified based on our national interests, and even though there were always protesters to our wars, few conflicts were considered immoral until the Vietnam War came along. Many said that stopping communism’s spread was a noble goal and fully justified our involvement in this war, but others argued with some validity that we had no right to assume that our way of governing was superior to communism. As a student at Yale, I can remember these boisterous protests against the war, which echoed on college campuses across the nation.

During that war in the jungles of Vietnam, we burned villages with napalm and destroyed the lives of many innocent villagers who had nothing to do with the political struggle. The Vietcong forces had the tremendous advantage of knowing both the terrain and the people, which eventually afforded them victory in the war. Even though we had overwhelming force, we had no way to deploy it in jungle terrain. Many of our soldiers were not clear about their overall mission, which surely had a negative effect on their enthusiasm. If communist forces had been trying to invade the United States, there would have been no question about the goals of the military and the country at large, and no sacrifice would have been too great in order to achieve victory. There also would have been no question about the morality of defending our way of life in our own country. Since the Vietnam conflict ended poorly, our nation experienced a period of shame and humiliation for which the military was blamed, and many of the returning veterans were treated with disrespect. The Vietnam War
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dampened America’s enthusiasm for war, and we experienced one of the longest periods of peace in our nation’s history.

However, sixteen years after the Vietnam War ended, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the enthusiasm for military intervention was tremendous. After the successful conclusion of the effort to restore freedom to Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush and the military heroes enjoyed enormous popularity and approval. A war with well-defined and widely accepted goals that ends in victory will virtually always be seen as virtuous. The subsequent war with Iraq
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years later was much more controversial, especially after weapons of mass destruction were not found. Although a qualified victory was eventually scored, the opposition to it certainly rivaled that present during the Vietnam War. Whether the war in Iraq was moral or not is highly debatable. If you think stopping a brutal dictator from continuing to kill hundreds of thousands of his own people is worthwhile, then you are more likely to believe that we acted in a morally justifiable manner. If you are more concerned about the over 4,000 American lives that were lost and the hundreds of billions of dollars that were added to our national debt to be passed along to our children, then you’re more likely to feel that our efforts were immoral.

The point here is that it is very difficult to determine our nation’s morality based on its military conflicts. Also, because we have dramatic changes of leadership and political philosophy, we do not have a consistent policy that governs military intervention. Then too one can legitimately ask the question, is any war moral? We try to sanitize wars by establishing all kinds of rules of conduct. Certainly women and children should be spared and torture should not be used, along with a myriad of other guidelines. If we followed this line of reasoning regarding prohibitions in war to its logical conclusion, I think the ultimate rule would say no war, period! If you can establish arbitrary rules for war, then making one more rule that eliminates all war makes a lot of sense. Of course, by definition, wars tend to start when logical, reasoned diplomacy fails.

It is hard to talk about the morality of a nation without considering the question of family values and the education of our youth. As we discussed in chapter 4, our founding fathers placed great importance on educating future generations. “I think with you,” Benjamin Franklin once said, “that nothing is of more importance for the public weal [or welfare], than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue. Wise and good men are, in my opinion, the strength of the state; more so than riches or arms. I think also, that general virtue is more probably to be expected and obtained from the education of
youth, than from the exhortations of adult persons; bad habits and vices of the mind being, like diseases of the body, more easily prevented than cured. I think, moreover, that the talents for the education of youth are the gift of God; and that he on whom they are bestowed, whenever a way is opened for the use of them, is as strongly called as if he heard a voice from heaven….”
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I believe one of the reasons our nation prospered was a strong emphasis on traditional family values that included instruction on the difference between right and wrong, teaching that began in the home and continued at school. And one of the central sources for defining values was the Bible, which back then was found in all public schools. Basic religious principles were taught in public schools in such a way as to have the broadest possible application without favoring any particular denomination. Children were taught that there was a Creator to whom they were responsible and that there was a moral code given to us by the Creator to whom we would all have to answer in the afterlife. The founding fathers had much to say regarding the morality of our nation and how important it was to our future, but I think one of the best quotes that summarizes their feelings is from John Adams when he said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
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I fully recognize that many in our society would prefer not to derive their morality from the Bible and its teachings. Many such people are atheists or agnostics and claim to have their own internal moral compass. While their opinions diverge when it comes to sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, gambling, the use of illicit drugs and alcohol, and other social behavior, I find it interesting to note, however, that their moral compass points in very much the same direction as Judeo-Christian values when it comes to such issues as murder, lying, cheating, and theft.

There is no question that the perspective over the last few decades regarding social morality has changed dramatically. When I was a child, it was generally considered shameful to have a child out of wedlock, whereas today, in many segments of our society, having a child out of wedlock is the norm, not in any way assigned social stigma. Many people feel this indicates that we are progressing to a more enlightened stage and that we are less judgmental and more accepting of everyone. Although being open-minded and accepting is generally a good thing, we should examine the effect this change in attitude has on society as a whole.

Children born out of wedlock are at least twice as likely to live in poverty as those born to a traditional family consisting of a married father and
mother with a stable household income.
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Unwed mothers are also more likely to be high school or college dropouts and are more likely to be recipients of public welfare — frequently on a chronic basis. There is a greater incidence of sexually transmitted diseases in both unwed mothers and unwed fathers. Not only are these things deleterious to the affected children and parents, but they also place extra burdens on the rest of society, who has to pay the bills. And because someone else pays the bill, the behavior continues, and we feed an entitlement society with a voracious appetite for government funding.

This brings us back to our point that what appears to be good in the short run, but is harmful in the long run, is in the end not virtuous and does not contribute to societal morality. A truly moral nation enacts policies that encourage personal responsibility and discourage self-destructive behavior by not subsidizing people who live irresponsibly and make poor choices. This can be done in a compassionate way by phasing out government assistance for those already receiving it and by making it clear that there will be no government assistance in the future in these situations. This is not to say that the affected individuals cannot be aided by their families, churches, and other charitable organizations and individuals. What we have just discussed may seem a bit harsh to many bleeding heart do-gooders, but I submit that what is harsh is continuing to encourage irresponsible behavior and generating a permanent underclass. We also simply cannot afford welfare programs for able-bodied people who make unwise choices and expect other people to pay for it.

An example of how responsible government policies can change a society’s behavior is found in Sweden, where they decided in the 1990s that their nation’s incidence of drunk driving was too high.
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They changed the legally tolerated blood-alcohol limit from 0.05 to 0.02 (in the United States, the average tolerated blood-alcohol level is 0.08 — four times higher than that in Sweden) and enacted and enforced severe penalties for drunk driving, including mandatory jail time, astronomical fines, and confiscation of one’s vehicle. As a result, there was a dramatic decline in alcohol-related traffic accidents and fatalities. The behavioral changes are so enculturated that hardly anyone even considers driving if they have consumed a single can of beer. This shows that people do respond to appropriate legislative changes and that there is still great potential for our nation to use government in a responsible and uplifting manner that will not break the bank and that will encourage the development of responsible citizens who will be contributors rather than dependents.

In 2008, we saw the beginning of a gigantic financial crisis on Wall Street, with financial experts convincing both Republicans and Democrats that a financial tsunami would destroy the United States and the rest of the world if a gigantic government bailout did not occur immediately. So our government embarked upon a series of financial ventures to prop up companies and financial entities that were “too big to fail.”

Whether it really worked or not is anybody’s guess and can never be proven one way or another, but one thing that did become clear was that there were many people involved in the financial markets who made enormous sums of money by engaging in questionable financial practices, while shareholders and constituents made little or nothing — or even lost great sums of money. Some of the tricks employed by money managers had been outlawed through wise legislative reforms enacted after the stock market crash in 1929 and the ensuing decade of turmoil. Congress recognized way back then that unless financial markets were regulated, greed would raise its ugly head and wreak havoc whenever human beings are involved.

During the 1990s, however, Congress allowed significant deregulation of financial markets, perhaps expecting that human nature had changed. It took almost twenty years to prove that greed was still alive and well, and it almost destroyed our nation. The obvious question given our subject matter is, does a moral nation allow criminals who have defrauded the populace to get away without penalty?

I have no problem with people making large sums of money legitimately along with all the other people involved in whatever venture is generating the money. On the other hand, just because people control our markets’ financial instruments, they should not be able to personally benefit by manipulating those instruments to their advantage. Many of these people suffer from the same type of entitlement mentality seen in poor people who are always looking for a government handout. These Wall Street moguls and corporate executives actually think that what they do is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, even though in many cases they are simply moving money around, producing nothing. The jury is still out on whether our government will conduct a serious investigation into what manipulation, if any, lay behind this crisis and whether justice will be served.

The Bible says that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10), and with this basic principle in mind one can easily see how a government that is in love with the people’s money could engage in the
evil act of “bleeding the people.” A truly virtuous government would act fiscally responsible, constantly remind itself of its duties, and collect just enough money through taxes to take care of those duties. It would never overspend its budget unless there was an emergency, in which case it would make every effort to pay back the debt as soon as possible. The United States government was very fiscally responsible up until World War II, after which time paying back the national debt became less of a priority. That debt has continued to grow and now is almost equal to our gross domestic product (GDP)
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— an entire year’s worth of our nation’s production simply going to pay off debt.