Harming Americans???

Justice and accountability, does this include the 54 million baby's that have been aborted since January 22, 1973? Our Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branch of our Government and the country's people have had an extended vacation for a very long time. It is time to hold all of us accountable. Not only is the loss of life that our country is experiencing and is devastating our souls, but also the loss of income to the economy and our Government (Local, State, & Federal) including the Social Security Shortfall. The people who were aborted would have provided for the future, not only financially but the leadership, direction, and moral compass that we so desperately need. Our financial, moral, and spiritual problems all started by the seed that was planted in Roe vs. Wade and now has culminated in the full blown tree of destruction that is now tearing down the very fabric that our country was built on. Dr. Martin Luther King has said "Ultimately, you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree."
Galatians 6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. 

Forgiveness to the Banks but no Forgiveness to Their Customers

The many banks who were helped through the financial crisis are failing their own customers. It seems that our Government, and the people forgave the Banks their debts. The Banks were helped by loans and given time to repay those loans. But the banks have forgotten what reciprocity means. We have gone out of our way to help in this economic crisis and the climate that we now live in. But enough is enough, apparently there has been no lessons learned when it comes to the morality of the many issues that we now face.

With the foreclosure problems, people being locked out of their homes when it is not necessary reminds me of a parable that Jesus taught.

Matt 18:23-35
23 "Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.
24 As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him.
25 Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
26 "The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.'
27 The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
28 "But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded.
29 "His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
30 "But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.
31 When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
32 "Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to.
33 Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?'
34 In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
35 "This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."

Should the banks be now thrown in jail for their neglect of the people who were their customers? The Banks have been forgiven, will they now forgive in return. But that would be Altruism and that is not the current moral endeavor in this present economic climate.

There has been an impassioned plea for morality in recent weeks, but they are not calling for a return to biblical ethics. Instead, they explicitly reject Christian and Religious morality in favor of a code that exudes selfishness and living in the light of Randian and Libertarian ways.

Though Ayn Rand has been dead for three decades, her philosophy is still embedded in the American way of life. It also has embedded it’s way into our churches by using quasi-biblical principles to obtain wealth but disposing of God’s principles. The big emphasis lately is on homosexuality and promiscuity which have replaced greed as the root of all evil. Gordon Gecko (movie “Wall Street”) is now rolling over in laughter, because greed is good, everything else is bad. So the battle cry for the libertarian worldview, as it is with Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, is replacing the cross with the dollar sign and making that a good thing.

But Altruism is the opposite of Randism/Libertarianism. Though it might seem obvious that altruism is central to the teachings of Jesus, one important and influential strand of Christianity would qualify this. St Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, I:II Quaestio 26, Article 4 states that we should love ourselves more than our neighbor. His interpretation of the Pauline phrase is that we should seek the common good more than the private good but this is because the common good is a more desirable good for the individual. The Apostle Paul in First Corithians 13 says "love seeks not its own interests." We need to shed light on tensions by contrasting the impostors of authentic self-affirmation and altruism such as Randism and Libertarianism. By analysis of other-regard within creative individuation of the self, and by contrasting love for the few with love for the many. Love confirms others in their freedom, shuns propagandas and masks, assures others of its presence, and is ultimately confirmed not by mere declarations from others, but by each person's experience and practice from within. As in practical arts, the presence and meaning of love becomes validated and grasped not by words and reflections alone, but in the making of the connection.

In saying all this, America is in trouble and headed down a path that reflects the good of the corporation over the good of the people. In the Constitution of the United States it says “we the people” and it is heading towards “we the corporations”. The rest of the preamble of the US Constitution reads “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

With Altruism out and Randism/Libertarianism in, that part of the Constitution should read “in order to form a more perfect union, establish greed as good, insure selfishness, provide domestic breakdown, provide corporations with profits by any means, promote the dollar by the dollar, for the dollar for posterity for all corporate holders.

I’m sad as I look out at this once great nation to see it has not learned from history. Everyone thinks this way of Libertarianism is new, it’s not, it’s only new to you. It’s old and it’s called greed at any cost.

Lord forgive us of this root of all evil?

Only Some People are Created Equal

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

If your not born in this country and you also presently live in Arizona the above statement from the Declaration of Independence is not true. Xenophobia, the 14th Amendment, being Mexican, being whatever is different from you means that all men are not created equal? Our Government is now backtracking and say that we are not sure what the drafters of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence had in mind. I guess we all have been out to lunch the past two hundred and thirty four years.

The problem with men learning from history is that they have not learned from history and that is why history repeats itself. All the historical facts, writings, musings do not mean a thing about how this country was founded. From the mind set in Congress this is apparently so. Our country ideals are based on jurisprudence, so lets just change the rule of law to suit whatever whim and fancy that comes our way. Let’s see, the Declaration of Independence also says

“ Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. “

Light and transient causes, may we all stop and ponder this. Maybe a visit to Ellis Island will awaken our senses from where we come from. My great grandparents were immigrants, glad that they did not cross over from Mexico to Arizona. My parents who were born here were not shipped back to Ireland and the history that we have all come from this ideal is where we have not learned from that historical fact.

When the people have spoken and it is declined by one judge that sure is a problem for jurisprudence. In Lincoln’s Gettysburg address where he ends by saying “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Apparently our government does not want to honor freedom for all, especially in our own country, and dishonor all who died for those freedoms in the past. Only some are created equal is the rally cry in our economic downturn, it is only a light and transient time. We will throw our history and equality aside for a temporary fix that will disfigure us in the years ahead. Let us learn from history.

When Greatness Slips Away

By BOB HERBERT
New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist
Published: June 21, 2010

We’ve blown so many enormous opportunities over the past several years. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, when most of the world had lined up in support of the United States, President George W. Bush had the chance to lead a vast cooperative, international effort to combat terrorism and lay the groundwork for a more peaceful, more secure world.

He blew it with the invasion of Iraq.

In the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we had not just the chance but an obligation to call on our best talent to creatively rebuild the historic city of New Orleans. That could have kick-started a major renovation of the nation’s infrastructure and served as the incubator for a new and desperately needed urban policy. Despite President Bush’s vow of “bold action” during a carefully staged, nationally televised appearance in the French Quarter, we did nothing of the kind.

The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans. Radical change was called for. (One thinks of Franklin Roosevelt raging against the “economic royalists” and asserting that “we need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.”)

But there has been no radical change, only caution and timidity and more of the same. The royalists remain triumphant and working people are absorbing blow after devastating blow. More than 1.2 million of the long-term jobless are due to lose their unemployment benefits this month.

The oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, as horrible as it has been, was yet another opportunity. In his address to the nation from the Oval Office last week, President Obama could have laid out a dramatic new energy policy for the U.S., calling on every American to do his or her part to help us escape the insidious, nonstop destruction that is the result of our obsessive reliance on fossil fuels.

He chose not to.

As a nation, we are becoming more and more accustomed to a sense of helplessness. We no longer rise to the great challenges before us. It’s not just that we can’t plug the oil leak, which is the perfect metaphor for what we’ve become. We can’t seem to do much of anything.

The city of Detroit is using federal money to destroy thousands upon thousands of empty homes, giving in to a sense of desperation that says there is no way to rebuild the city so let’s do the opposite: let’s destroy even more of it. Lots more of it.

There are plans aplenty for demolishing large parts of what’s left of Detroit, which in its heyday was the symbol of an America that was still a powerfully constructive force, a place that could produce things and improve the lives of its people and inspire the rest of the world.

Referring to an aspect of one of the plans, The Times’s Susan Saulny wrote in an article in Monday’s paper: “An urban homestead — one of the more popular parts of the plan — would be tantamount to country living in the city, the plan says, with homeowners enjoying an agricultural environment and lower taxes in exchange for disconnecting from some city services like water.”

The June 28 cover story of Time magazine is headlined, “The Broken States of America.” As I’ve mentioned here several times, the states are facing a catastrophic fiscal situation that is short-circuiting essential services, pushing even more people out of work, and undermining the feeble national economic recovery.

As Time reported: “Schools, health services, libraries — and the salaries that go with them — are all on the chopping block as states and cities face their worst cash squeeze since the Great Depression.”

We are submitting to this debacle with the same pathetic lack of creativity and helpless mind-set that now seems to be the default position of Americans in the 21st century. We have become a nation that is good at destroying things — with wars overseas and mind-bogglingly self-destructive policies here at home — but that has lost sight of how to build and maintain a flourishing society. We’re dismantling our public school system and, incredibly, attacking our spectacularly successful system of higher education, which is the finest in the world.

How is it possible that we would let this happen?

We’ve got all kinds of sorry explanations for why we can’t do any of the things we need to do. The Democrats can’t get 60 votes in the Senate. Our budget deficits are too high. Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck might object.

Meanwhile, the greatness of the United States, which so many have taken for granted for so long, is steadily slipping away.

~