America’s Critical Shortage of Character

 

What follows is my column from today's Orlando Sentinel

By now the entire world is well aware of the story of the three teenagers who gunned down Christopher Lane, a 22-year old Australian attending college in Oklahoma.

That such a cold-blooded, senseless killing could take place is numbing to the mind of any rational, decent human being.

The problem is, rational, decent human beings are becoming increasingly scarce in the United States – and I am afraid our modern definition of human liberty is partly to blame.

I often ask my students to define the word “liberty” in short essay form. Predictably, most of the answers dovetail towards the idea that we all have the right to do whatever we want to do in a free country. When I ask them where the phrase “personal responsibility” and the rights of others enters into their definition of liberty I most often get blank stares.

A few students will manage to eventually say that liberty means our right to do anything peaceful as long as we do not harm another human being. Even fewer get the connection between liberty and bearing responsibility for all of our choices.

In essence, many Americans today believe that we should be allowed to do anything we want – and someone else should take responsibility for the poor decisions we make. Moreover, it means that in today’s America, we believe we should be able to pursue whatever makes us happy without consequences, commentary or criticism.

How else, for example, do you explain how many of today’s young male Americans dress and entertain themselves? They walk around with the tops of their pants around their thighs, their skin covered with tattoos, ill-fitting baseball caps on their heads and various body piercings. They drive cars that incessantly blast all sorts of vile music at ear-splitting decibel levels.

Meanwhile, as economists have increasingly observed, more of those young “men” are failing to finish school, are often only marginally attached to the labor force while being significantly attached to their parents homes, the criminal justice system and/or the welfare state.

Unfortunately, the story is not much better for young women. How often have you heard girls of today using language that would make a sailor blush? When was the last time you saw a younger female dressed with anything approaching modesty? You get the point.

It is not just the young folks who seem to have abandoned any sense of honor or integrity.

How often do we read about the failings of our business leaders, politicians, public servants and parents in carrying out their duties in an honorable fashion?

While I am the first to defend businesses and the profit motive, I must admit that these are not good times for liberty-loving supporters of capitalism.

Today, our economy has been high-jacked by the Crony-Capitalists – those corporations who have learned how to rig the formerly free enterprise system into one where lobbyists line the halls of Washington, D.C. to steal the taxpayers money or rig the economic system to keep other competitors out of the market.

This is accomplished, of course, with the assistance of politicians from both parties who actively create laws, regulations and taxes that punish the virtuous and rewards those who have learned how to effectively engage in legalized plunder.

Today, over 47 million Americans live on food stamps. Almost half no longer pay any income taxes. Fully two-thirds of all federal tax dollars received by the Treasury end up as a transfer to another person in our growing welfare state.

While we have only 5 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of its prisoners.

Our public schools continue to rank at, or near the bottom, in scholastic achievement. And on and on…

Theodore Roosevelt once said, "Alike for the nation, and the individual, the one indispensable requisite is character - character that does and dares as well as endures, character that is active in the performance of virtue no less than firm in the refusal to do aught that is vicious or degraded."

The teens who murdered an innocent man for doing nothing more than jogging are simply symptomatic of a nation that has stood by and tolerated the erosion of virtue in our homes and in our institutions in favor of a definition of freedom that is devoid of personal integrity.

Until that changes, expect more senseless crimes in our “free” country.