How America Became Morally Bankrupt
Gary Null and Richard Gale
Progressive Radio Network, May 1, 2023
For those of us who have been activists in the media and the public arena –whether as broadcasters, journalists or community organizers — we have always believed that taking the initiative to increase public awareness about the disinformation, faults and failures in our society and the nation would engender constructive change. However, repeatedly, efforts to break Americans free from their comfort addiction have been futile exercises.
February’s Washington DC rally against the US-NATO proxy war against Russia, for example, which is perhaps the most important military crisis leading towards an exchange of nuclear missiles since the Cuban missile crisis, gathered a dismal several thousand protestors. Our complacency has become an endemic disorder. Even the neo-cons’ saber rattling towards self-annihilation is too much of an inconvenience to be bothered with.
Increasingly over the years little has changed to reverse the acceleration of our entire culture’s decline. Deep reflection and introspection consistently raise an essential question. What went wrong? For example, after promoting the benefits of adopting a plant-based diet for half century, I now question whether even five percent of the population has embraced a vegetarian philosophy and is committed to following it. The US is the most morbidly obese and overweight nation per capita in the developed world. Our life expectancy declined and many children born today will not outlive their parents. We are a nation with widespread inequality and buried in colossal debt at every level of society. Even the professional class, who are highly educated, find themselves in the precarious situation of an unannounced recession, runaway hyperinflation and multiple market uncertainties. When the economy grew, the new emerging elite embarked on a mad spending spree that they believed was necessary to maintain their unrealistic standard of living. After the pandemic and Biden’s blundering sanctions against Russia backfiring at home and throughout Europe, millions in the professional class are unable to service their debt. They have been spending more than they earn. But it is not just the upper middle class and moderately wealthy who struggle to remain financially afloat. The entire government — federal, state and city — has been on a massive spending binge as well. The White House dumped billions into fighting Covi-19 and over $115 billion in a pointless and losing war in Ukraine. Yet, none of these government expenditures have benefited either the country or taxpayers. As a nation, we are economically, politically and morally bankrupt.
Nor is anything crucial and necessary being done to reverse global warming trends and protect the environment. The Trump administration signed cruel bills to destroy the remaining ecological fragility that we all depend upon. In fact, four of the world’s most polluting nations — Brazil, China, India and US — have inexplicitly witnessed an increase in greenhouse gas emissions during pandemic lockdowns. Although politicians readily raise their concerns about the environment and human life, their actions speak otherwise. To the contrary, Marx’s nineteenth century warning about infinite capitalist growth goes unheeded: grow the economy in the name of progress by depleting whatever natural resources are available in order to prevent the GDP from falling.
As a result, for decades the warnings of many conscientious environmentalists, economists and scientists are becoming louder. The planet has entered positive feedback loops that likely cannot be slowed or reversed. Politically correct speeches to feed hope and secure false promises do not affect the climate’s tipping points such as the loss of polar ice and glaciers. Every wise environmental activist and educator, who has repeatedly forewarned that we must modify our lives and embrace a more austere and spiritual perspective, has been categorically ignored or mocked. And now in some ideological circles, a recent meme gaining popularity is that global warming is a conspiracy theory.
Rather than fund efforts that are in critical demand for the survival, well-being and sustainability of future generations, there are always other priorities: another government to overthrow or wage war against, increase defense budgets, revamp our nuclear weapons arsenal, the passage of another huge bailout for corrupt private corporations and banks. A Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a president who spoke about hope and change, but was directly involved in escalating America’s wars overseas and overthrowing legitimate, elected governments. Then this was followed with a president who was functionally illiterate in the political arena, and another struggling with senility.
But what is especially sad is that the American citizenry willingly participates in and contributes to this charade. As a society we have crossed the Rubicon into a marsh of irrational hostility and negative emotions. At this moment, both sides of the left-right political divide scream about their victimhood while actively participating in society’s destruction. And yet there are no massive mobilized protests against the most destructive elements in our culture as if they don’t really exist. Renewable energy, access to healthy foods, banning toxic chemicals in everyday household products that are otherwise forbidden in other countries, the institutionalization of cancel culture and government-sanctioned censorship, a new digital universe that will entrap every citizen in a carefully monitored surveillance state, a justice system that indentures the poor, fifty million Americans living in poverty and a thoroughly corrupt medical system — none of these seem important enough to warrant millions to march on Washington. Even humanity’s survival is inconsequential.
More mysterious, none of these crises are hidden from the public. They are publicly known. However most Americans have become so desensitized, so disconnected from perceiving reality, that they are incapable of realizing how government policies and spending adversely impacts every nick and cranny in their lives. So despite the fact that iatrogenesis (medical error and prescription drugs) kills far more people than the SARS-2 coronavirus, or that elections are purchased by the highest bidder, nothing will change. Bush and Obama removed habeas corpus, our Constitutional right to have access to a fair trial, and yet nobody seemed to notice. Or we might consider Congress’ push for Central Bank Digital Currency, Medical Digital Passport, a Social Credit System and the Democrat’s recent Restrict Act proposed in March 2023, which would give the government broad sweeping powers to ban or block communication technologies it deems to be security risk, including VPN app downloads that otherwise protect personal mobiles and computers from being spied upon. And yet the average American is clueless about these new forms of authoritarian vigilance violating their fundamental human rights and freedoms.
Despite the decades I have spent educating people about how to live a happier and healthier life few will even take the initiative to rebel against their own unhealthy habits and behavior. Instead of running away from crises, we are doing everything to the contrary to magnify the problems. So if the environmental and social crises continue to spiral out of control, understand it is because America is only exceptionally pathetic. The nation has quenched its illusions and stupor far too long on Aldous Huxley’s soma. Now its intoxicating effects are giving rise to an explosion of hatred, rage and self-serving narcissism in the streets, classrooms, corporate boardrooms, and the sitcoms staged in Congressional chambers. We must cease believing that the bureaucrats and technocrats in Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street will ever save us. The elite can afford to wall themselves away in Jackson Hole, Wyoming or a multi-million dollar yacht; but for the remainder of us we live in a Mad Max world. And our negligence, ignorance and hubris have brought this emergency upon ourselves.
Yes, there were better times in America’s history when the nation was relatively united because there were greater opportunities to satisfy the population’s fundamental universal needs: food and water, shelter, affordable health, education and a decent livelihood. Each has gradually been eroded away, and the pace of their decline is accelerating. Despite the Korean and Vietnam wars, the post-WW2 years and into the mid-1970s now seem like the Golden Age of the American empire. It certainly was for free speech and the safety for people to courageously step out of their comfort zones to express themselves and protest. But that has now been shut down.
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous,” wrote Martin Luther King, “than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” It is our deep ignorance about not knowing ourselves and failing to appreciate our intrinsic interconnection with each other and the environment that perpetuates the suffering around us. This includes our attachments to whatever accomplishments and failures we experience in our lives, which lead either to superiority complexes or apathy and fatalistic depression. Nevertheless, even if there is only five percent of the population that is truly awake, free of the cult of woke culture, and conscientiously aware about the causes and effects of the current crises and catastrophes, that still represents approximately 18 million people. That itself is sufficient to wage a conscious revolution to bring about constructive transformation. The oligarchy of neoliberal capitalism now governing the country will not change by itself. It will require very radicalized and impersonal forces to foment it to change from within. Each of us has within ourselves the capacity to make substantial changes. It requires the courage to break free from the shackles of both blind conservative nationalism and the liberal globalist promises of Big Brother. Our true enemies are irrational, dogmatic beliefs and faux liberal values, which equally keep us enslaved to a system that only serves its own interests and dehumanizes us to collateral damage to the system’s failings. All hegemonic world powers ultimately collapse. The US is in rapid decline; and the powers of authority, and their multi-industrial backers, are dragging the citizenry to ever lower depths.
John F. Kennedy gave a dire warning to those who are addicted to their self-indulgence in a faux comfort divorced from their responsibility to preserve higher virtues. In his 1956 speech at the University of Notre Dame, he stated, “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” Although President Kennedy probably read this phrase by Catholic Archbishop John Noll, who spoke these words a decade before, it is believed to have originated in Dante’s Inferno. It describes the fate for those who refuse to take a stand in the conflict between good and evil. The punishment is the torment of “a swarm of insects, flies and wasps and bees,” because like the stinging disorder of a swarming hive, so to is the tyrannical chaos brought about by neutral smugness in times of urgent need to restore social sanity.
“When dictatorship is a fact,” wrote French author Victor Hugo, “revolution become a right.” Sadly, we are in those times. But there are no longer enough listeners to make a difference.
