I had myself a cry upon the news of the Newtown slaughter. So many, so evil, so immoral.
So shocking, it was two whole hours before the political blood-dancing started. I was especially struck by a comment made on Face The Nation, when Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said he felt America might be at a “tipping point” about firearms. The senator may be right about America being at a “tipping point,” but not about guns.
John Adams once wrote two centuries ago: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The Newtown slaughter, so close on the heels of other derangements, begs the question: Are Americans a moral and religious people? Are we still worthy of our legacy as free American citizens?
America is exceptional, unique as a nation based not upon geography, ethnicity, or theology, but an idea: human liberty, exercised by responsible, aware citizens, capable of self-governance.
Morality and religion are central to the American idea, because without an internal moral compass, no one can govern themselves.
Some might argue that one can be moral without being religious. One can also show examples where religion acts as an instrument of repression, not enlightenment or emancipation. Yet religion undeniably acts as moral education, as a force for genuine good.
A crude yet effective explanation of the social role of religion is the country duet Tammy Wynette and George Jones recorded, “God’s Gonna Getcha for That.” A darker version is Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” – warning sinners that ultimate justice is on the way, and not from the sheriff. If bad people believe strongly enough that God will get them, they’ll usually behave.
What if there’s no God? The track record of state efforts to inculcate morality without religious backup is shameful. After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks busied themselves with eliminating religion from the Soviet cultural sphere. The Soviet totalitarian state, through the secret police and hordes of “watchers,” became the arbiter of all behavior. Did it matter? Yep.
Communism degraded into a fundamentally unethical, immoral system where some were more equal than others, everyone knew it, and everyone cheated. For New Soviet Man, the First and Only Commandment was “Don’t get caught.”
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the result wasn’t a First World democracy, but a kleptocracy. Is it mere coincidence that, after four generations of brainwashing, most of the Soviet republics are trending back to totalitarianism today? No, it’s history.
In a general sense, it seems that Americans are, as a people, forgetting our history, the moral roots of our citizenship, our very Americanism.
Not all of us are forgetting … too many are never taught properly in the first place. That’s just a symptom of the larger failings of the educational establishment (along with parents who don’t “get it,” either).
More specifically, however, we are all at risk of forgetting that even if American educators and parents do a flawless job of preparing our kids to be moral citizens, there are, and will always be, those who can’t be moral citizens in the fullest sense: The mentally ill.
The trait shared by all these mass killers is mental illness. Many mental quirks are harmless. But mentally ill persons, especially the criminally ill, are diagnosed because of behaviors that are either self-destructive or destructive to others. Such persons are unable to avoid these amoral or immoral behaviors without treatment up to and including institutionalization.
The failure at Newtown was not the fault of our civil liberties. The real failure at Newtown lies solely in our societal response to mental illness, more specifically the matter of timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment. Any effort to find a solution must be focused in the right place, on the real cause.
Might our leaders get it right? Well, as John Adams also wrote: “Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding, and softens the heart.”
For now, please hold your loved ones close, count your blessings, and have a reflective, if not merry, Christmas.