My post about Exodus brought me this reply from a Christian friend once employed in a high level job by the federal government:

An interesting set of thoughts from an unknown source…..

 

A rather nefarious and dishonest character I once had very unfortunate business dealings with in a rare careless moment disclosed his business method of operation to me. After ending a little business negotiation with slick serpentine skill he whispered to me as an aside with a braggart’s breath “create confusion and get what you want’. Those words should have made a more immediate impression on me than they did. They were a sort of prophetic warning of what would also happen in my own business dealings with him. It seems there is truth in the saying that leopards do not change their spots. This particular man had come highly recommended to me as a fine upstanding apparently Christian business man. In truth he was a snake on the make. For now, I want to focus on that man’s method of creating confusion to get what one wants.

 

Make no mistake, I do not subscribe to the method but I cannot help but recognize it in practice now when I listen to government officials who claim we are in such a serious crisis that we must fundamentally change our ways of doing business and banking in this country. They say all is lost in the capitalist free wheeling ways of the past and that only the state can save our economy from certain ruin. Some say past presidents are to blame for this great crisis of our time. Others blame Congress and business leaders on Wall Street. There is indeed a great deal of confusion. Now is a time for great caution and strengthening of character; a reformation of character.

 

I submit that our systems are not broken except perhaps for our educational and social security systems which were the first truly socialized agencies of our government. Our systems of government and business were designed to be managed and manned by honest women and men of good conscience. In fact, I believe we are reaping the results of decades of neglect by a whole generation of Americans who seem to have been distracted from their duty to maintain our culture’s core values by educating young people both morally and intellectually in our schools. Please pay attention to the historical reality that our government “socialized” school, Social Security, and Medicaid systems are very unhealthy and are themselves in a longstanding state of crisis. Socialized banking, business, and health care will not likely fare better.

 

We the people can do far better for ourselves in solidarity of virtues and values than can any great government society provide addicting and costly services to us. Services that might otherwise be far less demanded by a thriving entrepreneurial and industriously creative critical mass of citizens.

 

Our systems of government and business were designed with the expectation that these state and commercial corporate enterprises would be dominated by such a critical mass of men and women of good conscience that they would not fail to consistently and freely achieve their good ends of service to our community by common goodness. The guarantor of success would be the individual consciences which engender a whole corporate conscience greater that the sum of its parts.

 

It was never imagined that good people would become uncommon. The problem is not our banks but rather bad bankers. The problem is not our business system but bad businessmen and women. It is not Wall street but rather the current residents there. The same can be said of our governments and churches for that matter. There is personal DNA all over the scenes of crimes of corporate and government corruption that we have all witnessed as so many members of a reality television series. There are individual persons responsible for the crimes and excesses.

 

The problem is that we have now for decades taught people to believe they are better than they are. Consider just a couple undisputed statistics.

 

American high school students perennially rank near the bottom among the industrialized nations of the world for educational performance while consistently coming in first in the category of self-esteem. These statistics reveal a detachment from reality that that has cut our culture adrift and has allowed for some very pernicious weeds to be sown in the American Field of Dreams.

 

We have engendered this situation in our schools which have been neutered of the ability to transmit the greatest life affirming values of Judeo-Christian culture to our children. A whole generation has stood by and watched while children have been indoctrinated with a code of behavior and mores that is more foreign to us than the farthest eastern cultures. We may as well have sent our children off to be trained as youth in Asia as our abortive efforts at education reform will soon cause one generation to turn on another; each one assaulting the other.

 

Who of us has not heard of the self-esteem programs in the elementary and high schools? Students are taught to believe that they are good without any traditional sense of what is good. Instead of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule students are told that they must respect everyone and almost any chosen behavior of another short of physical violence should be tolerated without the exercise of good judgment as to character. If the Ten Commandments and Love Your Neighbor once ruled the consciences of the masses because they were taught in government and religious schools, they have been replaced by an innocuous consciousness of others. Greed and corruption have come to dominate commerce and government as a result.

 

Young people are so ignorant of cultural norms of sexual morality and of civics that they erroneously believe that homosexual behavior is an appropriate basis for a civil right in some sense akin to race or religious freedom.

 

This cause celeb has come to represent the decay of our culture in this time of topsy turvy torsos.

 

We need to reform the way government funds support the education young people. I think this should first be the right of parents and faith-based organizations whose primary and historical responsibility it has been. The governmental schools should be of high quality but subsidiaries of faith-based organizations and families. A well thought out system of providing funds to the schools of parents’ choice, government, private, and religious, will create a renaissance in our existing systems of commerce, government, and society at large.

 

Common good is its own reward. In its absence our systems of commercial and governmental service fail. The government cannot save us. We must save ourselves and restore virtue and common goodness to culture. To the generation on watch I say stop watching and start working again to clear the confusion. Our systems are not as broken as much as our wills have been weakened. Wake up and seize this opportunity to do something uncommonly good for yourself and your children. Now is not a time for party but rather solidarity of common good.

 

We must not let some masters of exaggerated disaster steal our common heritage of common goodness.

 

Copyright 2009

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