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Kimball Shinkoskey
Woods Cross
Nothing could be clearer as we start the New Year than the fact that the average American has chosen to ignore any sophisticated response to our darkest hour since the Civil War. Instead, we are retreating to those recesses of ignorance, inaction and self-pleasure where we hide our faces from reality and from personal duty. We saw that in clear focus over the holidays when we just bathed ourselves in self-indulgent tradition, normalcy and withdrawal from community, as the only real forms of action we can think of to engage in.
Fix local, state and national government? Leave that to others. Fix schools and colleges? They don't need fixing. Fix the economy? I've got a job, even if my neighbor doesn't. Go to church? Yeah, go there to hide from it all.
Our nation is plunging headlong into multi-front war in the Western Hemisphere and aggressive military actions around the world. Our government is plunging headlong into autocracy and nascent monarchy. Our economy is putting out suspect statistical numbers and is inviting untold perils in trade and manufacturing due to wild tariffs, uncontrolled debt spending and exploitation of workers and consumers. Our schools and colleges are deciding whether to pledge allegiance not to a flag or to a constitutional law or to academic freedom, but rather to America's new despotic ruler. Our state and local governments are rolling over to the new philosophy of bribery, flattery and obsequiousness that is necessary to get federal funding for their under-funded and over-promised institutions.
All the while this is happening the most capable, well-positioned, and well-heeled sector of the United States -- corporate America -- has decided to shun the once popular and always necessary concept of corporate responsibility and just plunge headlong into exploiting the citizenry with ever more insidious advertisements and inducements to consumerism.
The free enterprise system is one of the strongest historical engines of true progress and ethical activity in our history because it commands the technology, the marketing apparatus, the intellectual capacity, the communication apparatus and the political perspective to move the needle on any problem it chooses to engage with.
Today, however, industry, banking and commerce choose to run silent like a submarine, awaiting the perfect time to surface and either go with the indecent flow or else torpedo our civilization into oblivion with ungodly political alliances.
At the same time, the self-proclaimed morality and ethics champion of the world, the Christian church, has equally decided to go underground and just tend to the private interests of its own congregations while the public weal suffers from the absence of its sophisticated ancient teachings and egalitarian encouragements to citizen participation. It is just easier to be silent or to declare for the dictator, just like the churches in the Soviet Union did during the Stalinist era.
What is America doing while it is turning its face away from its problems? America used to be a place where people wanted to be good. Good to their neighbors, good to their families, good to employees, good to minorities, good to immigrants… you get the picture.
We also wanted to be smart, trustworthy, loving, forgiving, hard-working, healthy and balanced in our approach to life. Not any longer.
America's adults are all about entertaining ourselves with sports, TV and streaming, movies, travel, gambling, pornography, abandonment of family formation and of college education and embracing instead addiction, entertainment, general licentiousness and anti-social behavior. We see every reason to be as ignorant, inconsistent, indulgent, irresponsible, entitled and indifferent as humanly possible.