Our Beacon of Liberty and Justice for All Must Shine Again

Our Country is in the midst of a moral leadership breakdown. Throughout first two thirds of the 20th century the USA was generally respected and followed as the beacon of freedom and human progress. From Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower we were regarded as liberators in a often turbulent world. The Statue of liberty represented hope and freedom to most of the world. We began to overcome our heritage of slavery and gender discrimination. Our people came together and sacrificed millions of lives to help protect the world and ourselves from Nazi domination in Wold War II. Our leaders than got off track and wove a rocky paths through two ill-founded wars; Korea and Vietnam in which millions of innocent Korean and Vietnamese civilians, and about 150,000 of US military perished.Through this period we started to become a fractured country.The fractures have deepened and spread like a thunderous earthquake that sucks innocent live into the bowels of our earth.

The Second World War followed the great Depression and yet through all this turmoil our country became unified under sometimes opposing forces, but always able to serve the common purpose of our people. That unified period has been shattered by political partisanship and misguided policies that have cause hate and distrust,at worst, and endless political and international actions that have worked against the unification of our country and reconciliation with hostile countries and people. Our leaders,and others leaders in the world have become part of a seemingly increasingly inhospitable world intent upon self destruction.

Our country must regain cohesion and our sense of purpose as enunciated by our founding fathers. We must spread these enduring ideas into purposeful actions to heal our country and aid the world by setting an example.There are many examples of US policies that have fostered more distrust and antagonism rather than promoting understanding and diplomatic reconciliation. We have acted time and again to inflame wounds rather than heal them. We now exist in a quagmire of festering hate and mistrust than can never cause anything but more of the same.

For nearly two generations the USA has enforced trade embargoes and travel restrictions against Cuba for their governments human rights violations. Yet Cuba's human rights violations are a pittance compared to those that the world's biggest importer to the USA, China, has committed against their own people. Chinese atrocities in Tibet are destroying lives of Buddhist monks and civilians who are protesting China's enslavement of Tibet, and demonstrating for the independence that they are entitled to. The Communist Chinese dictatorship treats their own people as disposable pawns in their quest for world domination. The USA and most of the world seems to shut their collective senses off when they effortlessly dismiss the ongoing Chinese government's atrocities committed against their own people and others they dominate by force.Our government placates the communist dictators in charge of the Chinese government with meaningless words and platitudes instead of real actions.

Why do we continue to import from China? Why do we give China the most favored trade status? Why do we continue to allow USA companies to establish factories in China as the same companies shutter factories in the USA and fire their employees? Is our government conspiring, albeit unwittingly, to make the USA a Chinese colony, eventually as dominated by the Chinese communist government as is Tibet? These are simple examples of immoral response by our leaders to other leaders immoral actions. Such responses allow more restrictions rather than fewer and our country's moral authority is eroded.

The leaders of our country claim that we are the world's bastion of freedom, liberty, and humanity. Yet our Federal government, that is suppose to represent we, the people, seems to pick and choose our world partners and co-supporters on some other bases; clearly not to foster freedom, humanity, and liberty. We have reacted to madness with more madness instead of calibrated actions based upon rational thought. As a result we have splintered our own country and turned many nations in the world against us. Nearly half the world's people are deeply mistrustful of our policies and actions. We seem incapable of developing any consistent morally guided pathway and instead react to every incident with a knee-jerk reaction. Unlike our founding fathers we have become mired in pragmatic responses that are molded at the spur of the moment or based upon a policy of instant retaliation--an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We have been stuck on and endless treadmill that constantly engenders hate, mistrust, and hostility for each other.

We embargo trade and prevent travel to a minuscule country such as Cuba; we attack Iraq on the basis of false intelligence and are responsible for the many thousands of needless deaths and injuries sustained by our own military forces, while being directly or indirectly responsible for untold thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children.We ignore genocide in many African countries and often support the perpetrators of the atrocities.

We splinter our own country by politicizing every one and everything. We have lost our common purpose.

We think of ourselves as the moral magnet of the world, but what do we practice? As genocide runs rampant in African countries our government prefers to call the slaughter "ethnic war" and thus avoid responsibility for the same kind of hate that led to the Holocaust. As Tibetans, Pakistani, Chinese, and Chechnyan Russians civilians are murdered by their own governments, we close our minds to such atrocities, as long as their government leaders are willing to serve our economic, political, and military interests.

Our country's government cannot proclaim itself to be the world's "greatest" power when such power ignores the human atrocities that we, and many of the countries who support us, commit in the name of democracy, freedom, and liberty. Nor can we respond to every atrocity with military power. Power is achieved by demonstrating intelligent, considered actions always based upon a moral foundation.

Our country was founded when a small group of British colonists who voyaged to this new land under the authority of Royal British Crown subsequently became rebellious against their own British government because these colonists became the "tax" slaves of their own government. They lost their rights and liberty and were ruled by force imposed by the King of Great Britain. The American Revolution and our Declaration of Independence ensued, and soon thereafter our Constitution was enacted by the former thirteen colonies to create the Union of the United States of America.

Our Union was formed to support the BELIEF that: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Everyone who believes this must read the entire Declaration of Independence again, and while at it our Constitution also. We must once again dedicate ourselves to the roots of our very existence as a nation.

Our nation became the beacon for freedom and liberty, and we progressed for many years since 1776 to build upon the precepts at the time of our birth as an infant union of thirteen colonies. We have had severe shocks along the way. And amendments were added over the years to our Constitution that included Articles that: abolished slavery, allowed the right to vote to all citizens including women, and the right to vote to anyone attaining the age of 18 years. We have progressed to create a more perfect union based up expanded freedom and rights. We have indeed been the torch bearer of real Democracy until comparatively recent times.

But we have lost our way as a nation. We are slipping back into the Colonial era when our 13 colonies were enslaved by their own British Crown. We are becoming enslaved by our own government that seems to have forgotten why our Country was created in the fist place. We cannot live up to our heritage as a nation if we forget our roots. We must return to the ideas that spawned our nation and once again become the "GREAT POWER" we once were. We must again promote the unifying concept of our founders: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".

The moment is upon us to restore the faith and beliefs of our founders and become the voice for freedom and liberty for all. Let us find our moral compass and strive to become "One Nation,Indivisible,With Liberty and Justice for All." Let our beacon of hope and freedom shine for all the world to emulate again.