Ethics are mediating devices through which  humanity can prevent the rule of law from becoming a tyrant.  Every human person is infinitely complex and every human law is profoundly  limited due to that individual complexity.  The law is most definitely the hammer of the operation, but ethics is the guidance system that modifies the law’s unintended tyrannies or oversights. Whenever you find someone who does not respect ethics or disdains the service of ethics, you have a tyrant on your hands.  There are no exceptions to this tight little rule.  

The shocking problem right now is the current Administration takes pride in disregarding ethics and frequently the law itself.  Neither of those two levels of civil organization seem to mean that much to them.  This trend has gone so far that speaking the truth to power right now in Washington seems to be in bad taste. In addition we have a national ‘shoulder shrug’ with many people seeming to say “oh well, something is finally getting done.  Ethics are for the goofy academics, not the real power players. What does it matter if a a few children, well . . . maybe quite a few children get injured, traumatized and maybe a few die? OK. . .yes also quite a few innocent men, women, and oldsters are going to feel the pain of injury, but this is for the common good.  The trains are going to finally run on time!“.  That approach didn’t work for Mussolini and hopefully won’t work in the long run for this group. Sadly the victims of many of these constitutional crimes don’t have a ‘long run’ to wait.

We had an entitlement in this nation long before entitlement became a bad word. The entitlement was every person on our soil was entitled to basic justice.  The unspoken truth running our nation’s history was, excepting the indigenous peoples and nations, everyone in this country was either an immigrant or a direct descendent of an immigrant. We will, all, always be immigrants in this American journey.  People didn’t come here fully stamped citizens although some arrived as fully chained slaves, but therein lies the horror and beauty of the American story. The American story held together 0n a tether to humanity through a combination of strong hearts, morality, ethics, and the rule of law coming together to provide justice in a democracy. We seem to contemplating that this near sacred entitlement is no longer practical and can be shrugged off. The real truth is our justice was never practical. We were just strong enough to deal with the hard work of being authentic Americans.

Good is not far from where we are at.  In this moment in history ‘good’ is just in opposite direction pointing toward the north star of what was once America’s core aspirational values. I think the biblical term for saving this country is ‘repentance’.  Turn around people, turn around ! That would be good.

Is this Sunrise or Sunset?

It is up to us.