The Shame of the Nation

A Collective Perversion
by Stephen Lendman; October 24, 2006

The daily headlines about a single congressman's online pedophiliac behavior obscure the greater issue of a nation off its moorings and afflicted by the collective perversion of defiling the foundational equity and justice-for-all letter and spirit of what the nation long-claimed to stand for but no longer does if it ever did. Nearly everyone in the administration, Congress and courts share the collective guilt and shame and by their actions destroyed Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address "resolve....that this nation....shall have a new birth of freedom (in a) "government of the people, by the people, for the people (that) shall not perish from the earth."

They conspiratorially participated in the crimes of a nation that go against Lincoln's hope that the dead he spoke of hadn't "died in vain" on "the great battle-field" where he stood and all the other civil war ones he referred to. They also defiled what the Founders stood for and gave us in 1787 when 55 of them met in the Philadelphia State House, where the Declaration of Independence was signed 11 years earlier, and framed an historic foundational document for the new federal republic they hoped would last into "remote futurity." Benjamin Franklin was there but wasn't so sure and openly and presciently warned we might not be able to keep it. Even at our nation's birth, he understood the risk.

Where are the leaders now with the kind of wisdom, foresight, character, courage and honor our Founders and Lincoln had. A modern-day Diogenes would search in vain for them. We've come a long way in the last 220 years and since the time Lincoln spoke of a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Today democracy and freedom are somewhere between life support and the crematorium, and Ben Franklin would have said I warned you. The only speculation now is whether we've already gone over the edge, sunk too low, and it's too late to save the republic. It's visibly sinking fast into the dustbin of a worthy experiment gone sour because those with the power to nurture it spurned the chance. They sacrificed it on the alter of power corrupting and absolute power doing it absolutely.

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