Slow Creep Of Moral Apathy In America

SLOW CREEP OF MORAL APATHY IN AMERICA

Little by little America's freedoms are being marginalized and our moral apathy is much like Germany between 1938 to 1945 ~ when the people thought they were free but, in reality, hate and fear had left them morally apathetic and impotent: Allen L Roland

While President Obama and the Democrats keep bailing out the Banks, Health Insurance Industry, Nuclear Industry and now Oil Industry ( renewed Offshore drilling ) and Main Street staggers along with close to 20% real unemployment during this severe economic crisis ~ it becomes obvious that there is now only one party, through the magic of Clinton's and now Obama's triangulation, and it serves only the Corpocracy (or financial elite) and always at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Chris Hedges mirrors my thoughts when he wrote ~ " All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators walk away with millions. The elite will retreat, as Naomi Klein has written in The Shock Doctrine, into gated communities where they will have access to services, food, amenities and security denied to the rest of us. We will begin a period in human history when there will be only masters and serfs. The corporate forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the rage at the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to ruthlessly extinguish opposition movements. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross."
http://www.alternet.org/story/146005/we_stand_on_the_cusp_of_one_of_humanity%27s_most_dangerous_moments?page=entire

Most of Obama's pre-election progressive promises have been broken ~ much like Hitler's were in 1938 after he had gained power during a severe economic crisis. Here's the current list ~ Keeping the Guantánamo torture camp open, Continuing the war against Iraq, Renewing the USA Patriot Act, Continuing "military commission" kangaroo trials, Reserving the right to torture, and Continuing the NSA's "domestic surveillance" program of spying on innocent Americans' emails and phone calls. Note the slow marginalizing of our freedoms against a backdrop of public moral indifference. The dead canary in the mineshaft of public apathy is the growing suicide rate of both active and returning veterans.

In addition, the Obama administration has defended and justified in court almost every moral atrocity that the Bush / Cheney administration perpetrated on international law, human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Milton Meyer wrote of this same creep of moral apathy in his classic They Thought They Were Free, The Germans 1938 -1945 ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955 )

Excerpt: " What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated..... by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us..... "Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed ~ "You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."

We Americans are already seemingly in denial of the well over 1.3 million Iraqis who have been killed and displaced in our illegal war and occupation of Iraq which is now being replicated in Afghanistan ~ an occupation which benefits only the coffers of the Military / Industrial complex while economically starving Main Street .

Think of what could have happened if the German people in 1938 refused to be controlled by fear and instead ~ made a moral stand for social justice and altruism versus funding their Military / Industrial Machine's global designs of Empire building ~ while millions of innocent people died. Sound familiar ?

But let me point out that this indifference to the suffering of others is precisely what ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust possible ~ "The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people." Philosopher Theodor Adorno

As Hedges correctly points out ~ " Our mediocre and bankrupt elite is desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved " because, I would add, the same debt bubble that blew up in 2008 cannot be re-inflated ~ particularly when Main Street is bankrupt and jobless with no manufacturing base while Wall Street remains unregulated, unchecked and unsupervised.

So what's the answer ? Stop our morally out of control Military / Industrial Complex in its tracks by defunding our two illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and electing politicians who are committed to that promise in November, 2010.

It may be too late ~ but anything less will be morally suicidal for our staggering Republic.

Allen L Roland
http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/slow-creep-of-moral-apathy-in-america.html

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Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net

Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is also available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )

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