Has America lost its moral compass?

America claims to be the greatest nation on earth. But what makes us so great? 

We say we are the land of liberty, and for much of our history we openly welcomed immigrants from other lands. We believed in honesty and hard work and that everyone should have an equal opportunity to succeed. But where are we today?

We have more people living in poverty than any other industrialized nation. Our education system falls far behind those of western European nations. Millions of Americans have no health insurance, whereas many nations offer health care to all their citizens. And many in the white majority continue to actively discriminate against people of color and people who are non-Christian such as blacks, Hispanics and Muslims. For example, several states have passed highly restrictive laws about the criteria for being eligible to vote. These laws are aimed mainly at minority groups.

In the 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court intervened to stop the lawful recount of votes in Florida, and by a 5-to-4 vote gave the presidency to George W. Bush. There was relatively little public dissent from this incredible usurpation of power by the Supreme Court. In the 1960s we had a million person march on Washington to demand equal rights for black people and new laws were passed. In the 1970s there was another huge march on Washington to protest the Vietnam War and it was finally ended.

We spend a far greater proportion of our national budget on the military than does any other industrialized nation. And we use this military might to do whatever we want. For example, we invaded Iraq on a false pretense when they presented no direct threat to us at all. And we killed thousands of their civilians and imprisoned and tortured hundreds and hundreds of them. But most Americans didn’t seem to care. 

Now we are making drone strikes and killing civilians in countries like Pakistan and Yemen without declaring war on them. But there is no large public outcry about this.

It seems that the only thing that makes us great as a nation is that we have the biggest military in the world and we feel free to use it whenever and wherever we please, and most of our citizens don’t care. What has happened to our founding democratic principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and one person one vote? What has happened to “We the people...?”

We have become the modern incarnation of the Roman Empire. And as we all know, that empire crumbled due to internal decay. Our turn is coming.

Ferguson is a resident of Taos.