Sunday, May 07, 2006

Moral Crisis

I recently had a bad experience with a car dealer. It is pitiful that at my age I do expect people to behave honestly and morally, especially when I have contracts with them involving large sums of money. I have already in my life been gulled and cheated, hornswoggled and lied to enough times that you would think it would sink in. But it hasn't and it won't.

Like the time the bricks began to fall of the front of my house and I gave a local contractor huge sums of money to fix it. He messed it up real bad, using the wrong color mortar among other things. I refused to give him the other half of his money until he fixed it. He said he would send someone out to fix it. I said, "Okay, as long as they don't show up with a volkswagen and a shovel." Guess what...the volkswagen was blue. And a few days later, to add the insult to the injury, one of the sub contractors came by and threatened my life.

So this car dealer just lied to me and lied to the regional office, and I am just about at the point where I am tired of pursuing the issue. Which is probably what they intend to happen. But I am always so dismayed when this happens. And now, being so much older, I do not mourn for the lack of morality in my personal dealings, but worry so about what the world will be like for the future. What will the truth even seem to be when my four year old grandson is an adult? If he learns what the truth is, what good will it do him to pursue it?

And all these people that talk about looking to the Lord for guidance and the right answers, and they turn around and lie to me out of the other side of their mouth. What is the moral benchmark nowadays? Where is our touchstone? Do we have to make it up as we go along as so many of the younger generation seem to be doing? What is a crook? What is a lie? What is a moral guideline? When our children learn from their own parents to be irresponsible and unaccountable, what will they have in their conscience to guide their children?

People guilty of the most miserable of moral transgression walk around garnering respect among us every day. And people that did nothing are called on the carpet by liars with positions of trust and made to pay in ways they can not afford, morally, physically, financially. It is all so bogus, such a house of cards.

This crap about Iran and Iraq and the oil. A letter was going around on the internet saying what we would do when we pulled out of Iraq and stopped selling our Alaska oil to the Japanese. It was supposed to be sarcastic and a sort of ironic parody. But it was so grounded in how illogical it is that the obvious and most practical solutions to these huge problems are considered ridiculous, and that is all because of politics and political lobbyists. Which, if you have not noticed, is my answer for every problem you can think of.

I always thought that I was wrong in not pursuing my goals of being a diagnostic social worker in the school system or a respected writer But I guess I should have been a political lobbyist. But then I wouldn't be writing this, would I?