Let’s talk about values…

Featured image from the Pittsburg Post Gazette. Follow the link if you’d like.

I want to take a moment to talk about values. It seems that we have no collective values in this country anymore. There seems to be nothing that connects the two sides of the political aisle, and this in turn escalates the rhetoric and vitriol, and makes the word “compromise” into a lightning rod that infuriates either political base and spurn the wailing mob that is Twitter.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in discussing the 3.5 Trillion dollar “infrastructure” bill, was quoted as saying…

“We’ll see how the number comes down and what we need,” she added. “Again, the Senate and the House, those who are not in full agreement with the president, right, let’s see what our values — let’s not talk about numbers and dollars. Let’s talk about values.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

I think that her word choice was interesting, and in a way, I agree with the Speaker. What are the values that we wish to carry going forward? I’ll tell you mine, and if you’d like to comment, feel free to send me one (I’d enjoy the conversation).

Following the ratification of the Constitution, Ben Franklin responded when asked what kind of government we had by saying, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

The United States was, once upon a time, ardently skeptical of a centralized government. Our founding documents recognized that a central government was necessary after the chaos of the Articles of Confederation proved to be too weak to maintain the tenuous bonds holding the nascent country together. But the founders and framers, wary of the tyranny that a strong, centralized government could reap upon the people, implemented a series of checks and balances within our tricameral Federal government. These checks, and ultimately, the system that was built, also depended upon another thing, entirely beyond the scope of the government. That was an ethical and moral people.

Once upon a time, the people of the United States were mostly religious. Pew Research has an interesting breakdown of the decline of religious affiliation over time, you can check that out here. Nearly 30% of our population has no particular religious affiliation, with about a third of them being either agnostic (5%) and atheist (4%). As I searched for a more recent study, I came across a Gallup article, and my suspicions were confirmed. As of last year, 47% of US adults belonged to a church, mosque, or synagogue. This is a decline of nearly 30 points from the beginnings of this study back in 1937. The unaffiliated group has grown to 21%. The breakdown is correlates strongly to age, with my own age group, Millennials, sporting a 36% church membership percentage.

The implications here are profound. While it is entirely possible to be a moral and ethical person without the underpinnings of religion, I find that it is much easier to delve into morally detestable behavior, and to justify and rationalize evil. We are living in an age where we believe that the government should now be responsible for feeding, housing, and clothing children, the poor, and the disabled. This shift in responsibility away from communities and the church impacts the relationship between the governed and the governing. It enables the government to threaten the people with a reduction in their “benefits,” and allows politicians to be seduced by the power that they gain over the lives of the people who voted for them.

But let’s talk about the dollars and numbers for a moment. I am in the middle of a multi-year long struggle with eliminating my debts. My own decisions when I was younger have forced me to spend my money repaying the interest upon things I bought on impulse. I look at the opportunity costs for what I could have invested in, and see now how short-sighted I was in my youth. And yet, our politicians wish to do the same thing for the American people, selling the promise of our future labor to anyone willing to give us an infusion of cash now. We are addicted to our spending, and we squander our wealth by sending it to the far corners of the world, and build corrupt, bloated, bureaucratic systems of waste at home. We are told every year that our infrastructure is crumbling, that we need to spend trillions more dollars to renovate and improve our electrical grid, roads and bridges, and every time we agree and authorize that spending, the politicians say it is not enough. We used to be a society that would do the hard things now so our children would know peace and prosperity. We used to be the people who would sacrifice and pare back so our children could have a lifestyle better than our own. But now it is the mantra that we must get the newest, brightest, shiniest bauble because it’s our lives and you only live once.

Pelosi wishes to talk of values. Our ruling class values power and control. They value being able to capture systems to better cement their power. They value the manipulation of the people. They value division and exploitation, pitting one group against the other, making each seem so foreign and alien to one another that they cannot see what truly makes us all human. In this pursuit of power, they are willing to say and do whatever it takes to gain ground, and once they no longer find you useful, you will be cast aside. Nurses, once hailed as heroes, are being terminated because they decline to get the vaccine. Union workers, once viewed as a cornerstone of the Democratic base, are being screwed over by higher corporate taxes and the outsourcing of our production to countries like China. All the talk of helping the poor and the needy is meaningless when our “leaders” wish to spend us into oblivion, creating record inflation. Marketwatch reports that the consumer price index “cresting” at a 5.3% annual rate. For many of the working people, like myself, that means the difference between saving for the future and drawing from savings. It means the difference from going out with friends every couple of weeks to every couple of months. It means the difference between splurging on that pricier cut of meat versus cold cuts and ramen noodles. It means the difference of having some breathing room to choosing between rent, gas, and food.

We used to value compassion. We now value empathy and sympathy. We used to value service, now we value performance. We used to value delaying gratification. Now we value engaging in our impulses.

We wish to talk of values. I certainly would like to. But the values that we used to aspire to and appreciate, the values that helped to build this country and make it resilient are now labeled as white supremacy, given exclusively to “White people” by those who wish to see others kept down. These values have no race, creed, religion, or orientation. They belong to all who wish to succeed. And until we return to our values, we cannot escape the insanity that has befallen our republic.