Without a moral compass, can we find our way?

I was born in 1939, actually the day that England declared war on Germany, so like many of my generation, I am considered to be an “old fart”! But like so many of my generation, I have seen time after time, this republic rise from the ashes of devastation, to once again hold its head up high in the court of world opinion. 

In the 1960s I witnessed the assassination of one president, his brother and numerous civil-rights leaders in America including Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm “X” and numerous attempts to kill others in the 1970s. As I grew older and began to look at my country through the eyes of a young adult, I began to see a slow but steady deterioration of the fabric of America and the destruction of the family unit, especially in the low-income and minority communities.

Fifty years later, this destruction has almost reached its apex, and it is clearly visible to anyone who has his or her eyes wide open. From the Great Society to Black Lives Matter, to the assault on the common moral fiber of this country, that is now taking place. From the dumbing down of education system in this country to the complete and total indoctrination of school-age children to college-age adults and the words of Saul Alinsky and Vladimir Lenin ring true today as they did decades ago: “Useful Idiots.”

From the complete and total destruction of open conversation and exchange of ideas and thoughts on a college campus, to the indoctrination by liberal professors that “America is bad and we are a racist nation,” you can see just how far to the “left” our political thought has drifted. From the tearing down of historic statues and the banning of certain items that denote a part of our nation’s history, to the exclusion of books written with a certain perspective on our history. And to those too young to grasp or understand, this move towards “political correctness” is another step towards total ignorance of a people. This is the very same kind of ignorance that led a people in 1935 Germany to burn books written by Jewish authors and in 1938 led to “Kristallnacht,” the burning and looting of Jewish synagogues and the beating of Jewish people on the streets of Germany.

We are in some respects experiencing that same attitude today on the streets and college campuses of our country, where our youth are so indoctrinated into the “Leftist Attitude” that if you do not think the way I think, there is something really wrong with you!

We have lost our moral compass as a nation and are now drifting in a sea of uncertainty. We cannot return to the “Good Old Days” of Mum, Dad, apple pie and Chevrolet, but we must return to an attitude of open and productive discussion on issues that affect all of us.

We must once again exercise our determination to be a sovereign nation in this world and secure our borders from those who wish to do us harm. That does not mean we close our borders completely to everyone, but there must be a qualifying agent to be applied when seeking citizenship in America. You must be able to read and write and speak English. You must be able to provide for your family or yourself without any social assistance from your host nation. You must have a skill set that is needed in this technical society we live in. We are not the piggy bank or the welfare bank of the world, and we cannot afford to support those who come into our country without any skill set. But most importantly those who come into our country must understand one basic concept: We are an open, free society, a society established on a Judeo-Christian concept and a Constitution that guarantees all of us “certain rights” and those “rights” shall not infringed upon under any circumstance. So you as an individual or a family must accept these conditions, and if you cannot we don’t want you here.

At the same time, we cannot accept the attitude of “laissez-faire” when it comes to the use of drugs in this country. For more than five decades, this scourge has been put upon the American public and the impact upon low-income and minority communities is devastating — it has to stop.

Today we have a new president-elect. He is not the choice of a number of people in this country, but nonetheless, we had a democratic process and he was elected. Just the same as the previous president — not everybody was overjoyed at his election, but we accepted the decision of the American people and we must do the same with this man.

We are faced with so many problems today as a nation and as a people, and we must all understand that we have to reach “common ground” if we are to succeed in re-building this country. We have gone in the past eight years in a direction that a lot of people and economists feel was very unproductive for all of us.

So perhaps it’s time we change direction...

Garvey is a resident of Kalispell.