This morning's sermon comes from something written after seeing an article in Vanity Fair with accompanying photos of the accused, excruciatingly young (to my old eyes) men involved in the Haditha incident.
It was a grave moral lapse for this nation to elect George W. Bush twice as president. I am profoundly reminded of that lapse as I study the photos of the faces of the young men on trial for the military atrocity at Haditha in Iraq.
Their faces are painfully young, indicating a youth empty of the knowledge necessary for making adult moral choices. They were brought up, during their critical formative teen years, in a national environment of moral laxity, the past five years of our nation. However, their eyes are no longer young. Their eyes have the haunted edge of age, of having seen too much without having the values instilled into their character that would have given them the moral courage to make different and difficult choices, to know when to disobey orders, implied or direct.
When I see their young faces empty of knowledge and understanding, I think of the sorry state of our nation’s public education--which has deteriorated vastly in recent years, of our loss of moral standing internationally. The long list of legislators with links to a Mr. Abramoff comes to mind, golfing trips to Scotland and other worldly treasures distracting these men from their state-ordained duties and miring them in moral bankruptcy.
In contrast, these young men, who may be facing a trial which may end their very lives, were drawn from families beset with punishing poverty, requiring both parents to be at work, often at two or three jobs, denying these young men of the parental guidance and nurturance they needed at a critical time in their lives, depriving them of the time spent with a parent when a parent passes on values.
I bless my own children, now safe from such emptiness of family life. I bless my luck in having brought them up in the times before Reagan and Bush began their campaign to destroy the American family, when it was possible for me to be at home to be there for them, when it was possible for their father to have time to spend the time that a father needs to spend with his children. These young men did not have the advantages of my children, the advantage of having parents who could be there for them because they were not impoverished--and our nation is in a sorrier state for that.