No moral anchor

“What is the big deal?” A friend called to kid me following the breaking news concerning the episode in Cartagena, Columbia. His first question was followed up with this one: “If those Secret Service guys were in a legal escort (prostitution) zone, then what is wrong with that?” While my friend was trying to make fun of morals and character, and being responsible to make right choices, he did raise a good point. Wait; don’t throw the paper away yet! Hear me out on this one. The questions begging to be answered are those related to the systemic culture of government service corruption. Following on the heels of the exposure of the General Services Administration’s lack of control or concern about how they were spending the taxpayer’s money, we had the revelation of the behavior of the “boy’s club,” inside the Secret Service. Some of the comments on blogs this week have been interesting as many have raised the question of the legalization of prostitution. It seems that in Columbia (a country I have never visited) there are certain parts of the country known as legal zones for prostitution. It is also true that in our country there is a county or two (not sure how many), allowing legal brothels to operate. Taking the very low moral route, then, we could posit that with legal prostitution this would not be a national embarrassment. There could then be no questions as to the aberrant behavior of these married men who were on the government payroll to plan security for the President’s trip to Columbia. If we take that position about legalizing prostitution, then we must ask if this happened in an escort free zone in Columbia which is a fancy way of saying prostitution is legal in those zones, why is the nation of Columbia upset about this event. There were some people appearing on the Sunday talk shows raising the issue of the number of men as opposed to the number of women who are employed by the Secret Service. The person who cleaned this mess up quickly in Columbia was a female. This theory would suggest that with more females on the payroll of the Secret Service this type of activity would not be occurring. Let us come back to reality and cold hard facts. From this incident and others, we are seeing more evidence that our nation has lost any moral anchor it ever had. The corruption that occurs in the highest places of service is being exposed more often than ever. While it is true there is a sense, according to some pundits, in which bad behavior can be heightened in groups. What has happened to our nation when the thinking of a group of people receiving their pay from the taxpaying citizens reveals they feel no accountability to the people who pay their salary? Wait, again, we are dealing with the same issue when we come to elected officials who use their position in office to feather their own nest, and to expand their control over others in order to exact more money from the innocent tax paying public. The big deal, at least for me, is that we seem to have lost any sense of accountability and responsibility. As government has grown larger, it is harder to manage and to determine the people responsible for any unacceptable actions. With no clear awareness of right or wrong and no way to hold others accountable for their actions, we are as close to anarchy as ever. When every person does what is right in their on eyes, we are near to the days of lawlessness. There are certain acceptable levels of behavior that have been generally agreed to in civilized societies. When those levels of behavior are lowered to the baser levels of human or even animal actions then we have slipped deeper into the quagmire of being out of control of our culture. It is no longer just a culture of corruption we are talking about, if we think we can legalize what has been seen as illegal for centuries. When we reach the place of compromise with morals to the point we feel comfortable breaking covenants and agreements between individuals, we are at a point of no return on the free fall from all that is determined as decent. We need to see these events as a need to rethink our relaxed moral code.