David McElroy

Since last week’s funnies were all about cats, I’m giving equal time to the dogs today. Of course, the dogs in the audience aren’t likely to hear a word I’m saying, because what we say and what they hear have little to do with one another.

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Humans have always robbed each other, killed each other and done other evil things to one another. But as we became civilized, we learned that some things are right and wrong. Many of us believed in ideas rooted in natural law and natural rights. Other people rooted their ideas in different ways, but they still agreed upon most of the basics of what was right and wrong.

Sometime during the 20th century, that long-held shared belief about right and wrong started falling away among the public. It wasn’t just the immoral or lawless who were responsible. Those types had always had the willingness to hurt people and to do things that they knew were wrong.

The new belief to take the place of moral absolutes in the public consciousness was moral relativism, even if people wouldn’t necessarily know what to call it. The idea was that there wasn’t really such a thing as absolute right and wrong. Those were old-fashioned religious concepts, they said. Instead, right and wrong were said to be very relative and situational. I saw and heard this idea influence things I was taught in school, and I’ve seen more recent examples that were far more blatant.

I thought about all of that Thursday when I ran across some video that was uploaded to YouTube four years ago. I can’t verify it, but it appears to be the raw footage of interviews done by a TV news station with two young females about a crime they’ve committed. (Since the face of one of them is obscured, I assume she was still a juvenile.) As I listened to these girls, I found myself thinking that they’re the end result of teaching generations of kids that there aren’t any moral absolutes.

These two girls stole $150 from a 9-year-old girl who was selling Girl Scout cookies. Listen to them talk about it on the video below and notice that they have absolutely no sense of having done anything wrong. The only relevant thing to them is that they wanted the money. Even when the reporter pressed them — obviously trying to elicit some feelings of guilt or remorse at having stolen from a child — neither cared. They’re simply irritated at there being any consequences for their actions.

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We’re frequently told that we must support foreign invasions and military operations in other countries because that means “supporting the troops.” A veteran of the military gave me his thoughts on this whole idea on Memorial Day.

Those who support invading other countries and continuing wars that can’t be won tell us that doing so honors and supports the men and women who are fighting the wars. If that’s true, why did 87 percent of contributions from active-duty U.S. military people to GOP candidates go to Ron Paul — the only candidate who supports an end to military adventurism, reserving the U.S. military to the role of defending this country rather than invading other countries that haven’t attacked us?

More of those in the armed services have grave reservations about the way the military is used today. Some might be blindly supportive of the militaristic view of their civilian bosses, but a substantial number know better. And as many of them finish their time in the military and reflect on what they’ve seen and heard, they come to view things in very different ways. This is what a veteran said to me Monday in discussing the illustration above:

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