Steven Slater tells off a plane load of Jet Blue customers, grabs a couple of beers, pulls the emergency chute and dramatically exits the plane, his job, and his career. He is soon hailed across the Internet as a hero. People walk away from home equity loans saying, “I’m not going to be a slave to the bank.” Challenge after challenge to any reference to God in the public square as part of an effort to drive faith underground. Our is government telling us that the only way we can survive is by a government handout. We cannot make it on our own. If you wonder why we are heading in the wrong direction as to 70% of your fellow Americans believe, perhaps we should give morality a closer look.
The story on Mr. Slater is unclear. He says one thing, witnesses say another. It will eventually get sorted out, but let’s assume for a moment that Mr. Slater is correct in that a passenger’s behavior set him off. In a more moral society, Mr. Slater could have done one of two things. One, he could have taken a deep breath, held his tongue and just written it off to that passenger having a bad day. He would have won the admiration of those who watched him behave with self-control and dignity. Or, two, he could have asked the pilot to inform the authorities to meet the plane on the ground because an unruly passenger defied the instructions of the flight crew. That passenger would have been arrested on the ground and would be facing federal charges. But instead Mr. Slater took the route of immediate gratification. He got on the intercom and told off the whole plane, grabbed a couple of beers from the beverage cart, triggered the emergency escape chute and then like a giddy child went down the slide and ran home. A moment’s thrill of control followed a world of grief. Was his moral compass broken or pointing in the wrong direction?
Shawn Schlegalis a real estate agent in Arizona. Since moving there in 2005 he bought several houses with each one financing the next. He is currently in default for $94,873 and is basically saying tough luck, I’m not paying. The lender got a court order garnishing his salary, but that was eighteen months ago and he hasn’t heard anything since. “The case is sitting stagnant,” he said. “Maybe it will just go away.” While I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for any bank that would approve this chain of financing, I don’t know if the lender was aware of what the home equity loan was for, but it is Mr. Schlegal’s attitude that disturbs me. He made the decision to do this and he feels it is not his fault. True he will be impacted if he tries to borrow again in the near future, but he doesn’t seem to care. This is reinforced by the commercials flooding the airwaves advising consumers how they can walk away from their credit card debt. How about selling the flat screen TVs and sports cars you purchased on the plastic, and pay it back? Meanwhile our government continues to use your taxes to help people who are over their head pay their mortgages. Why do you have to pay your mortgage and theirs? You were responsible, they were not. The very concept of such a program would have been baffling to the Founding Fathers.
Our current government reinforces the idea of Americans as imbeciles. The mortgage companies took advantage of you, they were predatory lenders, while it was government programs that told the predators to get busy. We have to have more home ownership, we have to help people achieve the American Dream, so Andrew Cuomo at HUD, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the good folks at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who made millions on pushing these products, all pushed these government programs on more people, encouraging them to buy houses they couldn’t afford and when the bubble burst they pointed the finger at everyone but themselves. They believe the American people are helpless idiots who cannot fend for themselves and if by some accident someone does succeed, it is the government’s responsibility to take as much of what they earned by the sweat of their brow and give it to the simpletons they claim to be responsible for. That is a racist, sexist, class warfare point of view that unless our Ivy League educated elites give us our daily instruction, we will shrivel up and die. It is anything but the American Dream.
We see efforts to ban the Pledge of Allegiance because it contains the phrase “under God”; to ban the display of the Ten Commandments in court houses; the ban of religious displays on publicly owned land; and to ban prayer in any form at school graduations, football games or other gatherings. While atheists, a small percentage of the population, do not believe in God, why is another person who believes in God so offensive to them that they can’t bear hearing it? But as faith is driven further and further from the public square, boorish behavior becomes more and more acceptable. There is something to be said about eternal damnation curbing one’s baser appetites than responding to the statement, “You want me to stop it? Make me.” There is something to be said for fulfilling one’s obligations because it is the right thing to do, but the right thing to do does not come from living in the here and now. That is self-gratification. Doing the right thing comes from a set of morals that say, “Character is what we do when no one is watching.” Those who believe in a God believe someone is always watching. Perhaps John Adams said it best:
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
