THE MORAL MALAISE

I didn't say much following the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial. I was shocked, and angry that she wasn't, at the very least, charged with neglect for failing to report Caley as missing for thirty-one days. To me, that made her an accessory after the fact. But I am even more shocked by the lynch-mob mentality overtaking America in regards to the jurists. This is wrong, and it needs to stop.

I had the same knee-jerk reaction at first. "What were they thinking?" But bravo for cooler heads that pointed out that the jurists didn't have a twenty-four-seven narrative of "experts" decoding and translating every detail from every angle. They only had what was presented in court, and that had to be evaluated using the instructions they were given.

What, perhaps, offended me most during the trial was the dearth of truth and honesty, and with it, the casualness with which people lied under oath, because, (and this was a shock to me), people are rarely prosecuted for perjury. Really?

Worse yet is the Mack-truck-wide hole a liar opens up in a defense or prosecutorial case through lying, because now that entire witness's testimony can be thrown out. So a wise strategy in any case could easily be to find a few liars who will perjure themselves here and there, frustrating the prosecution, causing the judge to cast out pages and hours of crucial testimony, and in the end, confusing the jury. It's brilliant, it's frightening, and it threatens our judicial system.

John Adams knew the slippery slope America would face if the day came when integrity and honesty were no longer the underpinnings of our society. Said he, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
We're still rolling from Wall Street's and corporate America's lack of moral and ethical integrity. People's confidence in the integrity and honesty of its leaders is at a new low. Now our courts are infected with a moral malaise.

Moms and dads, grandparents, neighbors and teachers, it's time to up our game, to live a more morally-perfect life, to extol virtue every chance we get, and to eschew actions that sidestep honesty and integrity. We need to raise a virtuous generation. In so doing, we can right our crooked course.

And we need to hold people accountable for cheating, lying, stealing, harming society in any way. We don't need to be Draconian about it. Justice is the counterpart of mercy, but let's care enough to call right--right, and wrong--wrong, and make it matter. And let's hurry.