Echoing my last post about the sorry state of moral decay in Detroit, an article at Catholic Online diagnoses the root cause. As a nation, (We’ve) Lost True North: The Epidemic of Violence in the U.S. Not Caused by Guns or Knives ~
WASHINGTON,DC (Catholic Online) – On April 9, 2014, in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, a 16 year old high school student entered Franklin Regional High School flashing two knives and began stabbing and slashing fellow students indiscriminately. 19 students were injured, five are in critical condition. A security guard was also slashed with a knife.
The scene was so drenched with blood it resembled a horror movie.
On that same day, President Barack Obama attended a memorial service at Fort Hood, the site of another shooting last week. This one was committed by Spc. Ivan Lopez. Over a period of 8 minutes he killed one and injured ten others with his 45-caliber Caliber Smith & Wesson handgun. This is the same military base where 13 people were killed in 2009 […]
A High School and an Army Base; places which should be known as places of safety, were turned into killing fields. A Nation pauses, grieves and seeks to make sense of what seems to be a growing epidemic of violence.
Efforts to point to guns as the cause of the problems at Fort Hood had become the rallying cry among some lawmakers. However, now the weapon was knives. So far, no-one has called for banning or restricting knives.
That is because this is not about guns or knives.
We have lost our true north as a Nation. Finding true north is indispensable for navigating on land, sea or air. That is why the expression is a metaphor. It is often used in self improvement books or books on spirituality which seek to help the reader find meaning, purpose and direction in life.
“We must again find our true north as a Nation if we want to find
the path to take out of this present darkness.”
That will require us to once again embrace the core conviction that every single human life has dignity. Human Persons are created in the Image of God. They have an inherent dignity precisely because of that fact – at every age and stage of their lives. This conviction once informed the moral infrastructure of the United States and the West.
This respect for every human life is grounded in the Jewish and Christian vision of the dignity of every human person. It once inspired us to hold a respect for every human life, whether that life be found in the first home of the womb, a wheelchair, a jail cell, a hospital room, a hospice, a senior center, a soup kitchen or on a refugee boat, as our highest public good…
It was this foundational belief, in the intrinsic value of each and every human life, that led America’s founding fathers to declare “all men are created equal, endowed by their creator…” Without a return to this fundamental truth, we are surely lost.
