This is why we have become a failed country and why we cant just blame Trump
Neal Gabler, Moyers & Company NEAL GABLER, MOYERS & COMPANY
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/this-is-why-we-have-become-a-failed-country-and-why-we-cant-just-blame-trump/
"SNIP.................
Have we lost our compassion? Have we become so selfish that we have no capacity for empathy, or have we become so besotted with materialism and the lust for success that we can no longer see beyond them? Is the needle on our moral compass spinning so wildly that we have lost our bearings? To paraphrase the question attorney Joseph Welch asked Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a patron saint of the right, has America no sense of decency?
The irresistible temptation is to blame Donald Trump for all that has befallen us and for betraying the principles that defined the nation. But Trump is too easy a target and freighting him with all the blame too easy an excuse.
If we are now a failed country, as I believe we are, it is not because we have a failed presidency, although we do. It is because we are a failed people. A callousness, a self-righteousness, an obdurateness and, yes, a monstrousness has emerged from some subterranean depth where it had been forcibly submerged. We may say this is not who we are. That is denial.
In some ways, the American spirit has always been divided between the strength of community and the appeal of individualism, between empathy and selfishness. Ronald Reagan may have tipped the scales by insisting on cleaving communal goodness from national greatness to serve the interests of conservatism. But I think back to the murder of 20 schoolchildren and seven staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 as the moment when America finally transmogrified.
Many of us cried when the students and teachers were gunned down. The president cried. We couldn’t look at the photographs of those innocent victims without feeling shattered and without feeling that the country owed them something more than pious pronouncements. We owed them action, even if it was only some small reform of our gun laws. If this didn’t move the nation, what could?
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Institutionalized Republican greed.
