The Slippery Slope of Morality

The Bhagavad Gita states, "No action in this world goes for naught, or brings about a contrary result." Actions of selflessness and altruism toward others can bring nothing other than goodness to you, and actions of selfishness and harm to others can bring nothing other than harm. Although these laws do not always seem evident, if we fail to assume the basic principles of karma our whole moral code begins to crumble.

 My BLOG about the virtues was about morality. The word 'morality' is a hard one for me. It implies being judged. Hate that. I have to try so hard not to judge myself, let alone others. As with most spiritual factors, I fail more often than I succeed.

I take pride in the idea that my generation had a pretty ubiquitous bullshit Geiger counter. I will always remember the day when I was in a little house in Drain, Oregon. It was a wonderful/horrible time. Drain was a dying logging town with pretty much no trees left. There was a story that the town had been founded by a pioneer woman named Anna Drain. We knew that was a myth. The town lay in a small valley. When the rains came the water rushed down the denuded hills bringing slag, topsoil, and junk sliding down until the soil and the river got so clogged up that the town flooded.

One day, when the rain was killing me, I turned on the radio which sometimes worked. We had no TV. That didn't matter. We wouldn't have been able to get any reception in any case. I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes when the voice of Richard Nixon came on. He was giving the brilliant speech in which he absolutely denied that America had no military involvement in Laos and Cambodia.

You have to understand that I had almost no media in Drain Oregon. I could read the Oregonian at the library a few days late. The librarian wouldn't carry the New York Times or even Time Magazine because her membership in the John Birch Society impressed upon her that the were owned by the Communist Party. Once in a while I took the baby and drove the car that sometimes worked to Eugene and read underground newspapers which had articles from Liberation News Service lying around the hippie coffee houses.

But that morning, hearing Nixon, with no solid knowledge, every cell in my mind started screaming "He's lying!" All across the country, in isolated room after room, thousands of people had the same reaction. And tens of thousands of people did exactly what I did. We got dressed and got ourselves to college campuses and shut down the schools. They were mostly invested in the war machine. They all had ROTC courses. This great moment ,when the tide turned in for the Vietnam Occupation, came because we knew we were being lied to. We knew without doubt.  And we turned our knowledge into action.

Now, we are being lied to all the time by our government. Apparently it is in our best interest. Reading Jeremy Scahill's book, "Dirty Wars" and reading Wikileaks documents, we discover absolute confirmed facts the even the different branches of our intelligence community are lying to each other and to Congress and, of course, to us. Of course Hillary is lying about Benghazi. But she is probably covering up some secret act by JSOC that even the CIA and the diplomatic service hadn't been informed of. She is lying for her higher purpose.

If we take the opening statement at face value, and I can not see that it could be anything but perfectly true, we can expect some very heavy blow back from our actions all over the planet. We are making certain that our country is less safe every minute of every day. Where is our outrage? Do we, for one second really think that the great, universal laws of morality are saying, "except for the actions of the US corporations and the US government." Impossible.