by David A.G. Fischer

Created on: August 23, 2008   Last Updated: August 28, 2008

In response to the question of whether or not "America" has lost track of its moral principles, we truly needn't look any further than the question itself to discern one of the most evident examples of faltering morality, at least from a cultural standpoint. Addressing this immediate and most obvious point first, while not foremost, establishes precedence for continued development on the topic.

Noting that, let us please affirm that cultural morality has not yet emigrated from our diminishing human conscience by believing that the remaining majority of inhabitants on the continental system geographically known as the Americas are also in accord with the United States' reservation of the title "America". The prevailing and nonchalant adherence to this nominal faux-pas has only managed to exclude the Empire's neighbors, while leaving itself a somewhat lonely and isolated nation of dwindling return. After all, America was a continent long before it became the most ostentatious and ridiculed country on the planet.

Having made this initial critique rather transparent, it may now be strongly argued that in order to have lost track, we must assume that the nation was once on track, and from which therefore it has since strayed. However, an honest and retrospective examination of the nation's past instantly contradicts the original question effectually on the premise that the United States was indeed founded on the unstable soils of immorality, and as such has maintained its course unfalteringly.

Before getting the patriotic reader's britches in a bunch and reacting hyper-sensitively, making this claim is not in any way, shape or form meant to condemn, nor express ungratefulness for the progressive and sacrificial vision of so many revolutionary colonial pioneers who succeeded in escaping a tyrannical British government, fighting off its Army and eventually crafting the admirably esteemed Declaration of Independence. In fact, one must command a 50-gun salute to all the organized and radical dissidents of the day who made possible the liberties held forthright in that document, along with the subsequent participants who brought about even more liberties for U.S. society.

With the exceptional heroic and noble cases now aside, historic reality justifiably lays finger on the major gaps that exist in the tapestry of the U.S. moral code of conduct. For instance, who can logically defend the absence of virtue in decimating numerous North American indigenous populations along

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