by Vicki Phipps

Created on: January 28, 2011

Morality is a relative thing, related to the view you look through. What seems moral to me may be immoral through your view, so to ask if the United States will ever regain its morality would require you to assume the United States was moral in the first place. The question itself indicates confusion as to what morality means. After all, Americans used to believe it was perfectly moral to own slaves and to achieve the morality it would take to free the slaves took decades, not to mention the time it took to pass the Civil Rights Act. That’s why it’s hard to decide which side to take in this debate. When it comes to morality in the United States, we are still seeking the truth.

We once had stronger family values and there was a time of innocence that we tend to miss, but looking back at the way we were, it’s now more clear to see that we were living within a blissful state of ignorance. Who knew a black and white child would ever be in the same class at an American school? Who knew women would ever have the right to divorce a man who abused her or her children? No one realized the injustice some Americans had to simply survive, because to discuss such stuff would be an immoral thing to do.

No one knew that women would one day run for president of the United States back when we believed being submissive and stupid was the moral way for women to behave. We had no clue how equal people could be, much less how to tolerate that fact, until a few brave Americans went out on a limb to try something different. Because of those with more insightful morals stood up for the truth, they changed one mind at a time until our moral values improved. In spite of that, the question that keeps being asked is do we want to be free to choose our moral values or do we want to be safe? We still hate who we can’t understand, and we will never understand who we hate. That’s why we risk going back to making the same mistakes we made in the first place.

It’s the monsters in our minds that bite our society’s behind and holds us back, morally. Even so, we all know that change makes people afraid, and every time the need for change arrives, we begin to refer to, "The good old days," as if change never came. The fact remains that the United States looked the other way when innocent men, women and children were hung from trees simply because they were different from the majority. In fact, within my life time, African Americans were hosed down and beaten

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