From a piece by Courtney Martin in The American Prospect.
We have lost our moral way in this country. We have let the hype of humanitarian intervention -- the view of Americans as caped crusaders swooping in to save tyrannized foreigners -- drown out our commitment to helping others humbly and pragmatically. We have let the mystique of big markets and fast money woo us into looking the other way when corporate execs invented their bottom line. And we have let the American dream put us to sleep when we should have been wide awake about too-good-to-be-true mortgages.
Too many of us have stood by as our government has sent mostly young, low-income people to fight a "war on terror" -- as if terror were a definable target in a discrete location. As if this weren't bad enough, we've also stood by as those same people returned -- psychologically and physically maimed -- and pretended that we were providing them with enough resources to heal, just as we pretend that the mission is accomplished or the war winnable or evil extinguishable.
We have lost a sense of reality. The era of smoke and mirrors may have been most egregiously symbolized by President Bush in a flight suit, but the delusion has worn so many other guises: CEOs of the 500 biggest U.S. corporations who made an average of $12.8 million each last year, shady mortgage brokers who preyed on women craving a home of their own, bureaucrats at the United States Agency for International Development who basically invented budgets without talking to experts or doing any on-the-ground research for the rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure. After years of living in fantasy land, reality has rained down.
We have lost a system of accountability.
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