Our culture inundates us with messages that the ends always justifies the means. It constantly tells us that when our own survival is threatened and our morality becomes an obstruction, then it is our morality that must be sacrificed. Our heroes have become Walter White from “Breaking Bad”, Jack Bauer from “24”, and Rick Grimes from “Walking Dead”. The message has now been cemented into our brains: Sometimes good people have to become bad in order to survive.
It is within this context that we now view the torture of terrorist suspects behind the scenes at the CIA. Many argue that if we want to survive in today’s world that we are going to have to toughen up and do things that may make us uncomfortable. We believe that we can’t be a frightened victim cowering behind the door of our enemy… but that we have to transform ourselves into the “one who knocks”.
My heroes are not the endless parade of soulless survivors who continue to be displayed on our television screens. My heroes are still the United States soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II. These brave soldiers did not believe in survival just for survival’s sake. They believed in a greater good which was our common morality. They knowingly sacrificed their own lives in an attempt to rid the world of evil.
Many people in our culture today would simply look at these soldiers as “fools” because they did not do whatever it took to survive. They would not measure up in our “last man standing” rule of moral relativism.
It is still not too late for the United States to turn things around. We have to take a good hard look at ourselves in the mirror and decide who we want to be as a nation going forward. But as our television anti-heroes have already taught us, once you start “breaking bad”… it is very hard to go back.
