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 PrintableVersion Letter from AmericaLost with a moral compassIn the last week, America has been gripped by two very different news events. Most recently the college campus of Virginia Tech has been rocked by the sudden and unexpected violence of one of its own. A student went on a murderous rampage, killing dozens of fellow students, and eventually (as is all too predictable in such grim farces) committed suicide. This has deeply shocked a nation, for university campuses are still viewed to some extent as havens of learning and reason, and the carnage explodes the myth. As a member of the Yale community I received a forwarded message from Yale’s President Levin expressing the deep condolences of Yale towards the terrible happenings in Virginia. The other event has far less gravitas, and no terror. Don Imus, arch purveyor of the aggressive style of talk radio whose performers are known as ‘shock jocks’, committed one too many faux pas. He went so far as to dismiss a female sporting team in a phrase that managed both to be deeply racist and misogynist all in one breath. Immediately, as such folk have learnt to do, Imus went on an all out offensive of making apologies to all and sundry. But no apology would do, and Imus was rapidly fired after mounting pressure from the audience. What do these two very different events have in common, you ask? I answer: nothing. Except, maybe, this, that each of them displays a nation that is both on the verge of losing its moral way but one that has yet to lose its moral compass entirely. Not horrifiedMuch as the right wing moral voice of America bemoans (and who can blame them?) the moral decadence of ‘Generation Me’, as one recent study has dubbed this narcissistic generation (see http://www.godcenteredlife.org for more on the need for a call to God-centred living), there is no lack of moral tenacity. Imus touched a nerve and was dismissed. The tragedy and violence at Virginia Tech left us dumb struck. On the other hand, as the Public Radio newscaster reported soon after the Virginia event, at least some of the students did not seem particularly horrified. They were returning to life as normal. One talked of how a similar, lower scale, event earlier in the year had prepared him for such carnage. It was almost as if, to this listener, the student had become morally numb to the sheer trauma that his community had experienced. What kind of society has the West become when a grown man can not only behave like a toddler having a tantrum but can also somehow manage to gain access to lethal weapons and commit the worst of crimes on a massive scale? More to the point: what kind of society have we become when students of the same age and in the same place are out jogging the next morning, and on the day of the crisis are pushing the police to try and let them back on to campus so they can get back to their papers and their lives? Where is the sheer moral shock that Virginia Tech should produce? And then those who are paid to shock us — like shock jock Don Imus — can go too far. It’s like we’re a society teetering on the edge of moral disaster. As the apostle Paul warned in the last days there would be terrible times, and we are certain to have seen them. JoshMoody,
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