When you look at America today, do you say to yourself, honestly, that this is still a country of the utmost integrity, from the chambers of the judges who decide or rule on law, to the legislatures that create and pass law, and finally to our executive rooms that negotiate treaties with other countries, in maintaining the defense and standards of our country. If you look carefully around today, this appears to be a country that is in a moral freefall, that if it still leads by example, the example is often poor, that if it still leads by action, the action is either self-serving or misapplied or misused. There appears to be no great leaders in America today, few men of integrity, of which nobody is actively willing to risk it all, in order to stand on a principle or principles that must indeed be stood upon.
It has not always been this way in the United States, to which our finest moments, and our finest people probably existed at the time of our declaration of our independence, although arguably many fine men stood tall during our civil war, but since that time, too often it appears to be a country disintegrating into a disgrace to the very foundations that it once stood for because far too many people, especially those of power and influence, have absolutely no integrity.
For instance, what sort of demon inside someone encourages you in the belief and later in the enactment that you need to take performance-enabled drugs in order to excel in the sport of your choice, to which perhaps you justify this decision from a competitive standpoint, from a "everyone else is doing it standpoint", to a feeling that you can "game the system," to convincing yourself with the self-justification, that it really isn't cheating when you really are quite aware that your rationalization is pure bunk. We need only look at the powers-to-be at the very pinnacle of corporations or legislative bodies that do everything in their power to bend the law to fit their needs, to game the system to protect their own, while simultaneously closing the door on all outsiders, to the quid pro quo of trading this for that, without taking into real consideration the public or the stockholders that they serve or are paid to protect. It is, I submit, an abomination, and we wonder why the morals of our country are unraveling at such a dizzying pace, when our very corruption begins at the very top.
Today we lack men like Washington who serenely walked away from the ultimate seat of power because inspired by Cincinnatus of old, he gave back his Great War powers and his supreme Executive position to the people, to the republic, representing himself all the time as a true servant of our country. We also no longer have men like Henry Ford, who made it a point that the automobile was meant for the people, and not just for the rich, and thereby through his innovations in assembly, cost, productivity, and labor fairness, brought forth reliable transportation that was affordable by all. Instead, we are left with men like the self-aggrandizing Kozlowski, misappropriating corporate funds as he treated Tyco as his own little private domain to be looted as he saw fit. As for our so-called political leaders today, none of these men, could possibly hold a candle to Washington, they are instead mere puppets, that dance to the tune of multi-national corporations and the military-industrial complex, never straying outside the boundaries of their puppet-masters' commands.