Trust

How do we see our unity?
What is the nature of the justice we want to establish among us?
Are we still interested in establishing it?
What are we willing to do about our general welfare?
Of what does that welfare consist?
How interested are we in seeing that our laws are carried out?
Are they our laws?

So Willing

Why, fellow citizen, do we seem to be so willing to .......
~ keep ourselves ignorant
~ be okay with a professional military more and more supplemented with mercenaries
~ be at war
~ make war
~ kill children, women, and other forms of life
~ kill in the name of Christ
~ support the hate and mistrust in Senate bill One and the Patriot Act
~ abdicate responsibility for our prisons, schools, military, health care, welfare, parenting
~ go on being fearful of talking to one another about the things important to us
~ teach our children to kill without clearly understanding why
~ think that it is fine for us to back out of or ignore our treaty obligations
~ why do we contemplate killing those who honor theirs
~ fear people who have attacked no one when we have attacked so many
~ to be proud of our many violent attacks on others
~ be so careless of 'collateral damage'
~ be so careless about killing civilians
~ support wasting mercury in the ocean when we know it threatens all life
~ avoid teaching our children
~ avoid caring for the health of our children?

What other question might we ask ourselves?

Pass the Ammunition

Our national policy has been in large part to kill "the bad guys" or to lock them up and to trust in God for the good of the rest.
We said "Live and let live." which meant we each minded our own business and didn't kill "the good guys."
We have practiced little cooperation for the common good.
We took little care of public health and were disgusted by public welfare.
Our words to live by see to have been "Praise the Lord and pass the Ammunition."

Will we ever adopt words to live by that include ideas of of practical responsibility for taking care of public health and general public welfare?
When will we adopt "words to live by" that urge effective cooperation for the common good?
Can't we combine appropriate freedom with appropriate kindness?
Can't we leave a bit more of the killing to God and learn to trust our fellows a bit more?